Wagner's later music-dramas to which one can point, by reason of their
continent and transparent expression of the dramatic situation, as
examples of a perfect kind of music-drama: which satisfy, not only
every conceivable demand for fullness of musical utterance (for that
Wagner almost always does), but those intellectual convictions as to
what an ideal music-drama should be which he himself was pre-eminently
instrumental in diffusing. In such passages his direct and pointedly
dramatic use of the voice, and his discreet and sparing, yet deeply
suggestive, treatment of the orchestral background, are of
irresistible effect. How admirable, then, is his restraint! As in, for
example, _Waltraute's_ narrative in "Goetterdaemmerung"; the early
scenes between _Siegmund_ and _Sieglinde_, and _Brunnhilde's_
announcement of the decree of death to the Volsung, in "Walkuere"; and
in "Tristan" the passage wherein the knight proffers to _Isolde_ his
sword; the opening of the third act; and the first sixteen measures
that follow the meeting of the lovers in the second act--where the
breathless, almost inarticulate ecstasy of the moment is uttered with
extraordinary fidelity, only to lead into a passage wherein the pair
suddenly recover their breath in time to respond to the need of
battling against one of the most glorious but dramatically inflated
outpourings of erotic rapture ever given to an orchestra.
But scenes of such perfect musico-dramatic adjustment are rare in
Wagner. It is not likely, in view of his insuperable propensity toward
musical rhetoric and his amazingly fecund eloquence, that, even if he
had kept a more sternly repressive hand upon his impulse toward
musical elaboration, he could have accomplished the union of drama and
music in that exquisite and scrupulously balanced relationship which
produces the ideal music-drama. That achievement had to wait until the
materials of musical expression had attained a greater ductility and
variety, and until the intellectual and aesthetic seed which Wagner
sowed had ripened into a maturer harvest than was possible in his own
time--it had to wait, in short, until to-day. For there are those of
us who believe that the feat has at last been actually achieved--that
the principles of musico-dramatic structure inimitably stated by Gluck
in his preface to "Alceste" have been, for the first time, carried out
with absolute fidelity to their spirit; and, moreover, with that
cohesion of organism which Gluck signally failed to achieve, and with
that fineness of dramatic instinct the lack of which is Wagner's prime
deficiency.
IV
It is not every generation that can witness the emergence of a
masterpiece which may truly be called epoch-making; yet when
France--not the Italy of Peri and Monteverdi; nor the Germany of Gluck
and Wagner--produced, doubtless to the stupefaction of the shades of
Meyerbeer, Bizet, and Gounod, the "Pelleas et Melisande" of Claude
Debussy, it produced a work which is as commanding in quality as it
is unique in conception and design.
It has been left for Debussy to write an absolutely new page in the
eventful history of the opera. This remarkable composer is to-day
regarded with suspicion by the vigilant conservators of our musical
integrity--those who are vigorous and unconquerable champions of
aesthetic progress so long as it involves no change in established
methods and no reversal of traditions; for he has shown a perverse
disinclination to conform to those rules of procedure which, in music
as in the other arts, are held to be inviolable until they are set
aside by the practice of successive generations of inspired
innovators. He has, in brief, affronted the orthodox by creating a
form and method of his own, and one which stubbornly refuses to square
with any of the recognised laws of the game. He is nowhere so
significant a phenomenon to the curious student of musical development
as in his setting of Maeterlinck's drama. For the first time in the
history of opera we are confronted here with the spectacle of a
lyric-drama in which, while the drama itself holds without compromise
the paramount place in the structural scheme, the musical envelope
with which it is surrounded is not only transparent and intensifying,
but, as music, beautiful and remarkable in an extraordinary degree.
The point to be emphasised is this: that the postulate of Count
Bardi's sixteenth century "reformers," formulated by Gluck almost two
hundred years later in the principle that the true function of music
in the opera is "to second poetry in expressing the emotions and
situations of the plot," has its first consistent and effective
application in Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande." What the _Camerata_,
and their successors, could not accomplish for lack of adequate
musical means, what Gluck fell short of compassing for want of
boldness and reach of vision, what Wagner might have effected but for
too great a preoccupation with one phase of the problem, a Frenchman
of to-day has quietly and (I say it deliberately) perfectly achieved.
His success is as much a result of time and circumstance and the slow
growth of the art as of a preeminent natural fitness for the task. The
Florentines, for all their eagerness and sincerity, were helpless
before the problem of putting their principles into concrete and
effective form, for they were hopelessly blocked by reason of the
desperate poverty of the musical means at their disposal. Spurning the
elaborate and lovely art of the contrapuntists, they found themselves
in the sufficiently hopeless situation of artists filled with
passionate convictions but without tools--in other words, they aspired
to write dramatic music for single voices and instruments with nothing
to aid them save a rudimentary harmonic system and an almost
non-existent orchestra, and with virtually no perception of the
possibilities of melodic effect. Their failure was due, not to any
infirmity of purpose, but to a simple lack of materials. Of Gluck it
is to be said that, ardent and admirable reformer as he was, and clear
as was his perception of the rightful demands of the drama in any
serious association with music, he failed, as Mr. Henry T. Finck
justly says, to effect a "real amalgamation of music and drama,"
failed to strike out "a form organically connecting each part of the
opera with every other." His unconnected "numbers," his indulgence in
vocal embroidery, his retention of many of the encumbrances of the
operatic machinery, are all testimony to a not very rigorous or
far-seeing reformatory impulse. If, as Mr. Finck pointedly observes,
he "insisted on the claims of the composer as against the singer, he
did not, on the other hand, alter the relations of poet and composer.
Such a thing as allowing the drama to condition the form of the music
never occurred to him." A spontaneous master of musico-dramatic
speech, he stopped far short of striking out a form of lyric-drama in
which the music was really made to exercise, continuously and
undeviatingly, what he stated to be "its true function." It would be
absurd to dispute the fact that his sense of dramatic expression was
both keen and rich; but it was an instinct which manifested itself in
isolated and particular instances, and it was not strong enough or
exigent enough to compel him to devise a new and more intelligent
manner of treating his dramatic text as a whole.
Of the degree in which Wagner fell short of embodying his
principles--which were of course in essence the principles of the
Florentines and of Gluck--and the evident reason for his failure,
enough has already been said. 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 "Pelleas et Melisande" he has made his
music serve his dramatic subject, in all its parts, with absolute
fidelity and consistency, and with a rigorous and unswerving logic
that is without parallel in the history of operatic art; we are here
as far from the method of Richard Strauss, with its translation of the
entire dramatic material into the terms of the symphonic poem, and
with the singing actors contending against a Gargantuan and merciless
orchestra (which is nothing, after all, but an exaggeration of the
method of Wagner), as we are from the futile experimentings of the
_Camerata_.
V
One cannot but wonder what Hazlitt, who could not think of beauty,
simplicity, or sensibility as qualities having any possible
association with opera, would have said of a manner of writing for the
lyric stage which ignores even those opportunities for musical effect
which composers of unimpeachable artistic integrity have always held
to be desirable and legitimate. There is an even richer invitation to
the Spirit of Comedy in trying to imagine what Richard Wagner would
have said to the suggestion of a lyric-drama in which the orchestra is
not employed at its full strength more than three times in the course
of a score almost as long as that of "Tristan und Isolde," and in
which the singers scarcely ever raise their voices above a
_mezzo-forte_. Debussy's orchestra is unrivalled in musico-dramatic
art for the exquisite justness with which it enforces the moods and
action of the play. It never seduces the attention of the auditor from
the essential concerns of the drama itself: never, as with Wagner,
tyrannically absorbs the mind. Always in this unexampled music-drama
there is maintained, as to emphasis and intensity, a scrupulous
balance between the movement of the drama and the tonal undercurrent
which is its complement: the music is absolutely merged in the play,
suffusing it, colouring it, but never dominating or transcending it.
It is for this reason that it deserves, as an exemplification of the
ideal manner of constructing a music-drama, the hazardous epithet
"perfect"; for it is, one cannot too often repeat, a work far more
faithful to Wagner's avowed principles than are his own magnificently
inconsistent scores. In this music there is no excess of gesture,
there is none of Wagner's gorgeously expansive rhetoric: the "Je
t'aime," "Je t'aime aussi" of Debussy's lovers are expressed with a
simplicity and a stark sincerity which could not well go further; and
it is a curious and significant fact that the moment of their
profoundest ecstasy, though it is artfully and eloquently prepared, is
represented in the orchestra by a blank measure, a moment of complete
silence. This, indeed, is almost the supreme distinction of Debussy's
music-drama: that it should be at once so eloquent and so discreet:
that it should be, in the exposition of its subject-matter, so rich
and intense yet so delicately and heedfully reticent. After the grave
speech and simple gestures of these naive yet subtle and passionate
tragedians, as Debussy has translated them into fluid tone, the
posturings and the rhetoric of Wagner's splendid personages seem, for
a time, violently extravagant, excessive, and overwrought. To attempt
to resist the imperious sway which the most superb of musical
romantics must always exert over his kingdom would be a futile
endeavour; yet it cannot be denied that for some the method of Debussy
as a musical dramatist will seem the more viable and the more sound,
as it is grateful to the mind a little wearied by the drums and
tramplings of Wagnerian conquests.
His use of the orchestra differs from Wagner's in degree rather than
in kind. As he employs it, it is a veracious and pointed commentary on
the text and the action of the play, underlining the significance of
the former and colouring and intensifying the latter; but its comments
are infinitely less copious and voluble than are Wagner's--indeed,
their reticence and discretion are, as it has been said, extreme.
Debussy's choric orchestra is often as remarkable for what it does
not say as for what it does. Can one, for example, imagine Wagner
being able to resist the temptation to indulge in some graphic and
detailed tone-painting, at the cost of delaying the action and
overloading the score, at the passage wherein _Golaud_, coming upon
the errant and weeping _Melisande_ in the forest, and seeing her crown
at the bottom of the spring where she has thrown it, asks her what it
is that shines in the water? Yet observe the curiously insinuating
effect which results from Debussy's deft and reticent treatment of
this episode--the _pianissimo_ chords on the muted horns, followed by
a measure in which the voices declaim alone. And would not Wagner have
wrung the last drop of emotion out of the death scene of
_Melisande_?--a scene for which Debussy has written music of almost
insupportable poignancy, yet of a quality so reserved and unforced
that it enters the consciousness almost unperceived as music.
The discursive and exegetical tendencies of Wagner are forgotten; nor
are we reminded of the manner in which Strauss, in his "Salome,"
overlays the speech and action of the characters with a dense,
oppressive, and many-stranded web of tone. Yet always Debussy's
musical comment is intimately and truthfully reflective of what passes
visibly upon the stage and in the hearts of his dramatic personages;
though often it transmits not so much the actual speech and apparent
emotions of the characters, as that dim and pseudonymous
reality,--"the thing behind the thing," as the Celts have named
it,--which hovers, unspoken and undeclared, in the background of
Maeterlinck's wonderful play. We are reminded at times, in listening
to this lucent and fluid current of orchestral tone, of Villiers de
L'Isle-Adam's description of the voice of his _Elen_: "... it was
taciturn, subdued, like the murmur of the river Lethe, flowing through
the region of shadows." 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 his "Pelleas" has written music
that is rich in sorcery; but it is not violent. In it inheres a
capacity for expression, and a quality of enchantment in the result,
that music had not before exerted--an enchantment that invades the
mind by stealth yet holds it with enchaining power. In a curious
degree the music is both contemplative and impassioned; its pervading
note is that of still flame, of emotional quietude--the sweeping and
cosmic winds of "Tristan und Isolde" are absent. Yet the dramatic
fibre of the score is strong and rich; for all its fineness and
delicacy of texture and its economy of accent, it is neither
amorphous nor inert.
VI
_Tristan_ and _Isolde_, in moments of exalted emotion, utter that
emotion with the frankest lyricism; _Pelleas_ and _Melisande_, in
moments of like fervour, still adhere to the unformed and
unsymmetrical declamation in which their language is elsewhere
couched. It is the orchestra which sings--which, passionately or
meditatively, colours the dramatic moment. Wherein we come to what is
perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this extraordinary score:
the treatment of the voice-parts. Debussy's accomplishment in this
respect, justly summarised, is this: He has released the orchestra
from its thraldom to the methods of the symphonic poem (to which
Wagner committed it) by making it a background, a support, rather than
a thing of procrustean dominance, thus restoring liberty and
transparency of dramatic utterance to the singing actors. He himself
has succinctly stated the principles which guided him in his manner of
writing for the voices in "Pelleas." "I have been reproached," he has
said, "because in my score the melodic phrase is always found in the
orchestra, never in the voice. I wished--intended, in fact,--that the
action should never be arrested; that it should be continuous,
uninterrupted. I wanted to dispense with parasitic musical phrases.
When listening to a [musico-dramatic] work, the spectator is wont to
experience two kinds of emotion: the musical emotion on the one hand;
and the emotion of the character [in the drama], on the other.
Generally these are felt successively. I have tried to blend these two
emotions, and make them simultaneous. Melody is, if I may say so,
almost anti-lyric, and powerless to express the constant change of
emotion or life. Melody is suitable only for the song [_chanson_],
which confirms a fixed sentiment. I have never been willing that my
music should hinder ... the changes of sentiment and passion felt by
my characters. Its demands are ignored as soon as it is necessary that
these should have perfect liberty in their gestures as in their cries,
in their joys as in their sorrow."
Now Debussy in his public excursions as a critic is not always to be
taken seriously; indeed, it is altogether unlikely that he has
refrained from demonstrations of exquisite delight over the startled
or contemptuous comment which some of his vivacious heresies
concerning certain of the gods of music have evoked. These published
appraisements of his are, of course, nothing more than impertinent,
though at times apt and sagacious, _jeux d'esprit_. But when he speaks
seriously, as in the defence of his practice which I have just quoted,
of the menace of "parasitic" musical phrases in the voice-parts, and
when he observes that melody, when it occurs in the speech of
characters in music-drama, is "almost anti-lyric," he speaks with
penetration and truth. His practice, which illustrates it, amounts to
this: He employs in "Pelleas" a continuous declamation, uncadenced,
entirely unmelodic (in the sense in which melodious declamation has
been understood). Save for a brief and particular instance, there is
no melodic form whatsoever, from beginning to end of the score. There
is not a hint of the Wagnerian arioso. The declamation is founded
throughout upon the natural inflections of the voice in speaking--it
is, indeed, virtually an electrified and heightened form of speech.
It is never musical, for the sake of sheer musical beauty, when the
emotion within the text or situation does not lift it to the plane
where the quality of utterance tends naturally and inevitably toward
lyricism of accent. He does not, for example, commit the kind of
indiscretion that Wagner commits when he makes _Isolde_ sing the
highly unlyrical line, "Der 'Tantris' mit sorgender List sich nannte,"
to a phrase that has the double demerit of being "parasitically" and
intrusively melodic and wholly conventional in pattern--one of those
musical platitudes which have no excuse for existence in any sincere
and vital score. Nor in "Pelleas" do the singers ever sing, it need
hardly be said, anything remotely approaching a duet, a concerted
number, or a chorus (the snatches of distant song heard from the
sailors on the departing ship is a mere touch of atmospheric
suggestion). The dialogue is everywhere and always clearly
individualised, as in the spoken drama. Yet this surprising fact is to
be noted: undeviatingly naturalistic as are the voice-parts in their
structure and inflection, and despite their haughty and stoic
intolerance of melodic effect, they yet are so contrived that they
often yield--incidentally, as it were--effects of musical beauty; and
in so doing, they demonstrate the unfamiliar truth that there is
possible in music-drama a use of the voice which permits of an
expressiveness that is both telling and beautiful, though it yields
nothing that accepted canons would warrant us in describing as either
melody or melodious declamation. Now Mr. Baughan, whose views
concerning Wagner and his habits have been discussed, craves in the
music-dramas of Wagner a frankness of melody in the vocal writing
whose absence he deplores; and he seems to think that when this
melodiousness of utterance is denied to the voices in modern opera,
all that is left them is something "that an orchestral instrument
could do as well"--something that, inferentially, is anti-vocal, or at
least unidiomatic. It would seem that Mr. Baughan, and those who think
as he does, fail to realise, as I have remarked before, the immensely
important part which it is possible for modern harmony to play in the
combination of a voice and accompanying instruments. It would not be
difficult to demonstrate that a large part of what we are in the
habit of regarding as a purely melodic form of vocal expression in the
modern lyric-drama owes a large and unsuspected measure of its potency
of effect to the modulatory character of its harmonic support. Take a
passage that we are apt to think of as one of the most ravishingly and
purely melodious in the whole of that fathomless well of lyric beauty,
"Tristan und Isolde"--the passage in the duet in the second act
beginning, "Bricht mein Blick sich wonn' erblindet." As one hears it
sung by the two voices above the orchestra, it seems a perfect
example of pure melodic inspiration; yet play the voice-parts, alone
or together, without their harmonic undercurrent, and all the beauty,
all the meaning, vanish at once: without the kaleidoscopic harmonic
color the melodic phrases are without point, coherence, or design. But
this is aside from the point that I would make--that the
potentialities of modern harmony make possible a use of the voice in
music-drama which, while it is remote from the character of formal
melody, may yet be productive of a kind of emotional eloquence that is
exceedingly puissant and beautiful, and that may even possess a
seemingly lyric quality. We find a foreshadowing of this kind of
effect in such a passage as _Tristan's_ "Bin ich in Kornwall?" where
all of the haunting effect of the phrase is due to the modulation in
the harmony into the G-major chord at the first syllable of
"Kornwall." And one might point out to Mr. Baughan that this effect is
subtly dependent upon the co-operation of the voice and the
instruments. The phrase in the voice-part is not one "that an
orchestral instrument could do as well", as Mr. Baughan would at once
recognise if he were to play the accompanying chords on a piano and
give the progression in the voice to a 'cello or a violin.