Lawrence Gilman

“ Mélisande enters. Their greeting is simple. Pelléas bids her come under the shade of the linden. She wishes to remain where it is lighter; she wishes to stay where she may be seen. Golaud, she says, is sleeping. It is late. In an hour the great gates of the castle will be closed. Pelléas tells her that it is perhaps the last time he shall see her, that he must go away forever. She asks him why it is that he is always saying that. "Must I tell you what you know already?" rejoins Pelléas. "You know not what I am going to tell you?" "Why, no; I know nothing," says Mélisande. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He has traveled far on the path of his particular destiny; not since Wagner has any modern music-maker perfected a style so saturated with personality—there are far fewer derivations in his art than in the art of Strauss, through whose scores pace the ghosts of certain of the greater dead. All that Wagner could teach him of the potency of dissonance, of structural freedom and elasticity, of harmonic daring, Debussy eagerly learned and applied, as a foundation, to his own intricately reasoned though spontaneous art ”

“ They are alive like birds in my hands. And they love me, they love me more than you do!" Mélisande begs to be released, Pelléas kisses the enveloping tresses.... "Do you hear my kisses?—They mount along your hair." Doves come from the tower—Mélisande's doves—and fly about them. They are frightened, and are flying away. "They will be lost in the dark!" laments Mélisande. Golaud enters by the winding stair, and surprises them. Mélisande is entrapped by her hair, which is caught in the branches of a tree. "What are you doing here?" asks Golaud. ”

“ He considers man to be a great, fathomless mystery, which one cannot determine precisely, at which one can only glance, noting his involuntary and instinctive words, exclamations and impressions. Maeterlinck consciously deprives nature of her passive rôle of a soulless accessory, he animates her, orders her to collaborate actively in the action of the drama, to speak mysteriously beside man and to man, to forecast future incidents and catastrophes, in a word, to participate in all the actions of that fragment of human life which is called a drama. ”

“ It is an order of temperament for which the things of the marginal world of the mind are of transcendent consequence—that world which is perpetually haunted, for those mystics who are also the slaves of beauty, by remote illusions and disquieting enchantments: where it is not dreams, but the reflections of dreams, that obsess; where passion is less the desire of life than of the shadow of life. ”

“ Its beauty is not the beauty that issues from clear and transparent designs, from a lucid and outspoken style: it is a remote and inexplicable beauty, a beauty shot through with mystery and strangeness, baffling, incalculable. ”

“ It remains only to be said, by way of conclusion to this brief survey, that, for those who are disposed to open their sensibilities to the appeal of this music, its high and haunting beauty must exert an increasing sway over the heart and the imagination. It is making no excessive or invidious claim for it to assert that, after one has truly savored its quality, other music, transcendent though it may demonstrably be, seems a little coarse-fibred, a little otiose, a little—as Jules Laforgue might have said—quotidienne. ”

“ It is, for those who inhabit it, a world as exclusively preoccupying and authentic as it is, for those who do not, incredible and inaccessible. The reports of it, intense and gleaming as they may be, which are contained in the art of such of its inhabitants as Debussy, are, admittedly, little likely to conciliate the unbeliever. ”

“ Shall I close the windows?" asks Golaud. "No, no, not till the sun has sunk into the sea—it sets slowly." Arkël asks her if she wishes to see her child. "What child?" she inquires. Arkël tells her that she is a mother. The child is brought, and put into her arms. Mélisande can scarcely lift her arms to take her. "She does not laugh, she is little," says Mélisande; "she, too, will weep—I pity her." Gradually the room has filled with the women-servants of the castle, who range themselves in silence along the walls and wait. "She is going to sleep," observes Arkël; "her eyes are full of tears. ”

“ The achievement—an astonishing tour de force, at the least—is as artistically successful as it is unprecedented in modern music.
In his treatment of the orchestra, Debussy makes a scarcely less resolute departure from tradition. There is little symphonic development in the Wagnerian sense. His orchestra reflects the emotional implications of the text and action with absolute and scrupulous fidelity, but suggestively rather than with detailed emphasis. The drama is far less heavily underscored than with Wagner; the note of passion or of conflict or of tragedy is never forced. ”

“ 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) ”

“ She has never felt better, she says, in answer to Arkël's questioning. She asks if she is alone in the room. Her husband is present, answers Arkël. "If you are afraid, he will go away. He is very unhappy." "Golaud is here?" she says; "why does he not come to me?" Golaud staggers to the bed. He begs the others to withdraw for a moment, as he must speak with her alone. When they have left him, his torturing suspicions, suspicions that will not down, find voice. He entreats her to tell him the truth. "The truth must be spoken to one about to die." Did she love Pelléas? ”

“ It is a world of images and refractions, of visions and presentiments, a world which swims in dim and opalescent mists—where gestures are adored and every footfall is charged with indescribable intimations ”

“ One is aware of vast and inscrutable forces, working in silence and indirection, which somehow control and direct the shadowy figures who move dimly, with grave and wistful pathos, through a no less shadowy pageant of griefs and ecstasies and fatalities. ”

“ It is the product of a temperament unique in music, though familiar enough in the modern expression of the other arts. Debussy is of that clan who have uncompromisingly "turned their longing after the wind and wave of the mind." ”

“ The next scene passes before the castle. Golaud and his little son Yniold, the innocent playfellow of Mélisande and Pelléas, are together. Golaud questions him. "You are always with mama.... See, we are just under mama's window now. She may be saying her prayers at this moment.... Tell me, Yniold, she is often with your uncle Pelléas, is she not?" The child's naïve answers inflame his jealousy, confirm his suspicions, though they baffle him. "Do they never tell you to go and play somewhere else?" he asks. "No, papa, they are afraid when I am not with them.... They always weep in the dark.... ”

“ As Mélisande leans further and further out of her window, these two themes (Night and Ardor) grow increasingly insistent. They are interrupted at Pelléas' words, "I see only the branches of the willow drooping over the wall," by a rich passage for divided violins, violas, and 'cellos (page 124, measure 3) , and by a brief phrase to which attention should be drawn because of its essentially Debussy-like quality—the progression in the first measure of page 125 (scored for violins and violas) . ”

“ The rhythm of the Fate motive is hinted by violas, 'cellos, and horns as Golaud, in answer to Mélisande's compassionate questioning, observes that he is "made of iron and blood." Mélisande weeps, and the oboe sounds a plaintive variant of her motive (page 82, measure 2) ; the strings repeat it as she complains that she is ill. Nothing has happened, no one has harmed her, she answers, in response to Golaud's questionings: "It is no one. You do not understand me. It is something stronger than I," she says; and we hear the Pelléas theme, dulcetly harmonized, in the strings. ”

“ To forget the principles underlying three centuries of harmonic practice and revert to the methods of the mediaeval church composers, required an extraordinary degree of imaginative intuition; purposely and consistently to employ those methods as a foundation upon which to erect an harmonic structure most richly and elastically contrived—to vitalize the antique modes with the accumulated product of modern divination and accomplishment—was little less than an inspiration. ”

“ Many of them are simply harmonic hues and half-lights, melodic shreds and fragments, whose substance is as impalpable as mist and whose outlines waver and fade almost before they are perceived. Few of them are clearly and definitely articulated; for the most part they are, as I have called them, mere "sound-wraiths," intentionally suggestive rather than definitive, evocative rather than descriptive. ”

“ In calling this a "revolutionary" score one is being simply and baldly literal. To realize the justness of the epithet, one has only to speculate upon what Wagner would have said, or what Richard Strauss may think, of an opera (let us adhere, for convenience, to an accommodating if inaccurate term) written for the voices, from beginning to end, in a kind of recitative which is virtually a chant; an opera in which there is no vocal melody whatsoever, and comparatively little symphonie development of themes in the orchestra ”

“ Mélisande, confused and terrified, dissembles, and answers that she must have lost it in a grotto by the seashore, when she went there in the morning to pick shells for little Yniold. She is sure it is there. Golaud bids her go at once and search for it. She fears to go alone, and he suggests that she ask Pelléas to accompany her.
The next scene discovers Mélisande with Pelléas in the grotto. They are deeply agitated. It is very dark, but Pelléas describes to her the look of the place, for, he tells her, she must be able to answer Golaud if he should question her. ”

“ The Golaud motive is recalled with sombre force in the strings as the rattle of the great chains is heard. "All the better! All the better!" cries Mélisande; and, as they embrace in sudden abandonment, we hear, introduced by an exquisite interplay of tonalities, the motive of Rapture, announced, pp, by divided strings and flutes (page 258, measure 12) :
XXI. RAPTURE
As Mélisande whispers suddenly to Pelléas that there is some one behind them, a menacing version of the Vengeance theme is played, pp, by the basses, trombones, and timpani. ”

“ Suddenly the window under which they are sitting is illuminated, and the light falls upon them. "Oh, mama has lit her lamp!" exclaims Yniold. "Yes," observes Golaud; "it begins to grow light." Yniold wishes to go, but Golaud restrains him. "Let us stay here in the shadow a little longer.... One cannot tell, yet.... I think Pelléas is mad!" he exclaims violently. He lifts Yniold up to the window, cautioning him to make no noise, and asks him what he sees. The child reports that Mélisande is there, and that his uncle Pelléas is there, too. "What are they doing? ”

“ Pelléas, Mlle. Marie Aubry; Mélisande, Mlle. Meuris; Arkël, Émile Raymond; Golaud, Lugné-Poë; Geneviève, Mme. Camée; Le petit Yniold, Georgette Loyer.
"Take care," warns The Old Man in that most simply touching of Maeterlinck's plays, Intérieur; "we do not know how far the soul extends about men." It is a subtle and characteristic saying, and it might have been used by the dramatist as a motto for his Pelléas et Mélisande; for not only does it embody the central thought of this poignant masque of passion and destiny, but it summarizes Maeterlinck's attitude as a writer of drama. ”

“ As Pelléas and Mélisande stand in the darkness of the cavern we hear again (page 110, measure 2) the variant of the Fate motive which marked the close of the preceding scene; then, as a sudden shaft of moonlight illuminates the grotto, it is expanded and transmuted into a gleaming flood of orchestral and harmonic color (two flutes, oboe, two harps glissando, string tremolos, cymbals pp) . While they talk of the beggars sleeping in a corner of the cave, an oboe and flute trace a tenuous and melancholy phrase (doux et triste) which continues almost to the end of the scene ”

“ One might embark unwittingly and come back no more." They watch the departure of a great ship that is leaving the port, the ship that brought Golaud and his young wife. "Why does she sail to-night?... She may be wrecked," says Mélisande.... "The night comes quickly," observes Pelléas. A silence falls between them. "It is time to go in," says Geneviève. "Pelléas, show the way to Mélisande. I must go 'tend to little Yniold," and she leaves them alone. "Will you let me take your hand?" says Pelléas to Mélisande. Her hands are full of flowers, she responds. ”