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Lawrence Gilman >> Debussy\'s Pelleas et Melisande
DEBUSSY'S PELLEAS ET MELISANDE
[Illustration: _Claude Debussy (From the painting by Jacques Blanche)_]
A GUIDE TO THE OPERA
WITH MUSICAL EXAMPLES FROM THE SCORE
BY
LAWRENCE GILMAN
AUTHOR OF "PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC," "THE MUSIC OF TO-MORROW,"
"STORIES OF SYMPHONIC MUSIC," "EDWARD MACDOWELL" (IN "LIVING
MASTERS OF MUSIC" SERIES) "STRAUSS' 'SALOME,'" ETC.
NEW YORK G. SCHIRMER 1907
TO THE MEMORY OF
GUSTAVE SCHIRMER
A MUSIC LOVER OF LIBERAL TASTE
AND SENSITIVE APPRECIATION
AND AN INFLUENTIAL FORCE
IN THE PROMOTION OF
THE FINER THINGS OF THE ART
TO WHICH HIS LIFE
WAS DEVOTED
CONTENTS
I. DEBUSSY AND HIS ART
II. THE PLAY
ITS QUALITIES
ITS ACTION
III. THE MUSIC
A REVOLUTIONARY SCORE
THE THEMES AND THEIR TREATMENT
DEBUSSY'S PELLEAS ET MELISANDE
"It is not an ill thing to cross at times the marches of silence and
see the phantoms of life and death in a new way. It is not an ill thing,
even if one meet only the fantasies of beauty."--FIONA MACLEOD.
I
DEBUSSY AND HIS ART
With the production at Paris in the spring of 1902 of Claude Debussy's
_Pelleas et Melisande_, based on the play of Maeterlinck, the history of
music turned a new and surprising page. "It is necessary," declared an
acute French critic, M. Jean Marnold, writing shortly after the event,
"to go back perhaps to _Tristan_ to find in the opera house an event so
important in certain respects for the evolution of musical art." The
assertion strikes one to-day, five years after, as, if anything,
over-cautious. _Pelleas et Melisande_ exhibited not simply a new manner
of writing opera, but a new kind of music--a new way of evolving and
combining tones, a new order of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic
structure. The style of it was absolutely new and absolutely
distinctive: the thing had never been done before, save, in a lesser
degree, by Debussy himself in his then little known earlier work. Prior
to the appearance of _Pelleas et Melisande_, he had put forth, without
appreciably disturbing the musical waters, all of the extraordinary and
individual music with which his fame is now associated, except the three
orchestral "sketches," _La Mer_ (composed in 1903-1905 and published in
the latter year), the piano pieces _Estampes_ (1903), and _Images,
Masques, l'Ile joyeuse_ (1905), and a few songs. Certain audiences in
Paris had heard, nine years before, his setting of Rossetti's "Blessed
Damozel" (_La Demoiselle Elue_), a "lyric poem" for two solo voices,
female chorus, and orchestra; in the same year (1893) his string quartet
was played by Ysaye and his associates; in 1894 his _Prelude a
l'Apres-midi d'un Faune_ was produced at a concert of the National
Society of Music; the first two Nocturnes for orchestra, _Nuages_ and
_Fetes_, were played at a Lamoureux concert in 1900; the third,
_Sirenes_, was performed with the others in the following year. Yet it
was not until _Pelleas et Melisande_ was produced at the Opera-Comique
in April, 1902, that his work began seriously to be reckoned with
outside of the small and inquisitive public, in Paris and elsewhere,
that had known and valued--or execrated--it.
In this score Debussy went far beyond the point to which his methods had
previously led him. It was, for all who heard it or came to know it, a
revelation of the possibilities of tonal effect--this dim and wavering
and elusive music, with its infinitely subtle gradations, its gossamer
fineness of texture, its delicate sonorities, its strange and echoing
dissonances, its singular richness of mood, its shadowy beauty, its
exquisite and elaborate art--this music which drifted before the senses
like iridescent vapor, suffused with rich lights, pervasive,
imponderable, evanescent. It was music at once naive and complex,
innocent and impassioned, fragile and sonorous. It spoke with an accent
unmistakably grave and sincere; yet it spoke without emphasis:
indirectly, flexibly, with fluid and unpredictable expression. It was
eloquent beyond denial, yet its reticence, its economy of gesture, were
extreme--were, indeed, the very negation of emphasis. Is it strange that
such music--hesitant, evasive, dream-filled, strangely ecstatic, with
its wistful and twilight loveliness, its blended subtlety and
simplicity--should have been as difficult to trace to any definite
source as it was, for the general, immensely astonishing and unexpected?
There was nothing like it to be found in Wagner, or in his more
conspicuous and triumphant successors--in, so to speak, the direct and
royal line. Richard Strauss was, clearly, not writing in that manner;
nor were the brother musicians of Debussy in his own France; nor, quite
as obviously, were the Russians. The immediate effect of its strangeness
and newness was, of course, to direct the attention of the larger world
of music, within Paris and without, to the artistic personality and the
previous attainments of the man who had surprisingly put forth such
incommensurable music.
Achille[1] Claude Debussy was born at St. Germain-en-Laye
(Seine-et-Oise), France, August 22, 1862. He was still a youth when he
entered the Paris Conservatory, where he studied harmony under Lavignac,
composition under Guiraud, and piano playing with Marmontel. He was only
fourteen when he won the first medal for _solfege_, and fifteen when he
won the second pianoforte prize.
[1] He no longer uses the first of these given names.
In 1884, when he was in his twenty-second year, his cantata, _l'Enfant
prodigue_, won for him the _Prix de Rome_ by a majority of twenty-two
out of twenty-eight votes--it is said to have been the unanimous opinion
of the jury that the score was "one of the most interesting that had
been heard at the _Institut_ for years." While at the Villa Medicis he
composed, in 1887, his _Printemps_ for chorus and orchestra, and, in the
following year, his setting of Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel," of which
the authorities at the Conservatory saw fit to disapprove because of
certain liberties which Debussy even then was taking with established
and revered traditions. He performed his military service upon his
return from Rome; and there is a tradition told, as bearing upon his
love of recondite sonorities, to the effect that while at Evreux he
delighted in the harmonic clash caused by the simultaneous sounding of
the trumpet call for the extinguishing of lights and the sustained
vibrations of some neighboring convent bells. From this time forward his
output was persistent and moderately copious. To the year 1888 belong,
in addition to _La Demoiselle Elue_, the remarkably individual
"Ariettes,"[2] six settings for voice and piano of poems by Verlaine. To
1889-1890 belong the _Fantaisie_ for piano and orchestra and the
striking "Cinq Poemes de Baudelaire" (_Le Balcon_, _Harmonie du Soir_,
_Le Jet d'Eau_, _Recueillement_, _La Mort des Amants_). In 1891 came
some less significant piano pieces; but the following two years were
richly productive, for they brought forth the exquisite _Prelude a
l'Apres-midi d'un Faune_ for orchestra, after the Eclogue of
Mallarme--the first extended and inescapable manifestation of Debussy's
singular gifts--and the very personal but less important string quartet.
In 1893-1895 he was busied with _Pelleas et Melisande_,[3] and with the
_Proses lyriques_, four songs--not of his best--to words of his own
(_De Reve_, _De Greve_, _De Fleurs_, _De Soir_). The next four
years--1896-1899--saw the issue of the extremely characteristic and
uncompromising Nocturnes for orchestra (_Nuages_, _Fetes_, _Sirenes_),
and the fascinating and subtle _Chansons de Bilitis_, after Pierre
Louys--songs in which, aptly observed his colleague Bruneau, "he mingled
an antique and almost evaporated perfume with penetrating modern odors."
The collection "Pour le Piano" (_Prelude_, _Sarabande_,
_Toccata_)--inventions of distinguished and original style--and some
less representative songs and piano pieces, completed his achievements
before the production of _Pelleas et Melisande_ brought him fame and a
measure of relief from lean and pinching days. He has from time to time
made public appearances in Paris as a pianist in concerts of chamber
music; and he has even resorted--one wonders how desperately?--to the
writing of music criticism for various journals and reviews. "Artists,"
he has somewhat cynically observed, "struggle long enough to win their
place in the market; once the sale of their productions is assured, they
quickly go backward." There is as yet no sign that he himself is
fulfilling this prediction; for his most recent published
performance,[4] the superbly fantastic and imaginative _La
Mer_--completed three years after the production of _Pelleas_--is
charged to the brim with his peculiar and potent quality.
[2] A revised version of these songs was published fifteen years later,
in 1903, dedicated _a Miss Mary Garden, inoubliable Melisande_.
[3] M. Debussy sends me the information that, although the music of
_Pelleas et Melisande_ was begun as early as September, 1893, he was not
finally through with it until nine years later. In the spring of 1901
the last scene of the fourth act (the love-scene at the fountain in the
park, with its abrupt and tragic close) was rewritten, and in 1902,
after the first rehearsals at the Opera-Comique, it was found necessary
to lengthen the orchestral interludes between the different tableaux in
order that the scene-shifters might have sufficient time to change the
settings. These extended interludes are included in the edition of the
score for piano and voices, with French and English text, published in
1907.
[4] The above is written in July, 1907.
What are the more prominent traits of the music of this man who is the
product of no school, who has no essential affinities with his
contemporaries, who has been accurately characterized as the "tres
exceptionnel, tres curieux, tres solitaire M. Claude Debussy"? One is
struck, first of all, in savoring his art, by its extreme fluidity, its
vagueness of contour, its lack of obvious and definite outline. It is
cloudlike, evanescent, impalpable; it passes before the aural vision (so
to speak) like a floating and multicolored mist; it is shifting,
fugitive, intangible, atmospheric. 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 is unexpected
and subtle in accent, wayward and fantastic in rhythm. Harmonically it
obeys no known law--consonances, dissonances, are interfused, blended,
re-echoed, juxtaposed, without the smallest regard for the rules of
tonal relationship established by long tradition. It recognizes no
boundaries whatsoever between the different keys; there is constant flux
and change, and the same tonality is seldom maintained beyond a single
beat of the measure. There are key-signatures, but they strike one as
having been put in place as a mere yielding to what M. Debussy doubtless
regards indulgently as an amiable and harmless prejudice. His melodic
schemes suggest no known model--they conform to patterns which
intertwine and melt and are suddenly and surprisingly transformed; they
are without punctuation, uncadenced, irregular, unpredictable,
indescribably sensitive and supple. There is a marked indifference to
the possibilities of contrapuntal effect, a dependence upon a method
fundamentally homophonic rather than polyphonic--this music is a rich
and shimmering texture of blended chord-groups, rather than a pattern of
interlaced melodic strands. One cannot but note the manner in which it
abhors and shuns the easily achieved, the facile, the expected. Its
colors and designs are rare and far-sought and most heedfully contrived;
its eloquence is never unrestrained; and this hatred of the obvious is
as plainly sincere as it is passionate and uncompromising; it is not the
fastidiousness of a _precieux_, but of an extravagantly scrupulous and
austerely exacting artist.
Here, then, is as anomalous an aesthetic product as one could well
imagine. In a day when magnitude of plan and vividness of color,
rhetorical emphasis and dynamic brilliancy, are the ideals which
preeminently 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. 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." He is, as I have
elsewhere written, of the order of those poets and dreamers who
persistently heed, and seek to continue in their art, not the echoes of
passional and adventurous experience, but the vibrations of the spirit
beneath. He is of the brotherhood of those mystical explorers, of
peculiarly modern temper, who are perhaps most essentially represented
in the plays and poetry and philosophies of Mr. Yeats and M.
Maeterlinck: those who dwell--it has before been said--"upon the
confines of a crepuscular world whose every phase is full of subtle
portent, and who are convinced (in the phrase of M. Maeterlinck himself)
'that there are in man many regions more fertile, more profound, and
more interesting than those of his reason or his intelligence.'" 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. 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; where, "even in the
swaying of a hand or the dropping of unbound hair, there is less
suggestion of individual action than of a divinity living within,
shaping an elaborate beauty in a dream for its own delight." 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. This is music which it is hopeless
to attempt to justify or promote. It persuades, or it does not; one is
attuned to it, or one is not. For those who do savor and value it, it is
reasonable only to attempt some such notation of its qualities as is
offered here.
Debussy's ancestry is not easily traced. Wagner, whom he has amused
himself by decrying in the course of his critical excursions, shaped
certain aspects of his style. In some of the early songs one realizes
quite clearly his indebtedness to the score of _Tristan_; yet in these
very songs--say the _Harmonie du Soir_ and _La Mort des Amants_
(composed in 1889-1890)--there are amazingly individual pages: pages
which even to-day sound ultra-modern. And when one recalls that at the
time these songs were written the score of _Parsifal_ had been off
Wagner's desk for only seven years, that Richard Strauss was putting
forth such tentative things as his _Don Juan_ and _Tod und Verklaerung_,
that the "revolutionary" Max Reger was a boy of sixteen, and that
Debussy himself was not yet thirty, one is in a position forcibly to
realize the early growth and the genuineness of his independence.
Adolphe Jullien, the veteran French critic, discerns in his earlier
writing the influence of such Russians as Borodine, Rimsky-Korsakoff,
and Mussorgsky--a discovery which one finds some difficulty in
crediting. Later, Debussy was undoubtedly affected, in a slight degree,
by Cesar Franck; and there were moments--happily infrequent--during what
one may call his middle period, when a whiff of the perfumed sentiment
of Massenet blew disturbingly across his usually sincere and poetic
pages. But for traces of Liszt, or Berlioz, or Brahms, one will search
fruitlessly. That he does not, to-day, touch hands at any point with his
brother musicians of the elder school in France--with such, for example,
as the excellent and brilliant and superbly unimaginative
Saint-Saens--goes almost without saying. With Vincent d'Indy, a musician
of wholly antipodal qualities, he disputes the place of honor among the
elect of the "younger" school (whose members are not so young as they
are painted); and he is the worshiped idol of still younger Frenchmen
who envy, depreciate, and industriously imitate his fascinating and
dangerously luring art. 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;
yet Wagner would have gasped alike at the novelty and the exquisite art
of _Pelleas et Melisande_, of the _Nocturnes_, even of the comparatively
early _Prelude a l'Apres-midi d'un Faune_; for this is music of a kind
which may, indeed, have been dreamed of, but which certainly had never
found its way upon paper, before Debussy quietly recorded it in his
scores.
What is the secret principle of his method?--if one can call that a
"method" which is, in effect, nothing if not airily unmethodical, and
that principle "secret" which is neither recondite nor perplexing. It is
simply that Debussy, instead of depending upon the strictly limited
major and minor modes of the modern scale system, employs almost
continuously, as the structural basis of his music, the mediaeval church
modes, with their far greater latitude, freedom, and variety. It is, to
say the least, a novel procedure. Other modern composers before Debussy
had, of course, utilized the characteristic plain-song progressions to
secure, for special purposes, a particular and definite effect of color;
but no one had ever before deliberately adopted the Gregorian chant as a
substitute for the modern major and minor scales, with their deep-rooted
and ineradicable harmonic tendencies, their perpetual suggestion of
traditional cadences and resolutions. 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. Debussy must
undoubtedly have realized that the familiar scales, which have so long
and so faithfully served the expressional needs of the modern composer,
tend now to give issue to musical forms that are beginning to seem
_clichee_: forms too rigidly patterned, too redolent of outworn
formulas--in short, too completely crystallized. Chopin, Liszt, Wagner,
and after them the modern Germans and their followers, found in a scale
of semitones a limited avenue of escape from the confinement of the
modern diatonic modes, and bequeathed to contemporary music an
inheritance of ungoverned chromaticism which still clogs its progress
and obstructs its independence. Debussy, through his appreciation of the
living value of the old church modes, has been enabled to shape for
himself a manner of utterance which derives from none of these
influences. It is anything but chromatic; indeed, one of its most
striking characteristics is its use of whole-tone progressions, a
natural result, of course, of its dependence upon the old modes. Other
contemporary Frenchmen have made occasional use of Gregorian effects;
but Debussy was the first to adopt them deliberately as the basis of a
settled manner of utterance, and he has employed them with increasing
consistency and devotion. His example has indubitably served to enrich
the expressional material at the disposal of the modern
music-maker--there cannot conceivably, in reason, be two opinions as to
that: he has acted upon a principle which is, beyond question,
liberating and stimulating. And the adaptability to his own peculiar
temperament of the wavering and fluid order of discourse which is
permitted by the flexibility and variety of the antique modes is
sufficiently obvious.
His resort to Gregorian principles is, it has been observed, far from
being a matter of recent history with him. Almost twenty years ago we
find him writing in the spirit of the old modes. Examine the opening
phrases of his song, _Harmonie du Soir_ (composed in 1889-1890), and
note the felicitous adaptation to modern use of the "authentic" mode
known as the Lydian, which corresponds to a C-major scale with F-sharp.
Observe the use of the same mode in the introductory measures, and
elsewhere, of his setting of Verlaine's _Il pleure dans mon coeur_
(1889), the second of the "Ariettes." Five years later, in _Pelleas et
Melisande_, the trait is omnipresent--too extensive and obvious, indeed,
to require detailed indication. One might point out, at random, the
derivation from the seventh of the ecclesiastical modes (the Mixolydian)
of the phrase in the accompaniment to Arkel's words in the final scene,
"L'ame humaine aime a s'en aller seule;" or the relationship between the
opening measures of the orchestral introduction to the drama and the
first of the "authentic" modes, the Dorian; or between the same mode
(corresponding to the D-minor scale without accidentals) and Melisande's
song at the tower window at the beginning of the third act.
* * * * *
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_. But, however
it may come to be ranked, there are few, I think, who will not recognize
here an accent that is personal and unique, a peculiar ecstasy, a
pervading and influential magic.
II
THE PLAY
ITS QUALITIES
Maurice Maeterlinck's _Pelleas et Melisande_, published in 1892, stands
fifth in the chronological order of his dramatic works. It was preceded
by _La Princesse Maleine_ (1889); _L'Intruse_, _Les Aveugles_ (1890);
and _Les sept Princesses_ (1891). Since its appearance Maeterlinck has
published these plays: _Alladine et Palomides_; _Interieur_; _La Mort de
Tintagiles: Trois petits drames pour Marionnettes_ (1894); _Aglavaine et
Selysette_ (1896); _Ariane et Barbe-Bleue_; _Soeur Beatrice_ (1901);
_Monna Vanna_ (1902); _Joyzelle_ (1903). _Pelleas et Melisande_,
dedicated to Octave Mirbeau "in token of deep friendship, admiration,
and gratitude," was first performed at the Bouffes-Parisiens, Paris, on
May 17, 1893, with this cast: _Pelleas_, Mlle. Marie Aubry; _Melisande_,
Mlle. Meuris; _Arkel_, Emile Raymond; _Golaud_, Lugne-Poe; _Genevieve_,
Mme. Camee; _Le petit Yniold_, Georgette Loyer.
"Take care," warns The Old Man in that most simply touching of
Maeterlinck's plays, _Interieur_; "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 _Pelleas et
Melisande_; 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. "In the theatre," he says in the
introduction to his translation of Ruysbroeck's _l'Ornement des Noces
Spirituelles_, "I wish to study ... man, not relatively to other people,
not in his relations to others or to himself; but, after sketching the
ordinary facts of passion, to look at his attitude in presence of
eternity and mystery, to attempt to unveil the eternal nature hidden
under the accidental characteristics of the lover, father, husband....
Is the thought an exact picture of that something which produced it? Is
it not rather a shadow of some struggle, similar to that of Jacob with
the Angel?" 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 _denouement_ we do not and
cannot know, but of which mysterious intimations are constantly to be
perceived and felt. The characters in his plays live, as the old king,
Arkel, says in _Pelleas et Melisande_, 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." Mystery and sorrow--these are its keynotes; separately or in
consonance, they are sounded from beginning to end of this strange and
muted tragedy. It is full of a quality of emotion, of beauty, which is
as "a touch from behind a curtain," issuing from a background vague and
illimitable. 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. They are little
more than the instruments of a mysterious will, these vague and
mist-enwrapped personages, who seem always to be unconscious actors in
some secret and hidden drama whose progress is concealed behind the
tangible drama of passionate and tragic circumstance in which they are
ostensibly taking part.