support confer a special character upon the effect of the voice-part,
he did not begin to sound its possibilities. That was left for Debussy
to do; and for the task he was obviously equipped in a surpassing
degree by his unprecedentedly flexible, plastic, and resourceful
harmonic vocabulary--the richest harmonic instrument, beyond
comparison, that music has yet known. The score of "Pelleas"
overflows with instances of this--one may paradoxically call it
harmonic--use of the voice: things that Wagner, with his comparatively
limited harmonic range, could not have accomplished. As instances
where the voice-part, without being inherently melodic, borrows a
semblance of almost lyrical beauty from its harmonic associations,
consider the passage in the grotto scene beginning at _Pelleas'_
words, "Elle est tres grande et tres belle", and continuing to
"Donnez-moi la main"; or the astonishing passage in the final love
scene beginning at _Pelleas'_ words, "On a brise la glace avec des
fers rougis!" or, in the last act, the expression that is given to
_Melisande's_ phrase, "la grande fenetre...." Yet note that in such
passages the voice-part does not, in Mr. Baughan's phrase, merely
"weave up" with the orchestra, as he protests that it does in Wagner's
practice; in other words, it is not simply an incidental strand in the
general harmonic texture; it has character and individuality of its
own, though these are absolutely dependent for their full effect upon
their harmonic background. Nor is it, on the other hand, so assertive
and conspicuous that it comes within the class of that which Debussy
repudiates as "parasitic." Here, then, is a method of uttering the
text that not only permits of a just and veracious rendering of every
possible dramatic _nuance_, but which, by virtue of the means of
musical enforcement that are applied to it, takes on a character and
quality, as music, which are as influential as they are unparalleled.
VII
It has been affirmed that in "Pelleas et Melisande" Debussy has
produced a work as commanding 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. One
can easily conceive him as taking the more tranquil part in that
provocative dialogue put by Mr. Yeats into the mouths of two of his
dramatic characters:
"And what in the living world can happen to a man that is
asleep on his bed? 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 "Pelleas et Melisande," Debussy has, through a
fortunate conjunction of circumstances, found a perfect vehicle for
his impulses and preoccupations. There will always be, naturally
enough, persons who must inevitably regard such a work as that for
which he and Maeterlinck are now responsible as, for the most part,
vain, inutile, even preposterous. They are sincere in their dislike,
these forthright and excellent people, and they are to be
commiserated, for they are, in such a region of the imagination as
this drama builds up about them, aliens in a world whose ways and
whose wonders must be forever hidden from their most determined
scrutiny. Such robust and worldly spirits, writes a thoughtful
contemporary essayist, "that swim so vigorously on the surface of
things," have always "a suspicion, a jealousy, a contempt, for one who
dives deeper and brings back tidings of the strange secrets that the
depth holds": they will not even grant that the depths are anything
save murky, that the tidings have validity or importance. They take
comfort in their detachment, and are apt to speak of themselves, with
mock humility, as "plain, blunt persons," for whom the alleged
vacuities of such an order of art are comfortably negligible. Well,
it is, after all, as Maeterlinck's _Pelleas_ himself observes, a
matter not so much for mirth as for lament; yet even more is it a
matter for resignation. There will always be, as has been observed, an
immense and confident majority for whom that territory of the creative
imagination which lies over the boundaries of the palpable world will
seem worse than delusive: who will always and sincerely pin their
faith to that which is definite and concrete, patent and direct, and
who must in all honesty reject that which is undeclared, allusive,
crepuscular: which communicates itself through echoes and in
glimpses; by means of intimations, signs, and tokens. For them it
would be of no avail to point to the dictum of one who, like
Maeterlinck, is aware of remote voices and strange dreams: "Dramatic
art," he has wisely said, "is a method of expression, and neither a
hair-breadth escape nor a love affair more befits it than the
passionate exposition of the most delicate and strange intuitions; and
the dramatist is as free as the painter of good pictures and the
writer of good books. All art is passionate, but a flame is not the
less flame because we change the candle for a lamp or the lamp for a
fire; and all flame is beautiful."
It is a dictum that is scarcely calculated to persuade a very general
acceptance: a "passionate exposition of the most delicate and strange
intuitions" is not precisely the kind of aesthetic fare which the
"plain, blunt man," glorying in his plainness and his bluntness, is
apt to relish. It is a point upon which it is perhaps needless to
dwell; but its recognition serves as explanation of the fact that the
music-drama into which Debussy has transformed Maeterlinck's play
should not everywhere and always be either accepted or understood.
For in the musical setting of Debussy, Maeterlinck's drama has found
its perfect equivalent: the qualities of the music are the qualities
of the play, completely and exactly; and, sharing its qualities, it
has evoked and will always evoke the more or less contemptuous
antagonism of those for whom it has little or nothing to say.
Of the quality of its style, perhaps the most obvious trait to note is
its divergence from the kind of music-making which we are accustomed
to regard as typically French. We have come to regard as inevitable
the clear-cut precision, the finesse, the instinctive grace of French
music; but we are not at all accustomed to discovering this fineness
of texture allied with marked emotional richness, with depth and
substance of thought--we do not look for such an alliance, nor find
it, in any French music from Rameau to Saint-Saens, Gounod, and
Massenet. Yet Debussy has the typical French clarity and fineness of
surface without the French hardness of edge and thinness of substance.
The contours of his music are as melting and elastic as its emotional
substance is rich; and it is phantasmal rather than definite and
clear-cut; evasive rather than direct. His art, as a matter of fact,
has its roots in the literature rather than in the music of his
country. His true forebears are not Rameau, Couperin, Boieldieu,
Bizet, Saint-Saens, but Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme; and, beyond
his own frontier, Rossetti and Maeterlinck. There is scarcely a trace
of French musical influence in the score of "Pelleas," save for its
limpidity of expression and its delicate logic of structure. The truth
is that Debussy, with d'Indy, Ravel, and others, has made it
impossible to speak any longer, without qualification, of "French"
quality, or "French" style, in music; for to-day there is the French
of Saint-Saens and Massenet, and the French of Debussy, d'Indy,
Duparc, Faure, Ravel: and the two orders are as inassociable under a
generic yoke as are the poetry of Hugo and the poetry of Verlaine.
But the essential thing to observe and to praise in this music is its
astonishing, its almost incredible, affluence of substance: its
richness in ideas that are both extraordinarily beautiful and wholly
new. The score, in this respect alone, is epoch-making. Debussy is the
first music-maker since Wagner to evolve a kind of style of which the
substance is, so to say, newly-minted. Strauss is not to be compared
with him in this regard; for the basis of the German master's style,
upon which he has reared no matter how wonderful a superstructure, is
compounded of materials which he got straight from Richard Wagner and
his great forerunner, Franz Liszt; whereas the basis, the
starting-point, of Debussy's style--its harmonic and melodic
stuff--existed nowhere, in any artistic shape or condition, before
him. To speak of it as in any vital sense a reversion, because it
makes use of certain principles of plain-song, is mere trifling.
Debussy is a true innovator, if ever there was one. He has added fresh
materials to the matter out of which music is evolved; and no composer
of whom this may be said, from Beethoven to Chopin, has failed to find
himself eventually ranked as the originator of a new order of things
in the development of the art.
VIII
Those who feel the beauty and recognise the important novelty of the
music of "Pelleas et Melisande" will for some time to come find it
difficult to speak of it appreciatively without an appearance of
extravagance. One owns, in trying to appraise it, to a compunction
similar to that expressed by one of the wisest of modern critics,
when, after applauding some notable poetry, he whimsically reminded
himself that he "must guard against too great appreciation," and "must
mix in a little depreciation," to show that he had "read attentively,
critically, authoritatively." Well, there is no doubt a very definite
risk in praising too warmly a masterpiece which has the effrontery to
intrude itself upon contemporary observation, and upon a critical
function which has but just compassed the abundantly painful task of
adjusting its views to the masterpieces of the immediate past. I am
quite aware that such praise of Debussy's lyric-drama as is spoken
here will seem to many preposterous, or at best excessive. I am also
aware that the mistaking of geese for swans is a delusion which
afflicts generation after generation of over-confident critics, to the
entertainment of subsequent generations and the inextinguishable
delight of the Comic Muse--which, as Mr. Meredith has pointed out,
watches not more vigilantly over sentimentalism than over every kind
of excess. Yet I am willing to assert deliberately, and with a
perfectly clear sense of all that the words denote and imply, that the
score of "Pelleas" is richer in inner musical substance, in ideas that
are at once new and valuable, than anything that has come out of
modern music since Wagner wrote his final page a quarter of a century
ago. The orchestral score is almost as long as that of "Tristan und
Isolde"; yet in the course of its 409 pages there are scarcely half a
dozen measures in which one cannot point out some touch of genius.
The music is studded with felicities. One carries away from a survey
of it a conviction of its almost continuous inspiration, of its
profound originality. The score overflows with ideas, ideas that
possess character and nobility, and that are often of deep and
ravishing beauty--a beauty that takes captive both the spirit and the
sense. It is difficult to think of more than a few scores in which the
inspiration is so persistent and so fresh--in which there is so little
that is _cliche_, perfunctory, derivative. Certainly, if one is
thinking of music written for the stage, one has to go to the author
of "Tristan" for anything comparable to it. It has been said that in
this music Debussy is not always at his best, and the comment is
justified. There are passages, most of them to be found in the
interludes connecting the earlier scenes (which, it is well known,
were extended to meet a mechanical exigency), wherein the fine and
rare gold of his thought is intermixed with the dross of alien ideas.
And it is equally true that the vast and wellnigh inescapable shadow
of Wagner's genius impinges at moments upon the score: thus we hear
"Parsifal" in the first interlude, "Parsifal" and "Siegfried" in the
interlude following the scene at the fountain--the scene wherein
_Melisande's_ ring is lost. But the fact is mentioned here only that
it may be dismissed. The voice of Debussy speaks constantly out of
this music, even when it momentarily takes the timbre of another; and
none other, since the superlative voice of Wagner himself was stilled,
has spoken with so potent and magical a blend of tenderness and
passion, with so rare yet limpid a beauty, with an accent so touching
and so underived.
The nature of Debussy's harmony, and the emphasis which is laid upon
its remarkable quality by his appreciators, have provoked the
assertion that the score of "Pelleas" is devoid of melody, or at least
that it is weak in melodic invention. Of course the whole matter rests
upon what one means by "melody." The comment is a perfect
exemplification of that critical method which consists in measuring
new forms of expression by the standards of the past, instead of
seeking to learn whether they do not themselves establish new
standards by which alone they are to be appraised. The method has
been applied to every innovator in the records of art, and it is
probably futile to cry out against it, or to assert its stupidity. The
music of "Pelleas" is rich in melody. It does not, as we have seen,
reside in the voice-parts, for there Debussy, for reasons which have
already been discussed, has deliberately and wisely avoided formal
melodic contours. It is to be found in the orchestra--an orchestra
which, while it depends in an unexampled degree upon a predominantly
harmonic mode of expression, is at the same time very far from being
devoid of melodic effect. But the melody is Debussy's melody--it is
fatuous to expect to find in this score the melodic forms which have
been made familiar to us by the practice of his predecessors,--men who
themselves were made to bear the primeval accusation of melodic
barrenness. Debussy's melodic idiom is his own, and it often baffles
impatient or inhospitable ears by reason of its seeming
indefiniteness, its apparently wayward movement, and because of the
shifting and mercurial basis of harmony upon which it is imposed. It
would be easy to instance page after page in the score where the
melodic expression is, for those who are open to its address, of
instant and irresistible effect: as the greater part of the scene by
the fountain, in the second act; the whole of the tower scene--an
outpouring of rapturous lyric beauty which, again, sends one to the
loveliest pages of "Tristan" for a comparison; the affecting interview
between _Melisande_ and the benign and infinitely wise _Arkel_, in the
fourth act; the calamitous love scene in the park; and almost the
whole of the last act. If Debussy had written nothing else than the
entrancing music to which he has set the ecstatic apostrophe of
_Pelleas_ to his beloved's hair, he would have established an
indisputable claim to a melodic gift of an exquisite and original
kind. It has been said that he is "incapable of writing sustained
melody"; and though just how extended a melodic line must be in order
to merit the epithet "sustained" is not quite clear, it would seem
that in this particular scene, at all events, Debussy may be said to
have compassed even "sustained" melody; for the melodic line--varied,
sensitive, and plastic though it is--is here of almost unbroken
continuity.
In its total aspect as a dramatic commentary the score provokes wonder
at its precision and flexibility. The manner in which each scene is
individualised, differentiated and set apart from every other scene,
is of a vividness and fidelity beyond praise. For every changing
aspect of the play, for its every emotional phase, the composer has
discovered the exact and illuminating equivalent. The eloquence of
this music is seldom abated; it is as pervasive as it is extreme. One
would not be far wrong, probably, in finding this music-drama's chief
and final claim to the highest excellence in its triumphant character
as an expressional achievement; in this it ranks with the supreme
things in music. There are in the score innumerable passages which one
is tempted to adduce as particular instances of ideally fit and
beautiful expression. It is probably unnecessary to allege the quality
of such examples as the scene by the fountain, the perilous encounter
at the tower window, the final tryst in the park, or the interlude
which accompanies the change of scene from the castle vaults to the
sunlit terrace above the sea--music that has an entrancing radiance
and perfume, through which blows "all the air of all the sea"--these
things will be rightly valued by every observer of liberal
comprehension and sensitive discernment: to name them is to praise
them. But there are other triumphs of expression in the score whose
quality is not so immediately to be perceived. I do not speak of the
countless felicities of structural and external detail: felicities
which will repay close and protracted study. I am thinking of remoter,
less obvious felicities: of the grave beauty of the passage in which
_Genevieve_ reads to the King the letter of _Golaud_ to his brother
_Pelleas_[1]; of the extraordinary final measures of the first act,
after _Melisande's_ question: "Oh! ... pourquoi partez-vous?"; of the
delicious effect which is heard in the orchestra at _Pelleas'_ words,
in the scene at the fountain, "... le soleil n'entre jamais"; of the
exquisite setting of _Golaud's_ exclamation of delight over the beauty
of _Melisande's_ hands; of the entire grotto scene,--a passage of
superb imaginative fervour,--with its indescribably poetic ending (the
fragment of a descending scale given out in imitation by two flutes
and a harp); of the passage in the tower scene where the two solo
violins in octaves sing the ravishing phrase that accompanies the
"Regarde, regarde, j'embrasse tes cheveux ..." of the enraptured
_Pelleas_; of the piercing effect of the _Melisande_ theme where it is
combined with that of _Pelleas_ in the interlude which follows the
scene at the tower window; of the passage preceding the entrance of
_Melisande_ and _Arkel_ in the fourth act, where _Melisande's_ theme
is heard in augmentation; of the passage in the transitional music
following the misusing of _Melisande_ by _Golaud_ where her theme is
played by the oboe above an interchanging phrase in the horns--a
_diminuendo_ of inexpressible poignancy; of the impassioned soliloquy
of _Pelleas_ preparatory to the nocturnal meeting in the park; of the
theme which is played by the horns and 'cellos as he invites
_Melisande_ to come out of the moonlight into the shadow of the trees;
of the exquisite phrase given out by the strings and a solo horn as he
asks her if she knows why he wished her to meet him; of the interplay
of "ninth" chords which is heard, in the final act, when _Arkel_ asks
_Melisande_ if she is cold, and the mysterious majesty of the passage
which immediately follows, as _Melisande_ says that she wishes the
window to remain open until the sun has sunk into the sea; of, indeed,
the whole of the incomparable music of _Melisande's_ death; and
finally, of that scene wherein the genius of the musician and musical
dramatist is, as I think, most characteristically exerted: the
curiously potent and haunting scene in which _Pelleas_ and
_Melisande_, with _Genevieve_, watch the departure of the ship from
the port and speak of the approaching storm. Here Debussy, in setting
the simple yet elliptical speeches of the two tragedians, has written
music which is of marvellously subtle eloquence in its suggestion of
the atmosphere of impending disaster, of vague foreboding and
oppressive mystery, which rests upon the scene. The penetrating "On
s'embarquerait sans le savoir et l'on ne reviendrait plus" of
_Pelleas_, sung over a lingering series of descending chords of the
ninth; the strange, receding song of the departing sailors; the
passage in triplets which is heard when _Pelleas_ speaks of the
beacon light shining dimly through the mist; the veiled and sinister
phrase in thirds on the muted horns which follows the dying-away of
the sailors' call: these are salient moments in a masterly piece of
psychological and (there is no other word for it) subliminal
delineation.
[Footnote 1: As one out of many instances of similarly striking
detail, observe the remarkable and moving progression in the
voice-part from the D in the ninth chord on B-flat to the B-natural in
the chord of G-sharp minor, at _Genevieve's_ words "... tour qui
regarde la mer."]
Whatever Debussy may in the future accomplish--and it is not unlikely
that he may transcend this score in adventurousness and novelty of
style--will not imperil the unique distinction, the unique value, of
"Pelleas et Melisande." It has had, it has been truly said, no
predecessor, no forerunner; and there is nothing in the musical art
that is now contemporary with it which in the remotest degree
resembles it in impulse or character. That, as an example of the ideal
welding of drama and music, it will exert a formative or suggestive
influence, it is not now possible to say; but that its extraordinary
importance as a work of art will compel an ever-widening appreciation,
seems, to many, certain and indisputable. Thinking of this score,
Debussy might justly say, with Coventry Patmore: "I have respected
posterity."
NOTE
Some of the material contained in the foregoing studies appeared
originally in articles published in _Harper's Weekly_, _The North
American Review_, and _The Musician_. But for the most part the essays
are new; and such passages of earlier origin as are retained have been
considerably altered and amplified.
End of Project Gutenberg's Aspects of Modern Opera, by Lawrence Gilman