Debussy's shadowy revolution: How Pelléas et Mélisande transcended Wagnerian drama

“ It has been affirmed that in "Pelléas et Mélisande" Debussy has produced a work as command-182-ing in quality as it is unique in conception and design. Let us consider what grounds there may be for the assertion.
To begin with, its spiritual and emotional flavour are without analogy in the previous history, not merely of opera, but of music. Debussy is a man of unhampered and clairvoyant imagination, a dreamer with a far-wandering vision. He views the spectacle of the world through the magic casements of the mystic who is also a poet and visionary. ”

“ In a day when magnitude of plan and vividness of color, rhetorical emphasis and dynamic brilliancy, are the ideals which preëminently sway our tonal architects, emerges this reticent, half-lit, delicately structured, subtly accented music; which is incorrigibly unrhetorical; which never declaims or insists: an art alembicated, static, severely restrained—for even when it is most harmonically untrammeled, most rhythmically fantastic, one is aware of a quietly inexorable logic, an uncompromising ideal of form, underlying its seemingly unregulated processes. ”

“ M. Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, in 1902, seemed to mark more truly the emancipation of French music. From this time on, French music felt that it had left school, and claimed to have founded a new art, which reflected the spirit of the race, and was freer and suppler than the Wagnerian art. These ideas, which were seized upon and enlarged by the press, brought about rather quickly a conviction in French artists of France's superiority in music. Is that conviction justified? The future alone can tell us. ”

“ This orchestra, seldom elaborate in thematic exfoliation, and still less frequently polyphonic in texture, is, for the most part, a voice that speaks in hints and through allusions. The huge and imperious eloquence of Wagner is not to be sought for here. Taine once spoke of the "violent sorcery" of Victor Hugo's style, and it is a phrase that comes often to the mind in thinking of the music of the titanic German. Debussy in-164- his "Pelléas" has written music that is rich in sorcery; but it is not violent. ”

“ In this opera, Debussy showed himself an innovator; it was a new kind of harmony and melody and never before had an opera like it been written. He gave an exact impression in music of Maeterlinck’s imaginative, mystic play. This is not a case where music drowns the meaning of the story but each word is colored and interpreted by the music. Debussy accomplished what the Camerata, Gluck and Wagner tried to do. By the time he wrote Pelleas and Melisande, his style was established and the proof of his high attainment is seen in his many imitators. ”

“ So we come again to Debussy. For it is a singular fact—and this is the point to insist upon—that this French mystic of to-day is the first opera-maker in the records of musical art who has exhibited the courage, and who has possessed the means, to carry the principles of the Camerata, of Gluck, and of Wagner to their ultimate conclusion. In "Pelléas et Mélisande" he has made his music serve his dramatic subject, in all its parts, with absolute fidelity and consis-153-tency, and with a rigorous and unswerving logic that is without parallel in the history of operatic art ”

“ Only the easy-going attitude towards all questions of form that is bred in us by theatrical art could possibly blind us for a moment to the helplessness and ineptitude of a method of this kind. Debussy evades the difficulty in another way. He starts with a text that is already a complete, self-sufficing work of art, capable, without the assistance of music, of holding an audience interested in it by virtue of its own dramatic life and its fine literary quality. ”

“ Humanity has come to see that things of this kind are the mere excrescences of a dramatic action,—the mere crude outward and visible signs of desires and passions working in secret in the souls of men,—and their gaze is being turned more and more on the psychological springs of action rather than on the visible actions themselves. Drama, in the hands of thoughtful poetical writers, is becoming more and more an affair of the inner rather than the outer man ”

“ The characters in his plays live, as the old king, Arkël, says in Pelléas et Mélisande, like persons "whispering about a closed room," This drama—at once his most typical, moving, and beautiful performance—swims in an atmosphere of portent and bodement; here, as Pater noted in the work of a wholly different order of artist, "the storm is always brooding;" here, too, "in a sudden tremor of an aged voice, in the tacit observance of a day," we become "aware suddenly of the great stream of human tears falling always through the shadows of the world." ”

“ Enter Genevieve and Melisande.
Melisande.
It is dark in the gardens. And what forests, what forests around the palaces!...
Genevieve.
Yes; it astonished me too when I came here, and it astonishes everybody. There are places where one never sees the sun. But one is soon used to it. It is a long time, it is a long time... It is nearly forty years that I live here...Look on the other side and you will have the light of the sea...
Melisande. ”

“ In artistic merit “Pélléas and Mélisande” marks a nearer approach to mastery, once the integral peculiarities of the form and method have been granted. Despite a noticeable lack of force, directness, and plasticity in the characterization, the vie intérieure is most convincingly expressed. In one of the finest scenes of the play we see the principals at night gazing out upon a measureless expanse of water dotted with scattered lights. The atmosphere is permeated with a reticent yearning of love. ”

“ Come here; why do you remain there without answering and without lifting your eyes?—I have kissed you thus far only once, the day you came; and yet, old men want to touch sometimes with their lips, the forehead of a woman or the cheek of a child, to still believe in the freshness of life and to put farther away the threat of death. Are you afraid of my old lips? How I pitied you these past months...
Melisande.
Grandfather. I was not unhappy...
Arkel.
Let me look at you, quite near, a moment...one has so much need of beauty by the side of death...
(Enter Golaud.)
Golaud. ”

“ The actor's business is primarily to reproduce the ideas of the author's brain, to give them form, and substance, and color, and life, so that those who behold the action of a play may, so far as can be effected, be lured into the fleeting belief that they behold reality. Macready, who was an earnest student, defined the art of the actor "to fathom the depths of character, to trace its latent motives, to feel its [179] finest quivering of emotion, is to comprehend the thoughts that are hidden under words, and thus possess one's-self of the actual mind of the individual man" ”

“ Art, he has said, "is a temporary mask, under which the unknown without a face puzzles us. It is the substance of eternity, introduced ...by a distillation of infinity. It is the honey of eternity, taken from a flower of eternity." Everywhere, throughout his most deeply characteristic work, he emphasizes this thought—he would have us realize that we are the unconscious protagonists of an overshadowing, vast, and august drama whose significance and dénouement we do not and cannot know, but of which mysterious intimations are constantly to be perceived and felt. ”

“ The final scene of the act is treated with surpassing reticence, dignity, and simplicity, yet with piercing intensity of expression. Nothing could be at the same time more sparing of means and more exquisitely eloquent in result than Debussy's setting of the scene of Mélisande's death—it is music which dims the eyes and subdues the spirit. The pianissimo-repeated chords in the divided strings which accentuate Arkël's warning words (page 304, measure 8) ; the blended tones of the harp and the distant bell at the moment of dissolution (page 306, measure 11) ”

“ Debussy has it in excess, so that he almost sacrifices the other elements of art to it, until the passionate force of his music, even its very life, seems to be impoverished. But one must not deceive oneself; that impoverishment is only apparent, and in all his work there are evidences that his passion is only veiled. It is only the trembling of the melodic line, or the orchestration which, like a shadow passing before the eyes, tells us of the drama that is being played in the hearts of his characters. ”

“ Work must go on and coach-building must go on, and they will not go on the time there is too much attention given to dreams. A dream is a sort of a shadow, no profit in it to anyone at all."
"There are some would answer you that it is to those who are awake that nothing happens, and it is they who know nothing. He that is asleep on his bed is gone where all have gone for supreme truth."
In Maeterlinck's "Pelléas et Mélisande," Debussy has, through a fortunate conjunction of circum-184-stances, found a perfect vehicle for his impulses and preoccupations. ”