Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score

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.