The image of a cathedral emerging from the depths of the sea is a potent fixture in the French imagination. This trio draws its inspiration from a evocative passage in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, an image that immediately calls to mind Claude Debussy’s iconic prelude, La cathédrale engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral).

The work begins turbulently, casting the listener directly into the center of a chaotic sea. As the textures settle, a melodic strand begins to emerge, almost one note at a time. This line eventually reveals itself as a direct quote from the Debussy prelude. However, where Debussy finds majestic resonance, this work arrives at a moment of crushing, ominous intensity. It is a reimagining of that familiar landmark through a much darker, modern lens—as if the "submerged" past is being forced to the surface with violent effort.

The music seeks to capture the "impossible" synthesis Proust describes—the feeling of a landscape where nature has "taken lessons from art" and the past is perpetually reinventing itself.

"One of my dreams was the synthesis of what my imagination had often tried to envisage, during my waking hours, of a particular landscape by the sea and its medieval past. In my sleep I saw a Gothic citadel rising from the sea whose waves were frozen still, as in a stained-glass window. An inlet of the sea divided the town in two; the green water came right to my feet; on the opposite shore it lapped around an Oriental church, and around houses that already existed in the fourteenth century, so that to move across them would have been to go backwards through the centuries. This dream in which nature had taken lessons from art, in which the sea had become Gothic, this dream in which I longed to reach, and believed I was reaching, the impossible, was one I felt I had often dreamed before. But since it is the nature of what we imagine in sleep to multiply itself in the past and to appear familiar even when it is new, I supposed I was mistaken. What I did indeed notice, though, was that I frequently had this dream."— The Guermantes Way, Marcel Proust