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+Project Gutenberg's Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, by Lawrence Gilman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande
+       A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score
+
+Author: Lawrence Gilman
+
+Release Date: August 8, 2005 [EBook #16488]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEBUSSY'S PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Newman, Chuck Greif and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+DEBUSSY'S PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE
+
+[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 PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE
+
+"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
+_Pelléas et Mélisande_, 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. _Pelléas et Mélisande_ 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 _Pelléas et Mélisande_, 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'Île joyeuse_ (1905), and a few songs. Certain audiences in
+Paris had heard, nine years before, his setting of Rossetti's "Blessed
+Damozel" (_La Demoiselle Élue_), a "lyric poem" for two solo voices,
+female chorus, and orchestra; in the same year (1893) his string quartet
+was played by Ysaÿe and his associates; in 1894 his _Prélude à
+l'Après-midi d'un Faune_ was produced at a concert of the National
+Society of Music; the first two Nocturnes for orchestra, _Nuages_ and
+_Fêtes_, were played at a Lamoureux concert in 1900; the third,
+_Sirènes_, was performed with the others in the following year. Yet it
+was not until _Pelléas et Mélisande_ was produced at the Opéra-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 naïve 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 _solfège_, 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 Médicis 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 Évreux 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 Élue_, 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 Poèmes 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 _Prélude à
+l'Après-midi d'un Faune_ for orchestra, after the Éclogue of
+Mallarmé--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 _Pelléas et Mélisande_,[3] and with the
+_Proses lyriques_, four songs--not of his best--to words of his own
+(_De Rêve_, _De Grève_, _De Fleurs_, _De Soir_). The next four
+years--1896-1899--saw the issue of the extremely characteristic and
+uncompromising Nocturnes for orchestra (_Nuages_, _Fêtes_, _Sirènes_),
+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" (_Prélude_, _Sarabande_,
+_Toccata_)--inventions of distinguished and original style--and some
+less representative songs and piano pieces, completed his achievements
+before the production of _Pelléas et Mélisande_ 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 _Pelléas_--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 _à Miss Mary Garden, inoubliable Mélisande_.
+
+[3] M. Debussy sends me the information that, although the music of
+_Pelléas et Mélisande_ 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 Opéra-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 "très
+exceptionnel, très curieux, très 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 _précieux_, 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
+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. 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 Verklärung_,
+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 César 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-Saëns--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 _Pelléas et Mélisande_, of the _Nocturnes_, even of the comparatively
+early _Prélude à l'Après-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
+_clichée_: 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 _Pelléas et
+Mélisande_, 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 Arkël's words in the final scene,
+"L'âme humaine aime à 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 Mélisande'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 _Pelléas et Mélisande_, 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_; _Intérieur_; _La Mort de
+Tintagiles: Trois petits drames pour Marionnettes_ (1894); _Aglavaine et
+Selysette_ (1896); _Ariane et Barbe-Bleue_; _Soeur Béatrice_ (1901);
+_Monna Vanna_ (1902); _Joyzelle_ (1903). _Pelléas et Mélisande_,
+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: _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. "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 _dénouement_ 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,
+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." 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.
+
+"Maeterlinck's man," says S.C. de Soissons in a penetrating study of the
+Belgian's dramatic methods, "is a being whose sensuous life is only a
+concrete symbol of his infinite transcendental side; and, further, is
+only a link in an endless change of innumerable existences, a link that
+remains in continual communication, in mutual union with all the other
+links.... In Maeterlinck's dramas the whole of nature vibrates with man,
+either warning him of coming catastrophes or taking on a mournful
+attitude after they have happened. 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." This "rhythmic correspondence," as Mr. James
+Huneker calls it, between man and his environment, is nowhere more
+effectively insisted upon by Maeterlinck than in _Pelléas et Mélisande_.
+Note the incident at the conclusion of the first act, where the
+departure of the ship and the gathering of the storm are commented upon
+by the two lovers in a scene which is charged with an inescapable
+atmosphere of foreboding; note the incident of the fugitive doves in the
+scene at Mélisande's tower window; or the episodic passage near the end
+of the third act, during the tense and painful scene of Golaud's
+espionage: "Do you see those poor people down there trying to kindle a
+little fire in the forest?--It has rained. And over there, do you see
+the old gardener trying to lift that tree that the wind has blown down
+across the road?--He cannot; the tree is too big ... too heavy; ... it
+will lie where it fell." Note, further on (in the third scene of the
+fourth act), just in advance of the culmination of the tragedy, the
+strange and ominous scene wherein Little Yniold describes the passing of
+the flock of sheep:
+
+     "Why, there is no more sun.... They are coming, the little sheep.
+     How many there are! They fear the dark! They crowd together! They
+     cry! and they go quick! They are at the crossroads, and they know
+     not which way to turn!... Now they are still.... Shepherd! why do
+     they not speak any more?
+
+     THE SHEPHERD (_who is out of sight_)
+    "Because it is no longer the road to the fold.
+
+     YNIOLD
+    "Where are they going?--Shepherd! Shepherd!--where are they
+     going?--Where are they going to sleep to-night? Oh! oh! it is too
+     dark!--I am going to tell something to somebody."
+
+Always the setting, the accessories, reflect and underscore the inner
+movement of the drama, and always with arresting and intense effect.
+
+It tempts one to extravagant praise, this heart-shaking and lovely
+drama; this _vieille et triste légende de la forêt_, with its
+indescribable glamour, its affecting sincerity, its restraint, its
+exquisite and unflagging simplicity. The hesitant and melancholy
+personages who invest its scenes--Mélisande, timid, naïve, child-like,
+wistful, mercurial, infinitely pathetic; Pelléas, dream-filled, ardent,
+yet honorable in his passion; old Arkël, wise, gentle, and resigned; the
+tragic and brooding figure of Golaud; Little Yniold, artless and
+pitiful, a figure impossible anywhere save in Maeterlinck; the grave and
+simple diction, at times direct and homely in phrasing and imagery, at
+times rapturous, subtle, and evasive; the haunting _mise-en-scène_: the
+dim forest, the fountain in the park, the luminous and fragrant
+nightfall, the occasional glimpses, sombre and threatening, of the sea,
+the silent and gloomy castle,--all these unite to form a dramatic and
+poetic and pictorial ensemble which completely fascinates and enchains
+the mind. The result would have been as inconceivable before Maeterlinck
+undertook the writing of drama as, to-day, it is inimitable and
+untouched.
+
+
+ITS ACTION
+
+Maeterlinck's play, as adapted by Debussy for musical setting, becomes a
+"lyric drama in five acts and twelve tableaux." Certain portions have
+been left out--as the scenes, at the beginning of Act I and Act V, in
+which the servingwomen of the castle appear; the fourth scene of Act II,
+in which Pelléas is persuaded by Arkël to postpone his journey to the
+bedside of his dying friend Marcellus; the opening scene of Act III,
+between Pelléas, Mélisande, and Yniold. Numerous passages that are
+either not essential to the development of the action, or that do not
+invite musical transmutation, have been curtailed or omitted, with the
+result that the movement of the drama has been compressed and
+accelerated throughout. In outlining very briefly the action of the
+play (which should be read in the original by all who would know
+Debussy's setting of it) I shall adhere to the slightly altered version
+which forms the actual text of the opera.
+
+The characters are these:
+
+ARKËL, _King of Allemonde_
+PELLÉAS & GOLAUD, _half-brothers, grandsons of_ ARKËL
+MÉLISANDE, _an unknown princess; later the bride of_ GOLAUD
+LITTLE YNIOLD, _Son of_ GOLAUD _by a former marriage_
+GENEVIÈVE, _Mother of_ PELLÉAS _and_ GOLAUD
+A PHYSICIAN
+_Servants, Beggars, etc._
+
+
+
+
+ACT I
+
+The opening scene is in a forest, in an unknown land. It is autumn.
+Golaud, gray-bearded, stern, a giant in stature ("I am made of iron and
+blood," he says of himself), has been hunting a wild boar, and has been
+led astray. His dogs have left him to follow a false scent. He is about
+to retrace his steps, when he comes upon a young girl weeping by a
+spring. She is very beautiful, and very timid. She would flee, but
+Golaud reassures her. Her dress is that of a princess, though her
+garments have been torn by the briars. Golaud questions her. Her name,
+she says, is Mélisande; she was born "far away;" she has fled, and is
+lost; but she will not tell her age, or whence she came, or what injury
+has been done her, or who it is that has harmed or threatened
+her--"Every one! every one!" she says. Her golden crown has fallen into
+the water--"It is the crown he gave me," she cries; "it fell as I was
+weeping." Golaud would recover it for her, but she will have no more of
+it.... "I had rather die at once!" she protests. Golaud prevails upon
+her to go with him--the night is coming on, and she cannot remain alone
+in the forest. She refuses, at first, in terror, then reluctantly
+consents. "Where are you going?" she asks. "I do not know.... I, too, am
+lost," replies Golaud. They leave together.
+
+The scene changes to a hall in the castle--the silent and forbidding
+castle near the sea, surrounded by deep forests, where Golaud, with his
+mother Geneviève and his little son Yniold (the child of his first wife,
+now dead), lives with his aged father, Arkël, king of Allemonde. Here,
+too, lives Golaud's young half-brother, Pelléas--for they are not sons
+of the same father. Half a year has passed, and it is spring. Geneviève
+reads to her father, the ancient Arkël, a letter sent by Golaud to
+Pelléas. After recounting the circumstances of his meeting with
+Mélisande, Golaud continues: "It is now six months since I married her,
+and I know as little of her past as on the day we met. Meanwhile, dear
+Pelléas, you whom I love more than a brother, ... make ready for our
+return. I know that my mother will gladly pardon me; but I dread the
+King, in spite of all his kindness. If, however, he will consent to
+receive her as if she were his own daughter, light a lamp at the summit
+of the tower overlooking the sea, upon the third night after you receive
+this letter. I shall be able to see it from our vessel. If I see no
+light, I shall pass on and shall return no more." They decide to receive
+Golaud and his child-bride, although the marriage has prevented a union
+which, for political reasons, Arkël had arranged for his grandson.
+
+Again the scene changes. Mélisande and Geneviève are walking together in
+the gardens, and they are joined by Pelléas. "We shall have a storm
+to-night," he says, "yet it is so calm now.... 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. He will hold her
+arm, he says, for the road is steep. He tells her that he has had a
+letter from his dying friend Marcellus, summoning him to his bedside,
+and that he may perhaps go away on the morrow. "Oh! why do you go away?"
+says Mélisande.
+
+
+ACT II
+
+The second act begins at an old and abandoned fountain in the park--the
+"Fountain of the Blind," so called because it once possessed miraculous
+healing powers. Pelléas and Mélisande enter together. It is a stifling
+day, and they seek the cool tranquillity of the fountain and the shadow
+of the overarching trees--"One can hear the water sleep," says Pelléas.
+Their talk is dangerously intimate. Mélisande dips her hand in the cool
+water, and plays with her wedding-ring as she lies stretched along the
+edge of the marble basin. She throws the ring in the air and it falls
+into the deep water. Mélisande displays agitation: "What shall we say if
+Golaud asks where it is?" "The truth, the truth," replies Pelléas.
+
+The scene changes to an apartment in the castle. Golaud lies upon a bed,
+with Mélisande bending over him. He has been wounded while hunting.
+Mélisande is compassionate, perhaps remorseful. She too, she confesses,
+is ill, unhappy, though she will not tell Golaud what it is that ails
+her. Her husband discovers the absence of her wedding-ring, and harshly,
+suspiciously, asks where it is. 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 moon breaks through the clouds and illumines
+brightly the interior, revealing three old and white-haired beggars
+asleep against a ledge of rock. Mélisande is uneasy, and would go. They
+depart in silence.
+
+
+ACT III
+
+The opening scene of the third act shows the exterior of one of the
+towers of the castle, with a winding staircase passing beneath a window
+at which sits Mélisande, combing her unbound hair, and singing in the
+starlit darkness--"like a beautiful strange bird," says Pelléas, who
+enters by the winding stair. He entreats her to lean further forward out
+of the window, that he may come closer, that he may touch her hand; for,
+he says, he is leaving on the morrow. She leans further out, telling him
+that he may take her hand if he will promise not to leave on the next
+day. Suddenly her long tresses fall over her head and stream about
+Pelléas. He is enraptured. "I have never seen such hair as yours,
+Mélisande! See! see! Though it comes from so high, it floods me to the
+heart!... And it is sweet, sweet as though it fell from heaven!... I can
+no longer see the sky through your locks.... My two hands can no longer
+hold them.... 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. They are confused, and stammer inarticulately. "Mélisande, do
+not lean so far out of the window," cautions her husband. "Do you not
+know how late it is? It is almost midnight. Do not play so in the
+darkness. You are a pair of children!" He laughs nervously. "What
+children!"
+
+He and Pelléas go out, and the scene shifts to the vaults in the depths
+under the castle,--dank, unwholesome depths, that exhale an odor of
+death, where the darkness is "like poisoned slime." Golaud leads his
+brother through the vaults, which Pelléas had seen only once, long ago.
+"Here is the stagnant water of which I spoke; do you smell the
+death-odor?--That is what I wanted you to perceive," insinuates Golaud.
+"Let us go to the edge of this overhanging rock, and do you lean over a
+little. You will feel it in your face.... Lean over; have no fear; ... I
+will hold you ... give me ... no, no, not your hand, it might slip....
+Your arm, your arm! Do you see down into the abyss, Pelléas?" "Yes, I
+think I can see to the bottom of the abyss," rejoins Pelléas. "Is it the
+light that trembles so?" He straightens up, turns, and looks at Golaud.
+"Yes, it is the lantern," answers Mélisande's husband, his voice
+shaking. "See--I moved it to throw light on the walls." "I stifle
+here.... Let us go!" exclaims Pelléas. They leave in silence.
+
+The succeeding scene shows them on a terrace at the exit of the vaults.
+Golaud warns Pelléas. "About Mélisande: I overheard what passed and what
+was said last night. I realize that it was but child's play; but it must
+not be repeated.... She is very delicate, and it is necessary to be more
+than usually careful, as she is perhaps with child, and the least
+emotion might cause serious results. It is not the first time I have
+noticed that there might be something between you.... You are older than
+she; it will suffice to have said this to you. Avoid her as much as
+possible, though not too pointedly."
+
+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.... That makes one weep,
+too.... She is pale, papa." "Ah! ah!... patience, my God, patience!"
+cries the anguished Golaud.... "They kiss each other sometimes?" he
+queries. "Yes ... yes; ... once ... when it rained." "They kissed each
+other?--But how, how did they kiss?" "So, papa, so!" laughs the boy, and
+then cries out as he is pricked by his father's beard. "Oh, your
+beard!... It pricks! It is getting all gray, papa; and your hair,
+too--all gray, all gray!" 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? Are they near each other?" "They are
+looking at the light." "They do not say anything?" "No, papa, they do
+not close their eyes.... Oh! oh!... I am terribly afraid!" "Why, what
+are you afraid of?--look! look!" demands Golaud. "Oh, oh! I am going to
+cry, papa!--let me down! let me down!" insists Yniold, in nameless
+terror.
+
+
+ACT IV
+
+Mélisande and Pelléas meet in an apartment in the castle. Pelléas is
+about to leave, to travel, he tells her, now that his father is
+recovering; but before he goes he must see her alone--he must speak to
+her that night. He asks that she meet him in the park, at the "Fountain
+of the Blind." It will be the last night, he says, and she will see him
+no more. Mélisande consents to meet him, but she will not hear of his
+going away. "I shall see you always; I shall look upon you always," she
+tells him. "You will look in vain," says Pelléas; "I shall try to go
+very far away." They separate. Arkël enters. He tells Mélisande that he
+has pitied her since she came to the castle: "I observed you. You were
+listless--but with the strange, astray look of one who, in the sunlight,
+in a beautiful garden, awaits ever a great misfortune.--I cannot
+explain.--But I was sad to see you thus. Come here; why do you stay
+there mute and with downcast eyes?--I have kissed you but once hitherto,
+the day of your coming; and yet the old need sometimes to touch with
+their lips a woman's forehead or the cheek of a child, that they may
+still keep their faith in the freshness of life and avert for a moment
+the menaces of death. Are you afraid of my old lips? How I have pitied
+you these months!" She tells him that she has not been unhappy. But
+perhaps, he says, she is of those who are unhappy without knowing it.
+Golaud enters, ferocious and distraught. He has blood on his forehead.
+It is nothing, he says--he has passed through a thicket of thorns.
+Mélisande would wipe his brow. He repulses her fiercely. "I will not
+have you touch me, do you understand?" he cries. "I came to get my
+sword." "It is here, on the prie-Dieu," says Mélisande, and she brings
+it to him. "Why do you tremble so?" he says to her. "I am not going to
+kill you.--You hope to see something in my eyes without my seeing
+anything in yours? Do you suppose I may know something?" He turns to
+Arkël. "Do you see those great eyes?--it is as if they gloried in their
+power." "I see," responds Arkël, "only a great innocence." "A great
+innocence!" cries Golaud wildly. "They are more than innocent!... They
+are purer than the eyes of a lamb.--They might teach God lessons in
+innocence! A great innocence! Listen! I am so near them that I can feel
+the freshness of their lashes when they close--and yet I am less far
+from the great secrets of the other world than from the smallest secret
+of those eyes!--A great innocence?--More than innocence! One would say
+that the angels of heaven celebrated there an unceasing baptism. I know
+those eyes! I have seen them at their work! Close them! close them! or I
+shall close them forever!--You need not put your right hand to your
+throat so; I am saying a very simple thing--I have no concealed meaning.
+If I had, why should I not speak it? Ah!--do not attempt to
+flee!--Here!--Give me that hand!--Ah! your hands are too hot!--Away! the
+touch of your flesh disgusts me!--Here!--You shall not escape me now!"
+He seizes her by the hair. "Down on your knees! On your knees before
+me!--Ah! your long hair is of some use at last!" He throws her from side
+to side, holding her by her hair. "Right, left!--Left, right!--Absalom!
+Absalom!--Forward! now back! To the ground! to the ground! Ha! ha! you
+see, I laugh already like an imbecile!" Arkël, running up, seeks to
+restrain him. Golaud affects a sudden and disdainful calmness. "You are
+free to act as you please," he says.--"It is of no consequence to me.--I
+am too old to care; and, besides, I am not a spy. I shall await my
+chance; and then.... Oh! then!... I shall simply act as custom demands."
+"What is the matter?--Is he drunk?" asks Arkël. "No, no!" cries
+Mélisande, weeping. "He hates me--and I am so wretched! so wretched!"
+
+"If I were God," ruminates the aged king, "how infinitely I should pity
+the hearts of men!"
+
+The scene changes once more to the fountain in the park. Yniold is
+discovered seeking to move a great rock behind which his golden ball has
+rolled. Night is coming on. The distant bleating of sheep is heard.
+Yniold looks over the edge of the terrace and sees the flock crowding
+along the road. Suddenly they cease their crying. Yniold calls to the
+shepherd. "Why do they not speak any more?" "Because," answers the
+shepherd, who is concealed from sight, "it is no longer the road to the
+fold." "Where are they going to sleep to-night?" cries the child. There
+is no answer, and he departs, exclaiming that he must find somebody to
+speak to.[5] Pelléas enters, to keep his tryst with Mélisande. "It is
+the last time," he meditates. "It must all be ended. I have been playing
+like a child with what I did not understand. I have played, dreaming
+about the snares of fate. By what have I been suddenly awakened? Who has
+aroused me all at once? I shall depart, crying out for joy and woe like
+a blind man fleeing from his burning house. I shall tell her I am going.
+My father is out of danger; and I can no longer lie to myself.--It is
+late; she is not coming.
+
+[5] Although this scene was set to music by Debussy, and appears in both
+the orchestral and piano scores, it is omitted from the performances at
+the Opéra-Comique.
+
+--It would be better to go away without seeing her again.--But I must
+look well at her this time.--There are some things that I no longer
+recall.--It seems at times as though I had not seen her for a hundred
+years.--And I have not yet looked deep into her gaze. There remains
+nothing to me if I go away thus. And all those memories!--it is as if I
+were to carry away a little water in a muslin bag.--I must see her one
+last time, see to the bottom of her heart.--I must tell her all that I
+have never told her." 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. "You know not why I must go?
+You know not that it is because [he kisses her abruptly] I love you?" "I
+love you too," says Mélisande simply, in a low voice. "You love me? you
+love me too?" cries Pelléas. "Since when have you loved me?" "Since I
+saw you first," she answers. "Oh, how you say that!" cries Pelléas.
+"Your voice seems to have blown across the sea in spring!... You say it
+so frankly--like an angel questioned.--Your voice! your voice! It is
+cooler and more frank than the water is!--It is like pure water on my
+lips!--Give me, give me your hands!--Oh, how small your hands are!--I
+did not know you were so beautiful! I have never before seen anything so
+beautiful!--I was filled with unrest; I sought everywhere; yet I found
+not beauty.--And now I have found you!--I do not believe there can be
+upon the earth a woman more beautiful!" Their love-scene is harshly
+interrupted. "What is that noise?" asks Pelléas. "They are closing the
+gates!--We cannot return now. Do you hear the bolts?--Listen!--the great
+chains!--It is too late!" "So much the better!" cries Mélisande, in
+passionate abandonment. "Do you say that?" exclaims her lover. "See, it
+is no longer we who will it so! Come, come!" They embrace. "Listen! my
+heart is almost strangling me! Ah! how beautiful it is in the shadows!"
+"There is some one behind us!" whispers Mélisande. Pelléas has heard
+nothing. "I hear only your heart in the darkness." "I heard the
+crackling of dead leaves," insists Mélisande. "A-a-h! he is behind a
+tree!" she whispers. "Who?" "Golaud!--he has his sword!" "And I have
+none!" cries Pelléas. "He does not know we have seen him," he cautions.
+"Do not stir; do not turn your head.--He will remain there so long as he
+thinks we do not know he is watching us.--He is still motionless.--Go,
+go at once this way. I will wait for him--I will hold him back." "No,
+no, no!" cries Mélisande.
+
+"Go! go! he has seen everything!--He will kill us!"
+
+"All the better! all the better!"
+
+"He is coming!--Your mouth! your mouth!"
+
+"Yes! Yes! Yes!"
+
+They kiss desperately.
+
+"Oh, oh! All the stars are falling!" cries Pelléas.
+
+"Upon me also!"
+
+"Again! Again!--Give! give!"
+
+"All! all! all!"
+
+Golaud rushes upon them with drawn sword and kills Pelléas, who falls
+beside the fountain. Mélisande flees in terror, crying out as she goes,
+"Oh! oh! I have no courage! I have no courage!"
+
+Golaud pursues her in silence through the forest.
+
+
+ACT V
+
+The last act opens in an apartment in the castle. Mélisande is stretched
+unconscious upon a bed. Golaud, Arkël, and the physician stand in a
+corner of the room. Some days earlier Mélisande and her husband had
+been found stretched out senseless before the castle gate, Golaud having
+still in his side the sword with which he had sought to kill himself.
+Mélisande had been wounded,--"a tiny little wound that would not kill a
+pigeon;" yet her life is despaired of; and on her death-bed she has been
+delivered of a child--"a puny little girl such as a beggar might be
+ashamed to own--a little waxen thing that came before its time, that can
+be kept alive only by being wrapped in wool." The room is very silent.
+"It seems to me that we keep too still in her room," says Arkël; "it is
+not a good sign; look how she sleeps--how slowly.--It is as if her soul
+were forever chilled." Golaud laments that he has killed her without
+cause. "They had kissed like little children--and I--I did it in spite
+of myself!" Mélisande wakes. She wishes to have the window open, that
+she may see the sunset. 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? he asks in agony. "Why, yes, I
+loved him--where is he?" The answer maddens him. "Do you not understand?
+Will you not understand? It seems to me--it seems to me--well, then, it
+is this: I ask you if you loved him with a guilty love? Were you--were
+you both guilty?" "No, no; we were not guilty," she replies; "why do you
+ask me that?" Arkël and the physician appear at the door. "You may come
+in," says Golaud despairingly; "it is useless, I shall never know! I
+shall die here like a blind man!" "You will kill her," warns Arkël. "Is
+it you, grandfather?" questions Mélisande; "is it true that winter is
+already coming?--it is cold, and there are no more leaves." "Are you
+cold? 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. It is her soul, now, that weeps. Why
+does she stretch her arms out so?--what does she wish?" "Toward her
+child, without doubt," answers the physician. "It is the struggle of
+motherhood against...." "At this moment?--At once?" cries Golaud, in a
+renewed outburst of anguish.... "Oh, oh! I must speak to her! Mélisande!
+Mélisande!--leave me alone with her!" "Trouble her not," gravely
+interposes Arkël. "Do not speak to her again.--You know not what the
+soul is.--We must speak in low tones now. She must no longer be
+disturbed. The human soul is very silent. The human soul likes to depart
+alone. It suffers so timidly! But the sadness, Golaud, the sadness of
+all we see!" At this moment the servants fall suddenly on their knees at
+the back of the room. Arkël turns suddenly: "What is the matter?" The
+physician approaches the bed and examines the body of Mélisande. "They
+are right," he says. There is a silence.
+
+"I saw nothing. Are you sure?" questions Arkël.
+
+"Yes, yes."
+
+"I heard nothing. So quickly! so quickly! She goes without a word!"
+
+Golaud sobs aloud.
+
+"Do not remain here," says Arkël. "She must have silence now. Come;
+come. It is terrible, but it is not your fault. It was a little being,
+so quiet, so timid, and so silent. It was a poor little mysterious being
+like everyone. She lies there as though she were the elder sister of her
+baby. Come; the child should not stay here in this room. She must live,
+now, in her place. It is the poor little one's turn."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE MUSIC
+
+A REVOLUTIONARY SCORE
+
+
+Debussy's _Pelléas et Mélisande, drame lyrique en 5 actes et 12
+tableaux_, was performed for the first time on any stage at the
+Opéra-Comique, Paris, April 30, 1902. Its first performance outside of
+Paris was at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, January 9, 1907; its
+second was at Frankfort, April 19, 1907. Its third will be the coming
+production at the Manhattan Opera House, New York. The original Paris
+cast was as follows: _Pelléas_, M. Jean Périer; _Mélisande_, Miss Mary
+Garden; _Arkël_, M. Vieuille; _Golaud_, M. Dufrane; _Geneviève_, Mlle.
+Gerville-Réache; _Le petit Yniold_, M. Blondin; _Un Médicin_, M. Viguié.
+M. André Messager was the conductor. The work was admirably mounted
+under the supervision of the Director of the Opéra-Comique, M. Albert
+Carré.
+
+The fortunes of the opera have not been altogether happy. It has been
+said that Debussy conceived the idea of writing music for Maeterlinck's
+play soon after its first performance at the Bouffes-Parisiens in 1893;
+that, although it was necessary to secure the dramatist's consent to its
+adaptation, he did not solicit Maeterlinck's permission until he had
+thought out his musical scheme to a considerable degree of elaboration;
+and that Maeterlinck (being of that complacent majority of literary men
+who neither care for nor are intelligently curious concerning musical
+art) was immensely surprised to learn that his play had suggested a
+tonal setting. There was much correspondence between composer and
+dramatist before Maeterlinck finally heard the music of Debussy at a
+rehearsal at the Opéra-Comique: so, at least, runs the legend. Just when
+or precisely how the famous and probably inevitable rupture occurred
+between them, tradition does not make altogether clear. Maeterlinck is
+alleged to have become incensed on account of certain excisions made by
+Debussy in fitting the text of the play to music; then, it appears,
+there was a quarrel over the choice of a singer for the performance, and
+Maeterlinck published a letter of protest in which he declared that "the
+_Pelléas_ of the Opéra-Comique" was "a piece which had become entirely
+foreign" to him, and that, as he was "deprived of all control over it,"
+he could only hope "that its fall would be prompt and noisy." The matter
+is important only as contributing to the history of Debussy's work, and
+would scarcely reward detailed examination or discussion.
+
+One would have said, in advance of the event, that Debussy, of all
+composers, living or dead, was best fitted to write music for
+Maeterlinck's beautiful and perturbing play. He was not only best
+fitted, he was ideally fitted; in listening to this music one catches
+oneself imagining that it and the drama issued from the same brain. It
+is impossible to conceive of the play wedded to any other music, and it
+is difficult, indeed, after knowing the work in its lyric form, to think
+of it apart from its tonal commentary. For Debussy has caught and
+re-uttered, with almost incredible similitude, the precise poetic accent
+of the dramatist. He has found poignant and absolute analogies for its
+veiled and obsessing loveliness, its ineffable sadness, the strange and
+fate-burdened atmosphere in which it is steeped--these things have here
+attained a new voice and tangibility.
+
+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; in which an enigmatic and wholly
+eccentric system of harmony is exploited; in which there are scarcely
+more than a dozen _fortissimo_ passages in the course of five acts; in
+which, for the greater part of the time, the orchestra employed is the
+orchestra of Mozart,--surely, this is something new in modern
+musico-dramatic art; surely, it requires some courage, or an
+indifference amounting to courage, to write thus in a day when the
+plangent and complex orchestra of the _Ring_ is considered inadequate,
+and the 113 instrumentalists of _Salome_, like the trumpeters of an
+elder time, are storming the operatic ramparts of two continents.
+
+The radicalism of the music was fully appreciated at the time of the
+first performances in Paris. To the dissenters, Debussy's musical
+personages were mere "stammering phantoms," and he was regaled with the
+age-worn charge of having "ignored melody altogether." Debussy has
+defended his methods with point and directness. "I have been
+reproached," he says, "because in my score the melodic phrase is always
+in the orchestra, never in the voice. I tried, with all my strength and
+all my sincerity, to identify my music with the poetical essence of the
+drama. Before all things, I respected the characters, the lives of my
+personages; I wished them to express themselves independently of me, of
+themselves. I let them sing in me. I tried to listen to them and to
+interpret them faithfully. I wished--intended, in fact--that the action
+should never be arrested; that it should be continuous, uninterrupted. I
+wished to dispense with parasitic musical phrases. When listening to a
+work, the spectator is wont to experience two kinds of emotions which
+are quite distinct: the musical emotion, on the one hand; the emotion of
+the character [in the drama], on the other; generally they 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,
+through technical exigencies, the changes of sentiment and passion felt
+by my characters. It is effaced as soon as it is necessary that these
+should have perfect liberty in their gestures as in their cries, in
+their joy as in their sorrow." However much one may hesitate to
+subscribe to Debussy's generalities, the final justification for his
+procedure is in the fact that it is ideally suited to its especial
+purpose,--the tonal utterance of Maeterlinck's rhymeless, metreless,
+and broken phrases. To have set them in the sustained arioso style of
+_Tristan und Isolde_ would have been as impossible as it would have been
+inept. As it is, the writing for the voices in _Pelléas_ never, as one
+might reasonably suppose, becomes monotonous. 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. His personages love and
+desire, exult and hate and die, with a surprising economy of vehemence
+and insistence. Yet, unrhetorical as the music is, it is never pallid;
+and in such truly climacteric moments as that of Golaud's agonized
+outbreak in the scene with Mélisande, in the fourth act, and the
+ecstatic culmination of the final love-scene, the music supports the
+dramatic and emotional crisis with superb competency and vigor.
+
+He follows Wagner to the extent of using the inescapable device of
+representative themes, though he has, with his usual airy inconsistency,
+characterized the Wagnerian _Leitmotiv_ system as "rather coarse." It is
+true, however, that his typical phrases are employed far more sparingly
+and subtly than modern precedent would have led one to expect. They are
+seldom set in sharp and vividly dramatic contrast, as with Wagner; nor
+are they polyphonically deployed. Often they are mere sound-wraiths,
+intended to denote moods and nuances of emotion so impalpable and
+evanescent, so vague and interior, that it is more than a little
+difficult to mark their precise significance. Often they are mere
+fragments of themes, mere patches of harmonic color, evasive and
+intangible, designed almost wholly to translate phases of that psychic
+penumbra in which the characters and the action of the drama are
+enwrapped. They have a common kinship in their dim and muted loveliness,
+their grave reticence, the deep and immitigable sadness with which, even
+at their most rapturous, they are penetrated. This is a score rich in
+beauty and strangeness, yet the music has often a deceptive naïveté, a
+naïveté that is so extreme that it reveals itself, finally, as the
+quintessence of subtlety and reticence--in which respect, again, we are
+reminded of its perfect, its well-nigh uncanny, correspondence with the
+quality of Maeterlinck's drama.
+
+As it has been remarked, Debussy's orchestra is here, with few
+exceptions, the orchestra of Mozart's day. On page after page he writes
+for strings alone, or for strings with wood-wind and horns. He uses the
+full modern orchestra only upon the rarest occasions, and then more
+often for color than for volume. He has an especial affection for the
+strings, particularly in the lower registers; and he is exceedingly fond
+of subdividing and muting them. It is rare to find him using the
+wood-wind choir alone, or the wood and brass without the strings. His
+orchestra contains the usual modern equipment--3 flutes, 2 oboes, 2
+clarinets, an English horn, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3
+trombones, bass tuba, kettledrums, glockenspiel, cymbals, 2 harps, and
+strings; yet one may count on but little more than the fingers of both
+hands the pages in which this apparatus is employed in its full
+strength. And in spite of this curious and unpopular reticence, we
+listen here, as M. Bruneau has observed, to "a magic orchestra"--an
+orchestra of indescribable richness, delicacy, and suppleness--an
+orchestra that melts and shimmers with opalescent hues--an orchestra
+that has substance without density, sonority without blatancy,
+refinement without thinness.
+
+The music, as a whole, is as insinuating as it is unparalleled. Many
+passages are of an hypnotic and abiding fascination. There is something
+necromantic in the art which can so swiftly and so surely cast an
+ineluctable spell upon the heart and the imagination: such a spell as is
+cast in the scene at the _Fontaine des Aveugles_, in the second act; or
+when, from the window in the castle tower, Mélisande's unbound hair
+falls and envelops Pelléas--an unforgettable page; or when the lovers
+meet for the last time at the Fountain of the Blind; or in the scene of
+Mélisande's death--one of the most pathetic and affecting pages in all
+music. One must wonder at the elasticity and richness of the harmonic
+texture--which, while it is incurably "irregular," is never crude or
+inchoate; at the distinction of the melodic line; at the rhythmical
+variety; at the masterly and individual orchestration. No faculty of
+trained perception is required justly to value the excellences of
+Debussy's score. There is great beauty, great eloquence, in this music.
+It has sincerity, dignity, and reserve, yet it is both deeply
+impassioned and enamoringly tender; and it is as absolutely personal, as
+underived, as was _Tristan_ forty years ago.
+
+
+THE THEMES AND THEIR TREATMENT
+
+The score of _Pelléas et Mélisande_ ill brooks the short and ruthless
+method of the thematic annotator. As I have pointed out in the foregoing
+pages, its themes are often so indeterminate, so shadowy and elusive, as
+to rebuke the analyst who would disengage and expose them. 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. If one ventures to
+exhibit and to name them, one does so rather for the purpose of drawing
+attention to their beauty, their singularity, and their delicate
+potency, than with any thought of imposing an arbitrary character upon
+them or of insisting upon what seems to be their essential
+meaning--which is often altogether too recondite for positive
+identification. I shall not, therefore, attempt to dissect the music
+measure by measure, but shall endeavor rather to survey it "in the
+large," to offer simply a general indication of its more significant
+features. Nor shall I offer any further justification or apology for
+the titles which I have adopted for the various representative themes
+than to say that they have seemed to me to be sufficiently supported by
+their association with the moods and events of the drama. It is, of
+course, entirely possible that apter designations might be found for
+them; I offer those that I have chosen more as an invitation to the
+sympathetic and the inquisitive than from any desire to impose my own
+interpretation upon unwilling, dissenting, or indifferent minds.
+
+
+ACT I
+
+A brief orchestral prelude, less than twenty measures in length,
+introduces the opening scene of the first act. Divided and muted
+'cellos, double-basses, and bassoons intone, _pp_, a solemn and brooding
+theme[6] designed to evoke the thought of the forest, which, sombre,
+mysterious, and oppressive, forms the background against which the
+events of the drama are projected (page 1, measure 1):[7]
+
+[6] Its curious progressions, based on the Dorian mode of the
+plain-chant (corresponding to a scale of D-minor without accidentals), I
+have alluded to in a previous chapter.
+
+[7] These indications refer to the arrangement of the score for voices
+and piano, with French and English text, published by A. Durand & Fils
+of Paris in 1907. I have indicated in each case, in addition to the
+page, the measure in which the example begins.
+
+
+I. THE FOREST [Illustration: Très modéré]
+
+This is immediately followed by one of the most important themes in the
+opera, that which seems to typify the veiled and overshadowing destiny
+which is very close to the central thought of Maeterlinck's play.
+Strangely harmonized, this _Fate_ theme (it is in the second measure
+that its kernel is contained, and it is this portion of it that is most
+frequently repeated) is sounded, _pp, très modéré_, by oboes, English
+horn, and clarinets (page 1, measure 5):
+
+
+II. FATE
+
+[Illustration]
+
+These two themes are repeated, with altered harmonization; then follows
+one of the two principal themes of the score--that of _Mélisande_, sung,
+_doux et expressif_, by the oboe over tremolos in the divided strings
+(page 1, measure 14):
+
+
+III. MÉLISANDE
+
+[Illustration: _p doux et expressif_]
+
+It is followed by a derivative theme which, in the drama, suggests the
+naïveté of Mélisande's personality (page 1, measure 1):
+
+
+IV. MÉLISANDE'S NAÏVETÉ [Illustration]
+
+
+Flute, oboe and clarinet repeat it over a counterpoint formed by the
+_Fate_ theme (2 horns), and the curtain opens to the accompaniment of
+the _Forest_ motive. This latter theme, with the motive of _Fate_,
+underscores the earlier portions of the dialogue between Golaud and
+Mélisande. At Golaud's words: "Oh! you are beautiful!" we hear (page 7,
+measure 1) an ardent phrase in the strings expressive of his awakened
+passion for the distressful little princess:
+
+
+V. GOLAUD'S LOVE
+
+[Illustration: Animée]
+
+This theme is sounded again, with peculiarly penetrating effect, in the
+divided strings, as Golaud entreats Mélisande not "to weep so" (page 9,
+measure 4), and, later in the scene (page 19, measure 1), when he tells
+her that she must not stay in the forest alone after nightfall, and
+urges her to go with him. As he informs her that he is "Prince Golaud,
+grandson of Arkël, the aged king of Allemonde," we hear, on the bassoons
+and horns, his own motive (page 14, measure 8):
+
+
+VI. GOLAUD
+
+[Illustration: Très soutenu]
+
+"You look like a mere child," he says, and the _Mélisande_ theme is
+given out, _doux et calme_, by the divided strings (page 18, measure 2).
+As the two go out together, the motive of _Fate_ is quietly intoned by
+the horns (page 22, measure 3).
+
+An interlude of some fifty measures, in which the _Forest, Fate_, and
+_Mélisande_ themes are exploited, introduces the second scene of the
+act. To an accompaniment of long-sustained chords varied by recurrences
+of the _Mélisande_ theme, Geneviève reads to the venerable Arkël
+Golaud's letter to his brother. The entrance of Pelléas is accompanied
+by the theme which characterizes him throughout--the second of the two
+motives (that of Mélisande being the other) which most conspicuously
+dominate the score. It is announced (page 33, measure 10) by three
+flutes and a clarinet, over a viola accompaniment:
+
+
+VII. PELLÉAS
+
+[Illustration: Animez un peu]
+
+The scene closes with a variant of this, and there is an interlude in
+which the orchestra weaves a commentary out of the themes of _Fate_ and
+_Golaud's Love_.
+
+As the third scene opens (before the castle), the _Mélisande_ theme is
+sung, _mélancolique et doux_, by the oboe against a murmuring
+accompaniment of the strings. Together with the _Pelléas_ theme, it
+accompanies the opening portion of the scene. A suggestive use is made
+of a fragment of the _Fate_ theme at Mélisande's words, after Pelléas
+prophesies the approach of a storm: "And yet it is so calm now!" (page
+44, measure 5). Just before the voices of the departing sailors are
+heard, the curious student will note a characteristic passage in the
+orchestra (page 45, measure 1)--a sequence of descending "ninth-chords"
+built on a downward scale of whole tones. The _Fate_ theme, combined
+with that of _Mélisande_, colors the rest of the scene to the end. The
+conclusion of the act is striking: two flutes outline a variant of the
+_Mélisande_ motive; a horn sounds the first three notes of the second
+measure of the _Fate_ theme, and four horns and flute sustain, _pp_, an
+unresolved suspension--C#-F#-A#-D#-G#.
+
+
+VIII
+
+[Illustration: _presque plus rien_]
+
+
+
+
+ACT II
+
+The _Pelléas_ theme, sung by two flutes, opens the brief introduction to
+the second act. It is repeated, interwoven with harp arpeggios.
+Immediately preceding the entrance of Pelléas and Mélisande a muted
+horn, two flutes, two oboes, and harp sound a chord of singularly liquid
+quality--one of those fragmentary effects in the invention of which
+Debussy is so curiously happy. It is the motive of _The Fountain_.[8]
+
+[8] I quote it in the completer and more beautiful form in which it
+appears on page 57, measures 1-3.
+
+
+IX. THE FOUNTAIN
+
+[Illustration: Modéré]
+
+It is repeated, with still more magical effect (scored for divided
+violins and violas, two muted horns, and harp), as Mélisande remarks
+upon the clearness of the water, while the violins and violas weave
+about it a shimmering figure in sixteenth-notes with which its
+appearances are usually associated. As Pelléas warns Mélisande to take
+care, while she leans above the water along the marble edge of the
+basin, the clarinet, over a string accompaniment, announces an
+impassioned phrase (page 62, measure 3)--the theme of _Awakening
+Desire_:
+
+
+X. AWAKENING DESIRE
+
+[Illustration: En animant]
+
+As Pelléas questions Mélisande about the ring with which she is
+playing,--her wedding-ring,--and when it falls into the water while she
+is tossing it in the air, we hear persistently the theme of _Fate_,
+which, with the _Golaud_ theme (portentously sounded, _pp_, by horns and
+bassoons), closes the scene. There is an interlude in which the
+_Golaud_, _Mélisande_, and _Fate_ themes are heard.
+
+The rhythm of the latter theme mutters ominously in the bass as the
+second scene is disclosed. When _Golaud_, lying wounded on his bed,
+describes to Mélisande how, "at the stroke of noon," his horse "swerved
+suddenly, with no apparent cause," and threw him, as he was hunting in
+the forest ("could he have seen something extraordinary?"), the oboe
+recalls the theme of _Awakening Desire_, which was first heard as
+Mélisande and Pelléas sat together by the fountain in the forest during
+the heat of midday. 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. When, later,
+Golaud mentions his brother's name inquiringly, and she replies that she
+thinks he dislikes her, although he speaks to her sometimes, we hear,
+very softly, the theme of _Awakening Desire_. As their talk progresses
+to its climax, there is a recurrence of the _Fate_ theme; then, as
+Golaud, upon discovering the loss of her wedding-ring, harshly tells her
+that he "would rather have lost everything than that," the trombones and
+tuba declaim (page 99, measure 5) a threatening and sinister phrase
+which will later be more definitely associated with the thought of
+Golaud's vengeful purpose:
+
+
+XI. VENGEANCE
+
+[Illustration: Anime, un peu retenu]
+
+This is repeated still more vehemently three measures further on, and
+there is a return of the _Fate_ motive as Mélisande, at the bidding of
+Golaud, goes forth to seek the missing ring. An interlude, in which are
+blended the variant of the _Mélisande_ theme, which denotes her
+grieving, and the shimmering figure in sixteenth-notes heard during the
+dialogue at the fountain, leads into the scene before the grotto.
+
+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; it leads into a quiet coda formed out of the
+theme of _Fate_.
+
+
+
+
+ACT III
+
+After several bars of preluding by flute, harp, violas, and 'cellos
+(harmonics), on an arpeggio figure, _ppp_, flutes and oboe present (page
+115, measure 6) a theme which, in an ampler version, dominates the
+entire scene. Its complete form, in which I conceive it to be suggestive
+of the magic of night, is as follows (page 118, measure 2):
+
+
+XII. NIGHT
+
+[Illustration: Modéré sans lenteur]
+
+It continues in the orchestra until, as Pelléas urges Mélisande to lean
+further out of the window that he may see her hair unbound, a new theme
+enters, seeming to characterize the ardor of Pelléas' mood (page 120,
+measure 3[9]):
+
+[9] I quote it as it appears in its maturer form on page 125 (measure
+3).
+
+
+XIII. ARDOR
+
+[Illustration: Animez toujours]
+
+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). Then suddenly Mélisande's unloosed hair streams
+down from the open window and envelops Pelléas, and we hear (a famous
+passage) in the strings alone, _ff_, a precipitate descending series of
+seventh-chords built on the familiar whole-tone scale which Debussy
+finds so impelling (page 127, measure 1).
+
+
+XIV
+
+[Illustration: Animez toujours]
+
+Then begins (page 128, measure 1) a delectable episode. Over a murmurous
+accompanying figure given out by violas, 'cellos, harp, and horn, a
+clarinet sings a variant of the _Mélisande_ theme. The harmonic changes
+are kaleidoscopic, the orchestral color of prismatic variety. The lovely
+rhapsody over his belovèd's
+
+
+XV
+
+[Illustration: Moins vite et passionnément contenu]
+
+tresses which Maeterlinck puts into the mouth of Pelléas is exquisitely
+enforced by the music. There is ravishing tenderness and beauty here,
+and an intensity of expression as penetrating as it is restrained. As
+Mélisande's doves come from the tower and fly about the heads of the
+lovers, we hear, tremolo in the strings, a variation of her motive.
+Golaud enters by the winding stair, and the threatening phrase quoted as
+Ex. XI is heard sombrely in the horns, bassoons, violas, and
+'cellos--its derivation from Golaud's own theme (see Ex. VI) is here
+apparent. The latter motive sounds, _p_, as he warns Mélisande that she
+will fall from the window if she leans so far out. It is followed by the
+_Fate_ theme as he departs, laughing nervously. A short interlude is
+evolved from the _Mélisande_ theme (the _Pelléas_ motive forming a
+counterpoint), and the _Fate_ and _Vengeance_ motives--the latter
+outlined, over a roll of the timpani and a sustained chord in the horns
+and wood-wind, by a muted trumpet, _pp_.
+
+No new thematic matter is presented during the two succeeding scenes (in
+the vaults under the castle and, afterward, on the terrace), nor are
+there significant reminiscences of themes already brought forward. The
+music of the vault scene forms a pointed commentary on the implications
+of the action and dialogue--in character it is dark-hued, forbidding,
+sinister. As Golaud and Pelléas emerge from the vaults, much use is made
+in the orchestra of a jubilant figure in triplets (first given out
+_fortissimo_ by flutes and oboes, over an undulating accompaniment, on
+page 152, measure 1) which seems to express a certain irresponsible
+exuberance on the part of Pelléas; it accompanies his light-hearted
+remarks about the odor of the flowers, the sheen of the water, and the
+invigorating air, as they come out upon the sunlit terrace. As the scene
+changes again, a very short interlude introduces a new theme--that of
+Little Yniold, Golaud's son, whom he is to use as the innocent tool of
+his suspicions. This motive, which occurs repeatedly during the ensuing
+scene, is one of the less important, but most typical and haunting ones,
+in the entire score. It is first presented (page 158, measure 4) by the
+oboe, _doux et expressif_:
+
+
+XVI. YNIOLD
+
+[Illustration: _p doux et expressif_]
+
+It is heard again as an accompaniment to Yniold's naïve answers to
+Golaud's interrogations (page 160); when he cries out that his father,
+in his agitation, has hurt him (page 164); and, in a particularly
+touching form, on page 165, measure 4, when Golaud promises that he will
+give him a present on the morrow if Yniold will tell him what he knows
+concerning Mélisande and Pelléas. We hear the _Pelléas_ theme in the
+strings and wood-wind (page 172, measure 7) when Yniold says that they
+"weep always in the dark," and that "that makes one weep also," and
+again when he tells of having seen them kiss one day--"when it rained."
+Thereafter it is heard repeatedly in varying forms to the end of the
+scene, at times underlying a persistent triplet-figure which has the
+effect of an inverted pedal-point. A tumultuous and agitated _crescendo_
+passage brings the act to a portentous close.
+
+
+
+
+ACT IV
+
+A variant of the _Pelléas_ theme, with the opening notes of the _Fate_
+motive as an under voice, begins the short prelude to the fourth act;
+there is a hint of the _Yniold_ theme, and the first two notes of the
+_Pelléas_ motive introduce the first scene. The interview between
+Mélisande and her lover, in which they arrange their tryst at the
+fountain in the park, is treated with restraint; an expressive phrase
+sung by the 'cellos (page 194, measure 11) may be noted at the point
+where Pelléas informs Mélisande that she will look in vain for his
+return after he has gone. The _Mélisande_ theme, in a new form, opens
+the moving scene between Mélisande and Arkël in which he tells her of
+his compassionate observation of her since first she came to the castle.
+During his speech and her replies we hear her motive and that of _Fate_
+(page 205), the latter theme announcing the entrance of Golaud,
+distraught, blood-bespattered, seeking, he says, his sword. The music of
+the ensuing scene does not call for extended description--rather for the
+single comment that in it Debussy has proved once for all his power of
+forceful, direct, and tangible dramatic utterance: the music here, to
+apply to it Golaud's phrase in the play, is compact of "blood and
+iron"--as well it needed to be for the accentuation of this perturbing
+and violent episode. The _Fate_ motive courses ominously through its
+earlier portions. We hear, too, what I have called the "second"
+_Mélisande_ theme--that which seems to denote her naïveté (see Ex. IV),
+and a strange variant of the first _Mélisande_ theme (page 212, measure
+4). At the climax of the scene, when Golaud seizes his wife by her long
+hair and flings her from side to side, the music is as brutal, as
+"virile," as the most exigent could reasonably demand. Later, as he
+hints at his purpose,--"I shall await my chance,"--the trombones, tubas,
+and double-basses _pizzicato_ mutter, _pp_, the motive of _Vengeance_.
+The orchestral interlude is long and elaborate. We hear a variant of the
+_Fate_ theme, which reaches a climax in a _fortissimo_ outburst of the
+full orchestra. The theme in this form is developed at length; there is
+a reminiscence of the _Mélisande_ theme, and the music, by a gradual
+_diminuendo_, passes into the third scene of the act--in the park,
+before the Fountain of the Blind. At the beginning occurs the incident
+of the passing flock of sheep observed by Yniold. This scene need not
+detain us long, since it is musically as well as dramatically episodic.
+There are no new themes, and no significant recurrences of familiar
+ones, though the music is rich in suggestive and imaginative details; as
+I have previously noted, it is omitted in the performances at the
+Opéra-Comique.
+
+Pelléas enters, and there is an impassioned declaration of his theme,
+scored, _f_, for wood-wind, horns, and strings, as he observes that he
+is about to depart, "crying out for joy and woe like a blind man fleeing
+from his burning house." There is a return of the _Mélisande_ theme; and
+then, as she herself enters, and Pelléas urges her not to stay at the
+edge of the moonlight, but to come with him into the shadow of the
+linden, there enters a theme of great beauty and tenderness, announced,
+_mystérieusement_, by horns and 'cellos (page 236, measure 6). I may
+call it, for want of a better name, the motive of _The Shadows_, since
+it appears only in association with the thought of sheltering darkness
+and concealment:
+
+
+XVII. THE SHADOWS
+
+[Illustration: Modéré]
+
+We hear the _Fate_ motive when Mélisande warns Pelléas that it is late,
+that they must take care, as the gates of the castle will soon be closed
+for the night. There is a gracious variant of this motive as Mélisande
+tells how she caught her gown on the nails of the gate as she left the
+castle, and so was delayed. Then comes a reminiscence of the _Fountain_
+theme (the authentic wonder of which is that it is not a theme at all,
+but merely a single chord introduced by a grace-note; yet the vividness
+of its effect is indisputable), suggested, _pp_, by horns and harp, at
+Mélisande's words: "We have been here before." As Pelléas asks her if
+she knows why he has bidden her to meet him, strings and horn give out,
+_pp et très expressif_, a lovely phrase derived from the _Pelléas_ theme
+(page 242, measure 1). Their mutual
+
+
+XVIII
+
+[Illustration: Modéré]
+
+confessions of love, so simply uttered in the text, are entirely
+unaccompanied by the orchestra; but as Pelléas exclaims: "The ice is
+melted with glowing fire!" four solo 'cellos, with sustained harmonics
+in the violins and violas, sound, _pianissimo_, a ravishing series of
+"ninth-chords" (page 244, measure 6)--a sheer Debussy-esque effect, for
+the relation between the chords is as absolutely anarchistic as it is
+deeply beautiful. "Your voice seems to have
+
+
+XIX
+
+[Illustration: Lent]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+blown across the sea in spring," says Pelléas, and a horn, accompanied
+by violins in six parts, announces the motive of _Ecstasy_ (page 245,
+measure 7):
+
+
+XX. ECSTASY
+
+[Illustration: Modéré]
+
+The 'cellos intone the _Mélisande_ theme as Pelléas tells her that he
+has never seen anyone so beautiful as she; the theme of _Ecstasy_
+follows in the strings, horns, and wood-wind, _forte_; the theme of
+_The Shadows_ returns as Pelléas again invites her into the darkness
+beneath the trees; there is a dolorous hint of the _Mélisande_ theme as
+she says that she is happy, yet sad. And then the amorous and caressing
+quality of the music is sharply altered. There is a harsh and sinister
+muttering in the double-basses as Pelléas, startled by a distant sound,
+cries that they are closing the gates of the castle, and that they are
+shut out. 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
+
+[Illustration: Modéré]
+
+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. This theme and that of _Rapture_
+hasten the music toward its culminating point of intensity. The
+_Pelléas_ theme is given out by the 'cellos, the _Mélisande_ theme (this
+is not indicated in the piano version) by the violins, and as the lovers
+embrace desperately, a _crescendo_ leads to a _fortissimo_ proclamation,
+by all the orchestral forces, of a greatly broadened version of the
+motive of _Ecstasy_. As Golaud rushes upon them and strikes down
+Pelléas, the _Fate_ theme is declaimed by four horns in unison over
+string tremolos; and, as he turns and silently pursues the fleeing
+Mélisande through the forest, his _Vengeance_ theme brings the act, by a
+rapid _crescendo_, to a crashing close.
+
+
+
+
+ACT V
+
+The last act opens with a dolorous phrase derived from the variant of
+the _Mélisande_ theme noted on page 82 of the piano score. It is played
+by the violas, with harp accompaniment. The violins repeat it, and two
+flutes announce a new theme (page 268, measure 5), the motive of
+_Pity_:
+
+
+XXII. PITY
+
+[Illustration: Lent et triste]
+
+As Golaud bends with Arkël over the unconscious figure of Mélisande
+where she lies stretched upon her bed, muted horns and 'cellos play a
+gentle variant of the _Fate_ theme, followed by the _Mélisande_ motive
+as Golaud exclaims that they had but "kissed like little children." The
+theme of _Pity_ accompanies Mélisande's awakening, and a new motive is
+heard as she responds, to Arkël's question: "I have never been better."
+This new theme (page 274, measure 4), of extraordinary poignancy, is
+given out by an oboe supported by two flutes, and its expression is
+marked _triste et très doucement expressif_. I shall call it the motive
+of _Sorrow_, for it seems like the comment of the music upon the
+transporting and utter sadness of the play's dénouement. It voices a
+gentle and passive commiseration, rather than a profound and shaking
+grief:
+
+
+XXIII. SORROW
+
+[Illustration: Lent et triste]
+
+A third new theme, also of searching pathos, occurs in the strings, _p,
+très doux_, as Mélisande quietly greets her husband (page 279, measure
+1), and later, when she says that she forgives him (page 282, measure
+1). It may be called the motive of _Mélisande's Gentleness_:
+
+
+XXIV. MÉLISANDE'S GENTLENESS
+
+[Illustration: _très doux_]
+
+As Golaud's still unvanquished doubts and suspicions torture him into
+harsh interrogations, and he asks her if she loved Pelléas "with a
+forbidden love," an oboe and two flutes recall, _p et doux_, the
+_Rapture_ motive. Later, in succession, we hear (on a solo violin over
+flute and clarinets) the _Pelléas_ theme (page 289, measure 2), the
+motive of _Gentleness_, for the last time (page 290, measure 3), and
+the _Mélisande_ theme (pages 290-292). As Mélisande recognizes Arkël,
+and asks if it be true "that the winter is coming," a solo violin, solo
+'cello, and two clarinets play an affecting phrase (page 294, measure
+5). She tells Arkël that she does not wish the windows closed until the
+sun has sunk into the sea, and the orchestra accompanies her in a
+passage of curiously delicate sonority (page 295, measure 6).
+
+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); Arkël's simple requiem over the body of the
+little princess, with the grave and tender orchestral commentary woven
+out of familiarly poignant themes (pages 308-309); the murmurous coda,
+with its muted trumpet singing a gentle dirge under an accompaniment of
+two flutes (page 310, measure 7),--these things are easy to
+
+
+XXV
+
+[Illustration: Très lent]
+
+value, but they may not easily be praised with adequacy.
+
+Concerning felicities of structural and technical detail in the work as
+a whole, this has not been the place to speak; but if curious
+appreciators, or others who are merely curious, should perhaps be
+induced, by what has been written here, to explore for themselves
+Debussy's beautiful and in many ways incomparable score, the purpose of
+this study will have been achieved.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, by Lawrence Gilman
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEBUSSY'S PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE ***
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+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of DEBUSSY'S PELL&Eacute;AS ET M&Eacute;LISANDE, by Lawrence Gilman.
+    </title>
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+
+Project Gutenberg's Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, by Lawrence Gilman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande
+       A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score
+
+Author: Lawrence Gilman
+
+Release Date: August 8, 2005 [EBook #16488]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEBUSSY'S PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE ***
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+
+<a name="Page_1" id="Page_1" /><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2" />
+<h1>DEBUSSY'S</h1>
+<h1>PELL&Eacute;AS ET M&Eacute;LISANDE</h1>
+<br />
+<br />
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/debussy.png"
+      alt="Claude Debussy (From the painting by Jacques Blanche)" title="Claude Debussy (From the painting by Jacques Blanche)" />
+
+</div><h3><i>Claude Debussy (From the painting by Jacques Blanche)</i></h3>
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h2>A GUIDE TO THE OPERA</h2>
+
+<h2>WITH MUSICAL EXAMPLES FROM THE SCORE</h2>
+
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>LAWRENCE GILMAN</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>AUTHOR OF &quot;PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC,&quot; &quot;THE MUSIC OF TO-MORROW,&quot;
+     &quot;STORIES OF SYMPHONIC MUSIC,&quot; &quot;EDWARD MACDOWELL&quot; (IN &quot;LIVING
+     MASTERS OF MUSIC&quot; SERIES) &quot;STRAUSS' 'SALOME,'&quot; ETC.</p></div>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/design.png"
+      alt="design" title="design" />
+</div>
+<h3>NEW YORK G. SCHIRMER 1907</h3>
+<a name="Page_6" id="Page_6" /><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5" />
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4>
+TO THE MEMORY OF<br />
+<br />
+GUSTAVE SCHIRMER<br />
+<br />
+A MUSIC LOVER OF LIBERAL TASTE<br />
+AND SENSITIVE APPRECIATION<br />
+AND AN INFLUENTIAL FORCE<br />
+IN THE PROMOTION OF<br />
+THE FINER THINGS OF THE ART<br />
+TO WHICH HIS LIFE<br />
+WAS DEVOTED<br />
+</h4>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<a name="Page_7" id="Page_7" /><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8" />
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+ <a href="#I"><b>I.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;DEBUSSY AND HIS ART</b></a><br/><br />
+ <a href="#II"><b>II.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE PLAY</b></a><br /><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"> <a href="#II"><b>ITS QUALITIES</b></a><br /><br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"> <a href="#ACTION"><b>ITS ACTION:</b></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ <a href="#ACT_I"><b>ACT I</b></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ <a href="#ACT_II"><b>ACT II</b></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ <a href="#ACT_III"><b>ACT III</b></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ <a href="#ACT_IV"><b>ACT IV</b></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ <a href="#ACT_V"><b>ACT V</b></a><br /><br /></span>
+ <a href="#MUSIC"><b>III.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE MUSIC</b></a><br /><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"> <a href="#REV"><b>A REVOLUTIONARY SCORE</b></a><br /><br />
+</span>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"> <a href="#THEMES"><b>THE THEMES AND THEIR TREATMENT:</b></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ <a href="#ACT_I_THEMES"><b>ACT I</b></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ <a href="#ACT_II_THEMES"><b> ACT II</b></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ <a href="#ACT_III_THEMES"><b> ACT III</b></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ <a href="#ACT_IV_THEMES"><b> ACT IV</b></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+ <a href="#ACT_V_THEMES"><b> ACT V</b></a><br/><br /></span>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<a name="Page_9" id="Page_9" /><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10" />
+<h1>DEBUSSY'S PELL&Eacute;AS ET M&Eacute;LISANDE</h1>
+
+<p>&quot;<a name="Page_11" id="Page_11" />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.&quot;&mdash;FIONA MACLEOD.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I" /><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12" />I</h2>
+
+<h2>DEBUSSY AND HIS ART</h2>
+
+
+<p>With the production at Paris in the spring of 1902 of Claude Debussy's
+<i>Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande</i>, based on the play of Maeterlinck, the history of
+music turned a new and surprising page. &quot;It is necessary,&quot; declared an
+acute French critic, M. Jean Marnold, writing shortly after the event,
+&quot;to go back perhaps to <i>Tristan</i> to find in the opera house an event so
+important in certain respects for the evolution of musical art.&quot; The
+assertion strikes one to-day, five years after, as, if anything,
+over-cautious. <i>Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande</i> exhibited not simply a new manner
+of writing opera, but a new kind of music&mdash;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 <i>Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande</i>, 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 &quot;sketches,&quot; <i>La Mer</i> (composed in 1903-1905 and published in
+the lat<a name="Page_13" id="Page_13" />ter year), the piano pieces <i>Estampes</i> (1903), and <i>Images,
+Masques, l'&Icirc;le joyeuse</i> (1905), and a few songs. Certain audiences in
+Paris had heard, nine years before, his setting of Rossetti's &quot;Blessed
+Damozel&quot; (<i>La Demoiselle &Eacute;lue</i>), a &quot;lyric poem&quot; for two solo voices,
+female chorus, and orchestra; in the same year (1893) his string quartet
+was played by Ysa&yuml;e and his associates; in 1894 his <i>Pr&eacute;lude &agrave;
+l'Apr&egrave;s-midi d'un Faune</i> was produced at a concert of the National
+Society of Music; the first two Nocturnes for orchestra, <i>Nuages</i> and
+<i>F&ecirc;tes</i>, were played at a Lamoureux concert in 1900; the third,
+<i>Sir&egrave;nes</i>, was performed with the others in the following year. Yet it
+was not until <i>Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande</i> was produced at the Op&eacute;ra-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&mdash;or execrated&mdash;it.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 <a name="Page_14" id="Page_14" />shadowy beauty, its
+exquisite and elaborate art&mdash;this music which drifted before the senses
+like iridescent vapor, suffused with rich lights, pervasive,
+imponderable, evanescent. It was music at once na&iuml;ve 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&mdash;were, indeed, the very negation of emphasis. Is it strange that
+such music&mdash;hesitant, evasive, dream-filled, strangely ecstatic, with
+its wistful and twilight loveliness, its blended subtlety and
+simplicity&mdash;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&mdash;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 <a name="Page_15" id="Page_15" />man who had surprisingly put forth such
+incommensurable music.</p>
+
+<p>Achille<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1" /><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> 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 <i>solf&egrave;ge</i>, and fifteen when he
+won the second pianoforte prize.</p>
+
+<p>In 1884, when he was in his twenty-second year, his cantata, <i>l'Enfant
+prodigue</i>, won for him the <i>Prix de Rome</i> by a majority of twenty-two
+out of twenty-eight votes&mdash;it is said to have been the unanimous opinion
+of the jury that the score was &quot;one of the most interesting that had
+been heard at the <i>Institut</i> for years.&quot; While at the Villa M&eacute;dicis he
+composed, in 1887, his <i>Printemps</i> for chorus and orchestra, and, in the
+following year, his setting of Rossetti's &quot;Blessed Damozel,&quot; 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 <a name="Page_16" id="Page_16" />while at &Eacute;vreux 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 <i>La Demoiselle &Eacute;lue</i>, the remarkably individual
+&quot;Ariettes,&quot;<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2" /><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> six settings for voice and piano of poems by Verlaine. To
+1889-1890 belong the <i>Fantaisie</i> for piano and orchestra and the
+striking &quot;Cinq Po&egrave;mes de Baudelaire&quot; (<i>Le Balcon</i>, <i>Harmonie du Soir</i>,
+<i>Le Jet d'Eau</i>, <i>Recueillement</i>, <i>La Mort des Amants</i>). In 1891 came
+some less significant piano pieces; but the following two years were
+richly productive, for they brought forth the exquisite <i>Pr&eacute;lude &agrave;
+l'Apr&egrave;s-midi d'un Faune</i> for orchestra, after the &Eacute;clogue of
+Mallarm&eacute;&mdash;the first extended and inescapable manifestation of Debussy's
+singular gifts&mdash;and the very personal but less important string quartet.
+In 1893-1895 he was busied with <i>Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande</i>,<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3" /><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> and with the
+<i>Proses</i><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17" /><i>lyriques</i>, four songs&mdash;not of his best&mdash;to words of his own
+(<i>De R&ecirc;ve</i>, <i>De Gr&egrave;ve</i>, <i>De Fleurs</i>, <i>De Soir</i>). The next four
+years&mdash;1896-1899&mdash;saw the issue of the extremely characteristic and
+uncompromising Nocturnes for orchestra (<i>Nuages</i>, <i>F&ecirc;tes</i>, <i>Sir&egrave;nes</i>),
+and the fascinating and subtle <i>Chansons de Bilitis</i>, after Pierre
+Louys&mdash;songs in which, aptly observed his colleague Bruneau, &quot;he mingled
+an antique and almost evaporated perfume with penetrating modern odors.&quot;
+The collection &quot;Pour le Piano&quot; (<i>Pr&eacute;lude</i>, <i>Sarabande</i>,
+<i>Toccata</i>)&mdash;inventions of distinguished and original style&mdash;and some
+less representative songs and piano pieces, completed his achievements
+before the production of <i>Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande</i> 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&mdash;one wonders how desperately?&mdash;to the
+writing of music criticism for various journals and reviews. &quot;Artists,&quot;
+he has somewhat cynically observed, &quot;struggle long enough to win their
+place in the market; once the sale of their productions is assured, they
+quickly go backward.&quot; There is as yet no sign that he himself is
+fulfilling this prediction; <a name="Page_18" id="Page_18" />for his most recent published
+performance,<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4" /><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> the superbly fantastic and imaginative <i>La
+Mer</i>&mdash;completed three years after the production of <i>Pell&eacute;as</i>&mdash;is
+charged to the brim with his peculiar and potent quality.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;tr&egrave;s
+exceptionnel, tr&egrave;s curieux, tr&egrave;s solitaire M. Claude Debussy&quot;? 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&mdash;consonances, dissonances, are interfused, blended,
+re-echoed, juxtaposed, without the smallest regard for the rules of
+tonal relationship <a name="Page_19" id="Page_19" />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&mdash;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&mdash;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 <i>pr&eacute;cieux</i>, but of an extravagantly scrupulous and
+austerely exacting artist.<a name="Page_20" id="Page_20" /></p>
+
+<p>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
+pre&euml;minently 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&mdash;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 &quot;turned
+their longing after the wind and wave of the mind.&quot; 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&mdash;it has before been said&mdash;&quot;upon <a name="Page_21" id="Page_21" />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.'&quot; It is
+an order of temperament for which the things of the marginal world of
+the mind are of transcendent consequence&mdash;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&mdash;where gestures are adored and every
+footfall is charged with indescribable intimations; where, &quot;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.&quot; 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
+<a name="Page_22" id="Page_22" />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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Tristan</i>; yet in these
+very songs&mdash;say the <i>Harmonie du Soir</i> and <i>La Mort des Amants</i>
+(composed in 1889-1890)&mdash;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 <i>Parsifal</i> had been off
+Wagner's desk for only seven years, that Richard Strauss was putting
+forth such tentative things as his <i>Don Juan</i> and <i>Tod und Verkl&auml;rung</i>,
+that the &quot;revolutionary&quot; 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&mdash;a discovery which one <a name="Page_23" id="Page_23" />finds some difficulty in
+crediting. Later, Debussy was undoubtedly affected, in a slight degree,
+by C&eacute;sar Franck; and there were moments&mdash;happily infrequent&mdash;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&mdash;with such, for example,
+as the excellent and brilliant and superbly unimaginative
+Saint-Sa&euml;ns&mdash;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 &quot;younger&quot; 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&mdash;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, <a name="Page_24" id="Page_24" />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 <i>Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande</i>, of the <i>Nocturnes</i>, even of the comparatively
+early <i>Pr&eacute;lude &agrave; l'Apr&egrave;s-midi d'un Faune</i>; 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.</p>
+
+<p>What is the secret principle of his method?&mdash;if one can call that a
+&quot;method&quot; which is, in effect, nothing if not airily unmethodical, and
+that principle &quot;secret&quot; 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 <a name="Page_25" id="Page_25" />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&mdash;to vitalize the antique modes
+with the accumulated product of modern divination and
+accomplishment&mdash;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
+<i>clich&eacute;e</i>: forms too rigidly patterned, too redolent of outworn
+formulas&mdash;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 <a name="Page_26" id="Page_26" />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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>Harmonie du Soir</i> (composed in 1889-1890), and
+note the felicitous adaptation to modern use of the &quot;authentic&quot; mode
+<a name="Page_27" id="Page_27" />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 <i>Il pleure dans mon coeur</i>
+(1889), the second of the &quot;Ariettes.&quot; Five years later, in <i>Pell&eacute;as et
+M&eacute;lisande</i>, the trait is omnipresent&mdash;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 Ark&euml;l's words in the final scene,
+&quot;L'&acirc;me humaine aime &agrave; s'en aller seule;&quot; or the relationship between the
+opening measures of the orchestral introduction to the drama and the
+first of the &quot;authentic&quot; modes, the Dorian; or between the same mode
+(corresponding to the D-minor scale without accidentals) and M&eacute;lisande's
+song at the tower window at the beginning of the third act.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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
+de<a name="Page_28" id="Page_28" />monstrably be, seems a little coarse-fibred, a little otiose, a
+little&mdash;as Jules Laforgue might have said&mdash;<i>quotidienne</i>. 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.</p>
+
+
+<a name="Page_29" id="Page_29" />
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II" />II</h2>
+
+<h1>THE PLAY</h1>
+
+<h2>ITS QUALITIES</h2>
+
+
+<p>Maurice Maeterlinck's <i>Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande</i>, published in 1892, stands
+fifth in the chronological order of his dramatic works. It was preceded
+by <i>La Princesse Maleine</i> (1889); <i>L'Intruse</i>, <i>Les Aveugles</i> (1890);
+and <i>Les sept Princesses</i> (1891). Since its appearance Maeterlinck has
+published these plays: <i>Alladine et Palomides</i>; <i>Int&eacute;rieur</i>; <i>La Mort de
+Tintagiles: Trois petits drames pour Marionnettes</i> (1894); <i>Aglavaine et
+Selysette</i> (1896); <i>Ariane et Barbe-Bleue</i>; <i>Soeur B&eacute;atrice</i> (1901);
+<i>Monna Vanna</i> (1902); <i>Joyzelle</i> (1903). <i>Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande</i>,
+dedicated to Octave Mirbeau &quot;in token of deep friendship, admiration,
+and gratitude,&quot; was first performed at the Bouffes-Parisiens, Paris, on
+May 17, 1893, with this cast: <i>Pell&eacute;as</i>, Mlle. Marie Aubry; <i>M&eacute;lisande</i>,
+Mlle. Meuris; <i>Ark&euml;l</i>, &Eacute;mile Raymond; <i>Golaud</i>, Lugn&eacute;-Po&euml;; <i>Genevi&egrave;ve</i>,
+Mme. Cam&eacute;e; <i>Le petit Yniold</i>, Georgette Loyer.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Take care,&quot; warns The Old Man in that most simply touching of
+Maeterlinck's plays, <i>Int&eacute;rieur</i>; &quot;we do not know how far the soul
+extends about <a name="Page_30" id="Page_30" />men.&quot; It is a subtle and characteristic saying, and it
+might have been used by the dramatist as a motto for his <i>Pell&eacute;as et
+M&eacute;lisande</i>; 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. &quot;In the theatre,&quot; he says in the
+introduction to his translation of Ruysbroeck's <i>l'Ornement des Noces
+Spirituelles</i>, &quot;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?&quot; Art, he has said, &quot;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.&quot; Everywhere, throughout his most deeply
+characteristic work, he emphasizes this thought&mdash;he would have us
+realize that we are the unconscious protagonists of an overshadowing,
+vast, and august drama whose significance and <i>d&eacute;nouement</i> we do not and
+<a name="Page_31" id="Page_31" />cannot know, but of which mysterious intimations are constantly to be
+perceived and felt. The characters in his plays live, as the old king,
+Ark&euml;l, says in <i>Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande</i>, like persons &quot;whispering about a
+closed room,&quot; This drama&mdash;at once his most typical, moving, and
+beautiful performance&mdash;swims in an atmosphere of portent and bodement;
+here, as Pater noted in the work of a wholly different order of artist,
+&quot;the storm is always brooding;&quot; here, too, &quot;in a sudden tremor of an
+aged voice, in the tacit observance of a day,&quot; we become &quot;aware suddenly
+of the great stream of human tears falling always through the shadows of
+the world.&quot; Mystery and sorrow&mdash;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 &quot;a touch from behind a curtain,&quot; 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 se<a name="Page_32" id="Page_32" />cret and hidden drama whose progress is concealed behind the
+tangible drama of passionate and tragic circumstance in which they are
+ostensibly taking part.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Maeterlinck's man,&quot; says S.C. de Soissons in a penetrating study of the
+Belgian's dramatic methods, &quot;is a being whose sensuous life is only a
+concrete symbol of his infinite transcendental side; and, further, is
+only a link in an endless change of innumerable existences, a link that
+remains in continual communication, in mutual union with all the other
+links.... In Maeterlinck's dramas the whole of nature vibrates with man,
+either warning him of coming catastrophes or taking on a mournful
+attitude after they have happened. 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 r&ocirc;le 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.&quot; This &quot;rhythmic correspondence,&quot; as Mr. James
+Huneker calls <a name="Page_33" id="Page_33" />it, between man and his environment, is nowhere more
+effectively insisted upon by Maeterlinck than in <i>Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande</i>.
+Note the incident at the conclusion of the first act, where the
+departure of the ship and the gathering of the storm are commented upon
+by the two lovers in a scene which is charged with an inescapable
+atmosphere of foreboding; note the incident of the fugitive doves in the
+scene at M&eacute;lisande's tower window; or the episodic passage near the end
+of the third act, during the tense and painful scene of Golaud's
+espionage: &quot;Do you see those poor people down there trying to kindle a
+little fire in the forest?&mdash;It has rained. And over there, do you see
+the old gardener trying to lift that tree that the wind has blown down
+across the road?&mdash;He cannot; the tree is too big ... too heavy; ... it
+will lie where it fell.&quot; Note, further on (in the third scene of the
+fourth act), just in advance of the culmination of the tragedy, the
+strange and ominous scene wherein Little Yniold describes the passing of
+the flock of sheep:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>&quot;Why, there is no more sun.... They are coming, the little sheep.
+     How many there are! They fear the dark! They crowd together! They
+     cry! and they go quick! They are at the crossroads, and they know
+     not which way to turn!... Now <a name="Page_34" id="Page_34" />they are still.... Shepherd! why do
+     they not speak any more?</p>
+
+<p>     THE SHEPHERD (<i>who is out of sight</i>)</p>
+<p>        &quot;Because it is no longer the road to the fold.</p>
+
+<p>     YNIOLD</p>
+<p>&quot;Where are they going?&mdash;Shepherd! Shepherd!&mdash;where are they
+     going?&mdash;Where are they going to sleep to-night? Oh! oh! it is too
+     dark!&mdash;I am going to tell something to somebody.&quot;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Always the setting, the accessories, reflect and underscore the inner
+movement of the drama, and always with arresting and intense effect.</p>
+
+<p>It tempts one to extravagant praise, this heart-shaking and lovely
+drama; this <i>vieille et triste l&eacute;gende de la for&ecirc;t</i>, with its
+indescribable glamour, its affecting sincerity, its restraint, its
+exquisite and unflagging simplicity. The hesitant and melancholy
+personages who invest its scenes&mdash;M&eacute;lisande, timid, na&iuml;ve, child-like,
+wistful, mercurial, infinitely pathetic; Pell&eacute;as, dream-filled, ardent,
+yet honorable in his passion; old Ark&euml;l, wise, gentle, and resigned; the
+tragic and brooding figure of Golaud; Little Yniold, artless and
+pitiful, a figure impossible anywhere save in Maeterlinck; the grave and
+simple diction, at times direct and homely in phrasing and imagery, at
+times rapturous, subtle, and evasive; the <a name="Page_35" id="Page_35" />haunting <i>mise-en-sc&egrave;ne</i>: the
+dim forest, the fountain in the park, the luminous and fragrant
+nightfall, the occasional glimpses, sombre and threatening, of the sea,
+the silent and gloomy castle,&mdash;all these unite to form a dramatic and
+poetic and pictorial ensemble which completely fascinates and enchains
+the mind. The result would have been as inconceivable before Maeterlinck
+undertook the writing of drama as, to-day, it is inimitable and
+untouched.</p>
+<hr/>
+<a name="ACTION" id="ACTION" />
+<h2>ITS ACTION</h2>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck's play, as adapted by Debussy for musical setting, becomes a
+&quot;lyric drama in five acts and twelve tableaux.&quot; Certain portions have
+been left out&mdash;as the scenes, at the beginning of Act I and Act V, in
+which the servingwomen of the castle appear; the fourth scene of Act II,
+in which Pell&eacute;as is persuaded by Ark&euml;l to postpone his journey to the
+bedside of his dying friend Marcellus; the opening scene of Act III,
+between Pell&eacute;as, M&eacute;lisande, and Yniold. Numerous passages that are
+either not essential to the development of the action, or that do not
+invite musical transmutation, have been curtailed or omitted, with the
+result that the movement of the drama has been compressed and
+accelerated throughout. In outlining very briefly the <a name="Page_36" id="Page_36" />action of the
+play (which should be read in the original by all who would know
+Debussy's setting of it) I shall adhere to the slightly altered version
+which forms the actual text of the opera.</p>
+
+<p>The characters are these:</p>
+<div class="noindent" >
+ARK&Euml;L, <i>King of Allemonde</i><br /><br />
+PELL&Eacute;AS &amp; GOLAUD, <i>half-brothers, grandsons of</i> ARK&Euml;L<br /><br />
+M&Eacute;LISANDE, <i>an unknown princess; later the bride of</i> GOLAUD<br /><br />
+LITTLE YNIOLD, <i>Son of</i> GOLAUD <i>by a former marriage</i><br /><br />
+GENEVI&Egrave;VE, <i>Mother of</i> PELL&Eacute;AS <i>and</i> GOLAUD<br /><br />
+A PHYSICIAN<br /><br />
+<i>Servants, Beggars, etc.</i><br />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="ACT_I" id="ACT_I" />ACT I</h2>
+
+<p>The opening scene is in a forest, in an unknown land. It is autumn.
+Golaud, gray-bearded, stern, a giant in stature (&quot;I am made of iron and
+blood,&quot; he says of himself), has been hunting a wild boar, and has been
+led astray. His dogs have left him to follow a false scent. He is about
+to retrace his steps, when he comes upon a young girl weeping by a
+spring. She is very beautiful, and very timid. She would flee, but
+Golaud reassures her. Her dress is <a name="Page_37" id="Page_37" />that of a princess, though her
+garments have been torn by the briars. Golaud questions her. Her name,
+she says, is M&eacute;lisande; she was born &quot;far away;&quot; she has fled, and is
+lost; but she will not tell her age, or whence she came, or what injury
+has been done her, or who it is that has harmed or threatened
+her&mdash;&quot;Every one! every one!&quot; she says. Her golden crown has fallen into
+the water&mdash;&quot;It is the crown he gave me,&quot; she cries; &quot;it fell as I was
+weeping.&quot; Golaud would recover it for her, but she will have no more of
+it.... &quot;I had rather die at once!&quot; she protests. Golaud prevails upon
+her to go with him&mdash;the night is coming on, and she cannot remain alone
+in the forest. She refuses, at first, in terror, then reluctantly
+consents. &quot;Where are you going?&quot; she asks. &quot;I do not know.... I, too, am
+lost,&quot; replies Golaud. They leave together.</p>
+
+<p>The scene changes to a hall in the castle&mdash;the silent and forbidding
+castle near the sea, surrounded by deep forests, where Golaud, with his
+mother Genevi&egrave;ve and his little son Yniold (the child of his first wife,
+now dead), lives with his aged father, Ark&euml;l, king of Allemonde. Here,
+too, lives Golaud's young half-brother, Pell&eacute;as&mdash;for they are not sons
+of the same father. Half a year has passed, and it is spring. Genevi&egrave;ve
+reads to her father, the ancient Ark&euml;l, a letter sent by Golaud to
+Pell&eacute;as.<a name="Page_38" id="Page_38" /> After recounting the circumstances of his meeting with
+M&eacute;lisande, Golaud continues: &quot;It is now six months since I married her,
+and I know as little of her past as on the day we met. Meanwhile, dear
+Pell&eacute;as, you whom I love more than a brother, ... make ready for our
+return. I know that my mother will gladly pardon me; but I dread the
+King, in spite of all his kindness. If, however, he will consent to
+receive her as if she were his own daughter, light a lamp at the summit
+of the tower overlooking the sea, upon the third night after you receive
+this letter. I shall be able to see it from our vessel. If I see no
+light, I shall pass on and shall return no more.&quot; They decide to receive
+Golaud and his child-bride, although the marriage has prevented a union
+which, for political reasons, Ark&euml;l had arranged for his grandson.</p>
+
+<p>Again the scene changes. M&eacute;lisande and Genevi&egrave;ve are walking together in
+the gardens, and they are joined by Pell&eacute;as. &quot;We shall have a storm
+to-night,&quot; he says, &quot;yet it is so calm now.... One might embark
+unwittingly and come back no more.&quot; They watch the departure of a great
+ship that is leaving the port, the ship that brought Golaud and his
+young wife. &quot;Why does she sail to-night?... She may be wrecked,&quot; says
+M&eacute;lisande.... &quot;The night comes quickly,&quot; observes Pell&eacute;as. A silence
+<a name="Page_39" id="Page_39" />falls between them. &quot;It is time to go in,&quot; says Genevi&egrave;ve. &quot;Pell&eacute;as,
+show the way to M&eacute;lisande. I must go 'tend to little Yniold,&quot; and she
+leaves them alone. &quot;Will you let me take your hand?&quot; says Pell&eacute;as to
+M&eacute;lisande. Her hands are full of flowers, she responds. He will hold her
+arm, he says, for the road is steep. He tells her that he has had a
+letter from his dying friend Marcellus, summoning him to his bedside,
+and that he may perhaps go away on the morrow. &quot;Oh! why do you go away?&quot;
+says M&eacute;lisande.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="ACT_II" id="ACT_II" />ACT II</h2>
+
+<p>The second act begins at an old and abandoned fountain in the park&mdash;the
+&quot;Fountain of the Blind,&quot; so called because it once possessed miraculous
+healing powers. Pell&eacute;as and M&eacute;lisande enter together. It is a stifling
+day, and they seek the cool tranquillity of the fountain and the shadow
+of the overarching trees&mdash;&quot;One can hear the water sleep,&quot; says Pell&eacute;as.
+Their talk is dangerously intimate. M&eacute;lisande dips her hand in the cool
+water, and plays with her wedding-ring as she lies stretched along the
+edge of the marble basin. She throws the ring in the air and it falls
+into the deep water. M&eacute;lisande displays agitation: &quot;What shall we say if
+Golaud asks where it is?&quot; &quot;The truth, the truth,&quot; replies Pell&eacute;as.<a name="Page_40" id="Page_40" /></p>
+
+<p>The scene changes to an apartment in the castle. Golaud lies upon a bed,
+with M&eacute;lisande bending over him. He has been wounded while hunting.
+M&eacute;lisande is compassionate, perhaps remorseful. She too, she confesses,
+is ill, unhappy, though she will not tell Golaud what it is that ails
+her. Her husband discovers the absence of her wedding-ring, and harshly,
+suspiciously, asks where it is. M&eacute;lisande, 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 Pell&eacute;as to
+accompany her.</p>
+
+<p>The next scene discovers M&eacute;lisande with Pell&eacute;as in the grotto. They are
+deeply agitated. It is very dark, but Pell&eacute;as 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 moon breaks through the clouds and illumines
+brightly the interior, revealing three old and white-haired beggars
+asleep against a ledge of rock. M&eacute;lisande is uneasy, and would go. They
+depart in silence.<a name="Page_41" id="Page_41" /></p>
+
+<h2><a name="ACT_III" id="ACT_III" />ACT III</h2>
+
+<p>The opening scene of the third act shows the exterior of one of the
+towers of the castle, with a winding staircase passing beneath a window
+at which sits M&eacute;lisande, combing her unbound hair, and singing in the
+starlit darkness&mdash;&quot;like a beautiful strange bird,&quot; says Pell&eacute;as, who
+enters by the winding stair. He entreats her to lean further forward out
+of the window, that he may come closer, that he may touch her hand; for,
+he says, he is leaving on the morrow. She leans further out, telling him
+that he may take her hand if he will promise not to leave on the next
+day. Suddenly her long tresses fall over her head and stream about
+Pell&eacute;as. He is enraptured. &quot;I have never seen such hair as yours,
+M&eacute;lisande! See! see! Though it comes from so high, it floods me to the
+heart!... And it is sweet, sweet as though it fell from heaven!... I can
+no longer see the sky through your locks.... My two hands can no longer
+hold them.... They are alive like birds in my hands. And they love me,
+they love me more than you do!&quot; M&eacute;lisande begs to be released, Pell&eacute;as
+kisses the enveloping tresses.... &quot;Do you hear my kisses?&mdash;They mount
+along your hair.&quot; Doves come from the tower&mdash;M&eacute;lisande's doves&mdash;and fly
+about them. They are frightened, and are flying away. &quot;They <a name="Page_42" id="Page_42" />will be
+lost in the dark!&quot; laments M&eacute;lisande. Golaud enters by the winding
+stair, and surprises them. M&eacute;lisande is entrapped by her hair, which is
+caught in the branches of a tree. &quot;What are you doing here?&quot; asks
+Golaud. They are confused, and stammer inarticulately. &quot;M&eacute;lisande, do
+not lean so far out of the window,&quot; cautions her husband. &quot;Do you not
+know how late it is? It is almost midnight. Do not play so in the
+darkness. You are a pair of children!&quot; He laughs nervously. &quot;What
+children!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He and Pell&eacute;as go out, and the scene shifts to the vaults in the depths
+under the castle,&mdash;dank, unwholesome depths, that exhale an odor of
+death, where the darkness is &quot;like poisoned slime.&quot; Golaud leads his
+brother through the vaults, which Pell&eacute;as had seen only once, long ago.
+&quot;Here is the stagnant water of which I spoke; do you smell the
+death-odor?&mdash;That is what I wanted you to perceive,&quot; insinuates Golaud.
+&quot;Let us go to the edge of this overhanging rock, and do you lean over a
+little. You will feel it in your face.... Lean over; have no fear; ... I
+will hold you ... give me ... no, no, not your hand, it might slip....
+Your arm, your arm! Do you see down into the abyss, Pell&eacute;as?&quot; &quot;Yes, I
+think I can see to the bottom of the abyss,&quot; rejoins Pell&eacute;as. &quot;Is it the
+light that trembles so?&quot; He straightens <a name="Page_43" id="Page_43" />up, turns, and looks at Golaud.
+&quot;Yes, it is the lantern,&quot; answers M&eacute;lisande's husband, his voice
+shaking. &quot;See&mdash;I moved it to throw light on the walls.&quot; &quot;I stifle
+here.... Let us go!&quot; exclaims Pell&eacute;as. They leave in silence.</p>
+
+<p>The succeeding scene shows them on a terrace at the exit of the vaults.
+Golaud warns Pell&eacute;as. &quot;About M&eacute;lisande: I overheard what passed and what
+was said last night. I realize that it was but child's play; but it must
+not be repeated.... She is very delicate, and it is necessary to be more
+than usually careful, as she is perhaps with child, and the least
+emotion might cause serious results. It is not the first time I have
+noticed that there might be something between you.... You are older than
+she; it will suffice to have said this to you. Avoid her as much as
+possible, though not too pointedly.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The next scene passes before the castle. Golaud and his little son
+Yniold, the innocent playfellow of M&eacute;lisande and Pell&eacute;as, are together.
+Golaud questions him. &quot;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 Pell&eacute;as, is she
+not?&quot; The child's na&iuml;ve answers inflame his jealousy, confirm his
+suspicions, though they baffle him. &quot;Do they never tell you to go and
+play some<a name="Page_44" id="Page_44" />where else?&quot; he asks. &quot;No, papa, they are afraid when I am not
+with them.... They always weep in the dark.... That makes one weep,
+too.... She is pale, papa.&quot; &quot;Ah! ah!... patience, my God, patience!&quot;
+cries the anguished Golaud.... &quot;They kiss each other sometimes?&quot; he
+queries. &quot;Yes ... yes; ... once ... when it rained.&quot; &quot;They kissed each
+other?&mdash;But how, how did they kiss?&quot; &quot;So, papa, so!&quot; laughs the boy, and
+then cries out as he is pricked by his father's beard. &quot;Oh, your
+beard!... It pricks! It is getting all gray, papa; and your hair,
+too&mdash;all gray, all gray!&quot; Suddenly the window under which they are
+sitting is illuminated, and the light falls upon them. &quot;Oh, mama has lit
+her lamp!&quot; exclaims Yniold. &quot;Yes,&quot; observes Golaud; &quot;it begins to grow
+light.&quot; Yniold wishes to go, but Golaud restrains him. &quot;Let us stay here
+in the shadow a little longer.... One cannot tell, yet.... I think
+Pell&eacute;as is mad!&quot; 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 M&eacute;lisande is there, and that his uncle Pell&eacute;as is
+there, too. &quot;What are they doing? Are they near each other?&quot; &quot;They are
+looking at the light.&quot; &quot;They do not say anything?&quot; &quot;No, papa, they do
+not close their eyes.... Oh! oh!... I am terribly afraid!&quot; &quot;Why, what
+are you afraid <a name="Page_45" id="Page_45" />of?&mdash;look! look!&quot; demands Golaud. &quot;Oh, oh! I am going to
+cry, papa!&mdash;let me down! let me down!&quot; insists Yniold, in nameless
+terror.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="ACT_IV" id="ACT_IV" />ACT IV</h2>
+
+<p>M&eacute;lisande and Pell&eacute;as meet in an apartment in the castle. Pell&eacute;as is
+about to leave, to travel, he tells her, now that his father is
+recovering; but before he goes he must see her alone&mdash;he must speak to
+her that night. He asks that she meet him in the park, at the &quot;Fountain
+of the Blind.&quot; It will be the last night, he says, and she will see him
+no more. M&eacute;lisande consents to meet him, but she will not hear of his
+going away. &quot;I shall see you always; I shall look upon you always,&quot; she
+tells him. &quot;You will look in vain,&quot; says Pell&eacute;as; &quot;I shall try to go
+very far away.&quot; They separate. Ark&euml;l enters. He tells M&eacute;lisande that he
+has pitied her since she came to the castle: &quot;I observed you. You were
+listless&mdash;but with the strange, astray look of one who, in the sunlight,
+in a beautiful garden, awaits ever a great misfortune.&mdash;I cannot
+explain.&mdash;But I was sad to see you thus. Come here; why do you stay
+there mute and with downcast eyes?&mdash;I have kissed you but once hitherto,
+the day of your coming; and yet the old need sometimes to touch with
+their lips a woman's forehead or the cheek of a child, that they <a name="Page_46" id="Page_46" />may
+still keep their faith in the freshness of life and avert for a moment
+the menaces of death. Are you afraid of my old lips? How I have pitied
+you these months!&quot; She tells him that she has not been unhappy. But
+perhaps, he says, she is of those who are unhappy without knowing it.
+Golaud enters, ferocious and distraught. He has blood on his forehead.
+It is nothing, he says&mdash;he has passed through a thicket of thorns.
+M&eacute;lisande would wipe his brow. He repulses her fiercely. &quot;I will not
+have you touch me, do you understand?&quot; he cries. &quot;I came to get my
+sword.&quot; &quot;It is here, on the prie-Dieu,&quot; says M&eacute;lisande, and she brings
+it to him. &quot;Why do you tremble so?&quot; he says to her. &quot;I am not going to
+kill you.&mdash;You hope to see something in my eyes without my seeing
+anything in yours? Do you suppose I may know something?&quot; He turns to
+Ark&euml;l. &quot;Do you see those great eyes?&mdash;it is as if they gloried in their
+power.&quot; &quot;I see,&quot; responds Ark&euml;l, &quot;only a great innocence.&quot; &quot;A great
+innocence!&quot; cries Golaud wildly. &quot;They are more than innocent!... They
+are purer than the eyes of a lamb.&mdash;They might teach God lessons in
+innocence! A great innocence! Listen! I am so near them that I can feel
+the freshness of their lashes when they close&mdash;and yet I am less far
+from the great secrets of the other world than from the smallest secret
+<a name="Page_47" id="Page_47" />of those eyes!&mdash;A great innocence?&mdash;More than innocence! One would say
+that the angels of heaven celebrated there an unceasing baptism. I know
+those eyes! I have seen them at their work! Close them! close them! or I
+shall close them forever!&mdash;You need not put your right hand to your
+throat so; I am saying a very simple thing&mdash;I have no concealed meaning.
+If I had, why should I not speak it? Ah!&mdash;do not attempt to
+flee!&mdash;Here!&mdash;Give me that hand!&mdash;Ah! your hands are too hot!&mdash;Away! the
+touch of your flesh disgusts me!&mdash;Here!&mdash;You shall not escape me now!&quot;
+He seizes her by the hair. &quot;Down on your knees! On your knees before
+me!&mdash;Ah! your long hair is of some use at last!&quot; He throws her from side
+to side, holding her by her hair. &quot;Right, left!&mdash;Left, right!&mdash;Absalom!
+Absalom!&mdash;Forward! now back! To the ground! to the ground! Ha! ha! you
+see, I laugh already like an imbecile!&quot; Ark&euml;l, running up, seeks to
+restrain him. Golaud affects a sudden and disdainful calmness. &quot;You are
+free to act as you please,&quot; he says.&mdash;&quot;It is of no consequence to me.&mdash;I
+am too old to care; and, besides, I am not a spy. I shall await my
+chance; and then.... Oh! then!... I shall simply act as custom demands.&quot;
+&quot;What is the matter?&mdash;Is he drunk?&quot; asks Ark&euml;l. &quot;No, no!&quot; cries
+M&eacute;lisande, weeping. &quot;He hates me&mdash;and I am so wretched! so wretched!&quot;<a name="Page_48" id="Page_48" /></p>
+
+<p>&quot;If I were God,&quot; ruminates the aged king, &quot;how infinitely I should pity
+the hearts of men!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The scene changes once more to the fountain in the park. Yniold is
+discovered seeking to move a great rock behind which his golden ball has
+rolled. Night is coming on. The distant bleating of sheep is heard.
+Yniold looks over the edge of the terrace and sees the flock crowding
+along the road. Suddenly they cease their crying. Yniold calls to the
+shepherd. &quot;Why do they not speak any more?&quot; &quot;Because,&quot; answers the
+shepherd, who is concealed from sight, &quot;it is no longer the road to the
+fold.&quot; &quot;Where are they going to sleep to-night?&quot; cries the child. There
+is no answer, and he departs, exclaiming that he must find somebody to
+speak to.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5" /><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> Pell&eacute;as enters, to keep his tryst with M&eacute;lisande. &quot;It is
+the last time,&quot; he meditates. &quot;It must all be ended. I have been playing
+like a child with what I did not understand. I have played, dreaming
+about the snares of fate. By what have I been suddenly awakened? Who has
+aroused me all at once? I shall depart, crying out for joy and woe like
+a blind man fleeing from his burning house. I shall tell her I am going.
+My father is out of danger; and I can no longer lie to myself.&mdash;It is
+late; she is not coming.</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;<a name="Page_49" id="Page_49" />It would be better to go away without seeing her again.&mdash;But I must
+look well at her this time.&mdash;There are some things that I no longer
+recall.&mdash;It seems at times as though I had not seen her for a hundred
+years.&mdash;And I have not yet looked deep into her gaze. There remains
+nothing to me if I go away thus. And all those memories!&mdash;it is as if I
+were to carry away a little water in a muslin bag.&mdash;I must see her one
+last time, see to the bottom of her heart.&mdash;I must tell her all that I
+have never told her.&quot; M&eacute;lisande enters. Their greeting is simple.
+Pell&eacute;as 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. Pell&eacute;as 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. &quot;Must I tell you what you know
+already?&quot; rejoins Pell&eacute;as. &quot;You know not what I am going to tell you?&quot;
+&quot;Why, no; I know nothing,&quot; says M&eacute;lisande. &quot;You know not why I must go?
+You know not that it is because [he kisses her abruptly] I love you?&quot; &quot;I
+love you too,&quot; says M&eacute;lisande simply, in a low voice. &quot;You love me? you
+love me too?&quot; cries Pell&eacute;as. &quot;Since when have you loved me?&quot; &quot;Since I
+saw <a name="Page_50" id="Page_50" />you first,&quot; she answers. &quot;Oh, how you say that!&quot; cries Pell&eacute;as.
+&quot;Your voice seems to have blown across the sea in spring!... You say it
+so frankly&mdash;like an angel questioned.&mdash;Your voice! your voice! It is
+cooler and more frank than the water is!&mdash;It is like pure water on my
+lips!&mdash;Give me, give me your hands!&mdash;Oh, how small your hands are!&mdash;I
+did not know you were so beautiful! I have never before seen anything so
+beautiful!&mdash;I was filled with unrest; I sought everywhere; yet I found
+not beauty.&mdash;And now I have found you!&mdash;I do not believe there can be
+upon the earth a woman more beautiful!&quot; Their love-scene is harshly
+interrupted. &quot;What is that noise?&quot; asks Pell&eacute;as. &quot;They are closing the
+gates!&mdash;We cannot return now. Do you hear the bolts?&mdash;Listen!&mdash;the great
+chains!&mdash;It is too late!&quot; &quot;So much the better!&quot; cries M&eacute;lisande, in
+passionate abandonment. &quot;Do you say that?&quot; exclaims her lover. &quot;See, it
+is no longer we who will it so! Come, come!&quot; They embrace. &quot;Listen! my
+heart is almost strangling me! Ah! how beautiful it is in the shadows!&quot;
+&quot;There is some one behind us!&quot; whispers M&eacute;lisande. Pell&eacute;as has heard
+nothing. &quot;I hear only your heart in the darkness.&quot; &quot;I heard the
+crackling of dead leaves,&quot; insists M&eacute;lisande. &quot;A-a-h! he is behind a
+tree!&quot; she whispers. &quot;Who?&quot; &quot;Golaud!&mdash;he has his <a name="Page_51" id="Page_51" />sword!&quot; &quot;And I have
+none!&quot; cries Pell&eacute;as. &quot;He does not know we have seen him,&quot; he cautions.
+&quot;Do not stir; do not turn your head.&mdash;He will remain there so long as he
+thinks we do not know he is watching us.&mdash;He is still motionless.&mdash;Go,
+go at once this way. I will wait for him&mdash;I will hold him back.&quot; &quot;No,
+no, no!&quot; cries M&eacute;lisande.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Go! go! he has seen everything!&mdash;He will kill us!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All the better! all the better!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He is coming!&mdash;Your mouth! your mouth!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes! Yes! Yes!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>They kiss desperately.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, oh! All the stars are falling!&quot; cries Pell&eacute;as.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Upon me also!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Again! Again!&mdash;Give! give!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All! all! all!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Golaud rushes upon them with drawn sword and kills Pell&eacute;as, who falls
+beside the fountain. M&eacute;lisande flees in terror, crying out as she goes,
+&quot;Oh! oh! I have no courage! I have no courage!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Golaud pursues her in silence through the forest.</p>
+
+<h2><a name="ACT_V" id="ACT_V" />ACT V</h2>
+
+<p>The last act opens in an apartment in the castle. M&eacute;lisande is stretched
+unconscious upon a bed. Golaud, Ark&euml;l, and the physician stand in a
+corner <a name="Page_52" id="Page_52" />of the room. Some days earlier M&eacute;lisande and her husband had
+been found stretched out senseless before the castle gate, Golaud having
+still in his side the sword with which he had sought to kill himself.
+M&eacute;lisande had been wounded,&mdash;&quot;a tiny little wound that would not kill a
+pigeon;&quot; yet her life is despaired of; and on her death-bed she has been
+delivered of a child&mdash;&quot;a puny little girl such as a beggar might be
+ashamed to own&mdash;a little waxen thing that came before its time, that can
+be kept alive only by being wrapped in wool.&quot; The room is very silent.
+&quot;It seems to me that we keep too still in her room,&quot; says Ark&euml;l; &quot;it is
+not a good sign; look how she sleeps&mdash;how slowly.&mdash;It is as if her soul
+were forever chilled.&quot; Golaud laments that he has killed her without
+cause. &quot;They had kissed like little children&mdash;and I&mdash;I did it in spite
+of myself!&quot; M&eacute;lisande wakes. She wishes to have the window open, that
+she may see the sunset. She has never felt better, she says, in answer
+to Ark&euml;l's questioning. She asks if she is alone in the room. Her
+husband is present, answers Ark&euml;l. &quot;If you are afraid, he will go away.
+He is very unhappy.&quot; &quot;Golaud is here?&quot; she says; &quot;why does he not come
+to me?&quot; 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 <a name="Page_53" id="Page_53" />suspicions, suspicions that will not down, find voice. He
+entreats her to tell him the truth. &quot;The truth must be spoken to one
+about to die.&quot; Did she love Pell&eacute;as? he asks in agony. &quot;Why, yes, I
+loved him&mdash;where is he?&quot; The answer maddens him. &quot;Do you not understand?
+Will you not understand? It seems to me&mdash;it seems to me&mdash;well, then, it
+is this: I ask you if you loved him with a guilty love? Were you&mdash;were
+you both guilty?&quot; &quot;No, no; we were not guilty,&quot; she replies; &quot;why do you
+ask me that?&quot; Ark&euml;l and the physician appear at the door. &quot;You may come
+in,&quot; says Golaud despairingly; &quot;it is useless, I shall never know! I
+shall die here like a blind man!&quot; &quot;You will kill her,&quot; warns Ark&euml;l. &quot;Is
+it you, grandfather?&quot; questions M&eacute;lisande; &quot;is it true that winter is
+already coming?&mdash;it is cold, and there are no more leaves.&quot; &quot;Are you
+cold? Shall I close the windows?&quot; asks Golaud. &quot;No, no, not till the sun
+has sunk into the sea&mdash;it sets slowly.&quot; Ark&euml;l asks her if she wishes to
+see her child. &quot;What child?&quot; she inquires. Ark&euml;l tells her that she is a
+mother. The child is brought, and put into her arms. M&eacute;lisande can
+scarcely lift her arms to take her. &quot;She does not laugh, she is little,&quot;
+says M&eacute;lisande; &quot;she, too, will weep&mdash;I pity her.&quot; Gradually the room
+has filled with the women-servants of the castle, who range themselves
+in silence along the walls <a name="Page_54" id="Page_54" />and wait. &quot;She is going to sleep,&quot; observes
+Ark&euml;l; &quot;her eyes are full of tears. It is her soul, now, that weeps. Why
+does she stretch her arms out so?&mdash;what does she wish?&quot; &quot;Toward her
+child, without doubt,&quot; answers the physician. &quot;It is the struggle of
+motherhood against....&quot; &quot;At this moment?&mdash;At once?&quot; cries Golaud, in a
+renewed outburst of anguish.... &quot;Oh, oh! I must speak to her! M&eacute;lisande!
+M&eacute;lisande!&mdash;leave me alone with her!&quot; &quot;Trouble her not,&quot; gravely
+interposes Ark&euml;l. &quot;Do not speak to her again.&mdash;You know not what the
+soul is.&mdash;We must speak in low tones now. She must no longer be
+disturbed. The human soul is very silent. The human soul likes to depart
+alone. It suffers so timidly! But the sadness, Golaud, the sadness of
+all we see!&quot; At this moment the servants fall suddenly on their knees at
+the back of the room. Ark&euml;l turns suddenly: &quot;What is the matter?&quot; The
+physician approaches the bed and examines the body of M&eacute;lisande. &quot;They
+are right,&quot; he says. There is a silence.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I saw nothing. Are you sure?&quot; questions Ark&euml;l.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I heard nothing. So quickly! so quickly! She goes without a word!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Golaud sobs aloud.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Do not remain here,&quot; says Ark&euml;l. &quot;She must <a name="Page_55" id="Page_55" />have silence now. Come;
+come. It is terrible, but it is not your fault. It was a little being,
+so quiet, so timid, and so silent. It was a poor little mysterious being
+like everyone. She lies there as though she were the elder sister of her
+baby. Come; the child should not stay here in this room. She must live,
+now, in her place. It is the poor little one's turn.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<a name="Page_56" id="Page_56" />
+<h1>III</h1>
+<a name="MUSIC" id="MUSIC" />
+<h1>THE MUSIC</h1>
+<a name="REV" id="REV" />
+<h2>A REVOLUTIONARY SCORE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Debussy's <i>Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande, drame lyrique en 5 actes et 12
+tableaux</i>, was performed for the first time on any stage at the
+Op&eacute;ra-Comique, Paris, April 30, 1902. Its first performance outside of
+Paris was at the Th&eacute;&acirc;tre de la Monnaie, Brussels, January 9, 1907; its
+second was at Frankfort, April 19, 1907. Its third will be the coming
+production at the Manhattan Opera House, New York. The original Paris
+cast was as follows: <i>Pell&eacute;as</i>, M. Jean P&eacute;rier; <i>M&eacute;lisande</i>, Miss Mary
+Garden; <i>Ark&euml;l</i>, M. Vieuille; <i>Golaud</i>, M. Dufrane; <i>Genevi&egrave;ve</i>, Mlle.
+Gerville-R&eacute;ache; <i>Le petit Yniold</i>, M. Blondin; <i>Un M&eacute;dicin</i>, M. Vigui&eacute;.
+M. Andr&eacute; Messager was the conductor. The work was admirably mounted
+under the supervision of the Director of the Op&eacute;ra-Comique, M. Albert
+Carr&eacute;.</p>
+
+<p>The fortunes of the opera have not been altogether happy. It has been
+said that Debussy conceived the idea of writing music for Maeterlinck's
+play soon after its first performance at the Bouffes-Parisiens in 1893;
+that, although it was necessary to secure the dramatist's consent to its
+adaptation, <a name="Page_57" id="Page_57" />he did not solicit Maeterlinck's permission until he had
+thought out his musical scheme to a considerable degree of elaboration;
+and that Maeterlinck (being of that complacent majority of literary men
+who neither care for nor are intelligently curious concerning musical
+art) was immensely surprised to learn that his play had suggested a
+tonal setting. There was much correspondence between composer and
+dramatist before Maeterlinck finally heard the music of Debussy at a
+rehearsal at the Op&eacute;ra-Comique: so, at least, runs the legend. Just when
+or precisely how the famous and probably inevitable rupture occurred
+between them, tradition does not make altogether clear. Maeterlinck is
+alleged to have become incensed on account of certain excisions made by
+Debussy in fitting the text of the play to music; then, it appears,
+there was a quarrel over the choice of a singer for the performance, and
+Maeterlinck published a letter of protest in which he declared that &quot;the
+<i>Pell&eacute;as</i> of the Op&eacute;ra-Comique&quot; was &quot;a piece which had become entirely
+foreign&quot; to him, and that, as he was &quot;deprived of all control over it,&quot;
+he could only hope &quot;that its fall would be prompt and noisy.&quot; The matter
+is important only as contributing to the history of Debussy's work, and
+would scarcely reward detailed examination or discussion.<a name="Page_58" id="Page_58" /></p>
+
+<p>One would have said, in advance of the event, that Debussy, of all
+composers, living or dead, was best fitted to write music for
+Maeterlinck's beautiful and perturbing play. He was not only best
+fitted, he was ideally fitted; in listening to this music one catches
+oneself imagining that it and the drama issued from the same brain. It
+is impossible to conceive of the play wedded to any other music, and it
+is difficult, indeed, after knowing the work in its lyric form, to think
+of it apart from its tonal commentary. For Debussy has caught and
+re-uttered, with almost incredible similitude, the precise poetic accent
+of the dramatist. He has found poignant and absolute analogies for its
+veiled and obsessing loveliness, its ineffable sadness, the strange and
+fate-burdened atmosphere in which it is steeped&mdash;these things have here
+attained a new voice and tangibility.</p>
+
+<p>In calling this a &quot;revolutionary&quot; 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 <a name="Page_59" id="Page_59" />whatsoever, and comparatively little symphonie
+development of themes in the orchestra; in which an enigmatic and wholly
+eccentric system of harmony is exploited; in which there are scarcely
+more than a dozen <i>fortissimo</i> passages in the course of five acts; in
+which, for the greater part of the time, the orchestra employed is the
+orchestra of Mozart,&mdash;surely, this is something new in modern
+musico-dramatic art; surely, it requires some courage, or an
+indifference amounting to courage, to write thus in a day when the
+plangent and complex orchestra of the <i>Ring</i> is considered inadequate,
+and the 113 instrumentalists of <i>Salome</i>, like the trumpeters of an
+elder time, are storming the operatic ramparts of two continents.</p>
+
+<p>The radicalism of the music was fully appreciated at the time of the
+first performances in Paris. To the dissenters, Debussy's musical
+personages were mere &quot;stammering phantoms,&quot; and he was regaled with the
+age-worn charge of having &quot;ignored melody altogether.&quot; Debussy has
+defended his methods with point and directness. &quot;I have been
+reproached,&quot; he says, &quot;because in my score the melodic phrase is always
+in the orchestra, never in the voice. I tried, with all my strength and
+all my sincerity, to identify my music with the poetical essence of the
+drama. Before all things, I respected the characters, the <a name="Page_60" id="Page_60" />lives of my
+personages; I wished them to express themselves independently of me, of
+themselves. I let them sing in me. I tried to listen to them and to
+interpret them faithfully. I wished&mdash;intended, in fact&mdash;that the action
+should never be arrested; that it should be continuous, uninterrupted. I
+wished to dispense with parasitic musical phrases. When listening to a
+work, the spectator is wont to experience two kinds of emotions which
+are quite distinct: the musical emotion, on the one hand; the emotion of
+the character [in the drama], on the other; generally they 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 (<i>chanson</i>), which confirms a fixed
+sentiment. I have never been willing that my music should hinder,
+through technical exigencies, the changes of sentiment and passion felt
+by my characters. It is effaced as soon as it is necessary that these
+should have perfect liberty in their gestures as in their cries, in
+their joy as in their sorrow.&quot; However much one may hesitate to
+subscribe to Debussy's generalities, the final justification for his
+procedure is in the fact that it is ideally suited to its especial
+purpose,&mdash;the tonal utterance of Mae<a name="Page_61" id="Page_61" />terlinck's rhymeless, metreless,
+and broken phrases. To have set them in the sustained arioso style of
+<i>Tristan und Isolde</i> would have been as impossible as it would have been
+inept. As it is, the writing for the voices in <i>Pell&eacute;as</i> never, as one
+might reasonably suppose, becomes monotonous. The achievement&mdash;an
+astonishing <i>tour de force</i>, at the least&mdash;is as artistically successful
+as it is unprecedented in modern music.</p>
+
+<p>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. His personages love and
+desire, exult and hate and die, with a surprising economy of vehemence
+and insistence. Yet, unrhetorical as the music is, it is never pallid;
+and in such truly climacteric moments as that of Golaud's agonized
+outbreak in the scene with M&eacute;lisande, in the fourth act, and the
+ecstatic culmination of the final love-scene, the music supports the
+dramatic and emotional crisis with superb competency and vigor.<a name="Page_62" id="Page_62" /></p>
+
+<p>He follows Wagner to the extent of using the inescapable device of
+representative themes, though he has, with his usual airy inconsistency,
+characterized the Wagnerian <i>Leitmotiv</i> system as &quot;rather coarse.&quot; It is
+true, however, that his typical phrases are employed far more sparingly
+and subtly than modern precedent would have led one to expect. They are
+seldom set in sharp and vividly dramatic contrast, as with Wagner; nor
+are they polyphonically deployed. Often they are mere sound-wraiths,
+intended to denote moods and nuances of emotion so impalpable and
+evanescent, so vague and interior, that it is more than a little
+difficult to mark their precise significance. Often they are mere
+fragments of themes, mere patches of harmonic color, evasive and
+intangible, designed almost wholly to translate phases of that psychic
+penumbra in which the characters and the action of the drama are
+enwrapped. They have a common kinship in their dim and muted loveliness,
+their grave reticence, the deep and immitigable sadness with which, even
+at their most rapturous, they are penetrated. This is a score rich in
+beauty and strangeness, yet the music has often a deceptive na&iuml;vet&eacute;, a
+na&iuml;vet&eacute; that is so extreme that it reveals itself, finally, as the
+quintessence of subtlety and reticence&mdash;in which respect, again, we are
+reminded of its perfect, its <a name="Page_63" id="Page_63" />well-nigh uncanny, correspondence with the
+quality of Maeterlinck's drama.</p>
+
+<p>As it has been remarked, Debussy's orchestra is here, with few
+exceptions, the orchestra of Mozart's day. On page after page he writes
+for strings alone, or for strings with wood-wind and horns. He uses the
+full modern orchestra only upon the rarest occasions, and then more
+often for color than for volume. He has an especial affection for the
+strings, particularly in the lower registers; and he is exceedingly fond
+of subdividing and muting them. It is rare to find him using the
+wood-wind choir alone, or the wood and brass without the strings. His
+orchestra contains the usual modern equipment&mdash;3 flutes, 2 oboes, 2
+clarinets, an English horn, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3
+trombones, bass tuba, kettledrums, glockenspiel, cymbals, 2 harps, and
+strings; yet one may count on but little more than the fingers of both
+hands the pages in which this apparatus is employed in its full
+strength. And in spite of this curious and unpopular reticence, we
+listen here, as M. Bruneau has observed, to &quot;a magic orchestra&quot;&mdash;an
+orchestra of indescribable richness, delicacy, and suppleness&mdash;an
+orchestra that melts and shimmers with opalescent hues&mdash;an orchestra
+that has substance without density, sonority without blatancy,
+refinement without thinness.<a name="Page_64" id="Page_64" /></p>
+
+<p>The music, as a whole, is as insinuating as it is unparalleled. Many
+passages are of an hypnotic and abiding fascination. There is something
+necromantic in the art which can so swiftly and so surely cast an
+ineluctable spell upon the heart and the imagination: such a spell as is
+cast in the scene at the <i>Fontaine des Aveugles</i>, in the second act; or
+when, from the window in the castle tower, M&eacute;lisande's unbound hair
+falls and envelops Pell&eacute;as&mdash;an unforgettable page; or when the lovers
+meet for the last time at the Fountain of the Blind; or in the scene of
+M&eacute;lisande's death&mdash;one of the most pathetic and affecting pages in all
+music. One must wonder at the elasticity and richness of the harmonic
+texture&mdash;which, while it is incurably &quot;irregular,&quot; is never crude or
+inchoate; at the distinction of the melodic line; at the rhythmical
+variety; at the masterly and individual orchestration. No faculty of
+trained perception is required justly to value the excellences of
+Debussy's score. There is great beauty, great eloquence, in this music.
+It has sincerity, dignity, and reserve, yet it is both deeply
+impassioned and enamoringly tender; and it is as absolutely personal, as
+underived, as was <i>Tristan</i> forty years ago.<a name="Page_65" id="Page_65" /></p>
+<hr/>
+<a name="THEMES" id="THEMES" />
+<h2>THE THEMES AND THEIR TREATMENT</h2>
+
+<p>The score of <i>Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande</i> ill brooks the short and ruthless
+method of the thematic annotator. As I have pointed out in the foregoing
+pages, its themes are often so indeterminate, so shadowy and elusive, as
+to rebuke the analyst who would disengage and expose them. 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 &quot;sound-wraiths,&quot; intentionally suggestive rather than
+definitive, evocative rather than descriptive. If one ventures to
+exhibit and to name them, one does so rather for the purpose of drawing
+attention to their beauty, their singularity, and their delicate
+potency, than with any thought of imposing an arbitrary character upon
+them or of insisting upon what seems to be their essential
+meaning&mdash;which is often altogether too recondite for positive
+identification. I shall not, therefore, attempt to dissect the music
+measure by measure, but shall endeavor rather to survey it &quot;in the
+large,&quot; to offer simply a general indication of its more significant
+features. Nor shall<a name="Page_66" id="Page_66" /> I offer any further justification or apology for
+the titles which I have adopted for the various representative themes
+than to say that they have seemed to me to be sufficiently supported by
+their association with the moods and events of the drama. It is, of
+course, entirely possible that apter designations might be found for
+them; I offer those that I have chosen more as an invitation to the
+sympathetic and the inquisitive than from any desire to impose my own
+interpretation upon unwilling, dissenting, or indifferent minds.</p>
+<h2><a name="ACT_I_THEMES" id="ACT_I_THEMES" />ACT I</h2>
+<p>A brief orchestral prelude, less than twenty measures in length,
+introduces the opening scene of the first act. Divided and muted
+'cellos, double-basses, and bassoons intone, <i>pp</i>, a solemn and brooding
+theme<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6" /><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> designed to evoke the thought of the forest, which, sombre,
+mysterious, and oppressive, forms the background against which the
+events of the drama are projected (page 1, measure 1):<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7" /><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></p>
+
+<a name="Page_67" id="Page_67" />
+<h3>I.THE FOREST</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/i-theforest.png"
+      alt="THE FOREST" title="THE FOREST" />
+</div>
+
+<p>This is immediately followed by one of the most important themes in the
+opera, that which seems to typify the veiled and overshadowing destiny
+which is very close to the central thought of Maeterlinck's play.
+Strangely harmonized, this <i>Fate</i> theme (it is in the second measure
+that its kernel is contained, and it is this portion of it that is most
+frequently repeated) is sounded, <i>pp, tr&egrave;s mod&eacute;r&eacute;</i>, by oboes, English
+horn, and clarinets (page 1, measure 5):</p>
+
+
+<h3>II. FATE</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/ii-fate.png"
+      alt="FATE" title="FATE" />
+</div>
+
+<p>These two themes are repeated, with altered harmonization; then follows
+one of the two principal themes of the score&mdash;that of <i>M&eacute;lisande</i>, sung,
+<i>doux</i><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68" /> <i>et expressif</i>, by the oboe over tremolos in the divided strings
+(page 1, measure 14):</p>
+
+<h3>III. M&Eacute;LISANDE</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/iii-melisande.png"
+      alt="III. M&Eacute;LISANDE" title="III. M&Eacute;LISANDE" />
+</div>
+
+<p>It is followed by a derivative theme which, in the drama, suggests the
+na&iuml;vet&eacute; of M&eacute;lisande's personality (page 1, measure 1):</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV. M&Eacute;LISANDE'S NA&Iuml;VET&Eacute;</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/iv-melisandesnaivte.png"
+      alt="IV. M&Eacute;LISANDE'S NA&Iuml;VET&Eacute;" title="IV. M&Eacute;LISANDE'S NA&Iuml;VET&Eacute;" />
+</div>
+
+<p>Flute, oboe and clarinet repeat it over a counterpoint formed by the
+<i>Fate</i> theme (2 horns), and the curtain opens to the accompaniment of
+the <i>Forest</i> motive. This latter theme, with the motive of <i>Fate</i>,
+underscores the earlier portions of the dialogue between Golaud and
+M&eacute;lisande. At Golaud's words: &quot;Oh! you are beautiful!&quot; we hear (page 7,
+measure 1)<a name="Page_69" id="Page_69" /> an ardent phrase in the strings expressive of his awakened
+passion for the distressful little princess:</p>
+
+
+<h3>V. GOLAUD'S LOVE</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/v-golaudslove.png"
+      alt="V. GOLAUD'S LOVE" title="V. GOLAUD'S LOVE" />
+</div>
+<p>This theme is sounded again, with peculiarly penetrating effect, in the
+divided strings, as Golaud entreats M&eacute;lisande not &quot;to weep so&quot; (page 9,
+measure 4), and, later in the scene (page 19, measure 1), when he tells
+her that she must not stay in the forest alone after nightfall, and
+urges her to go with him. As he informs her that he is &quot;Prince Golaud,
+grandson of Ark&euml;l, the aged king of Allemonde,&quot; we hear, on the bassoons
+and horns, his own motive (page 14, measure 8):</p>
+
+
+<h3>VI. GOLAUD</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/vi-golaud.png"
+      alt="VI. GOLAUD" title="VI. GOLAUD" />
+</div>
+
+<p>&quot;You look like a mere child,&quot; he says, and the <i>M&eacute;li<a name="Page_70" id="Page_70" />sande</i> theme is
+given out, <i>doux et calme</i>, by the divided strings (page 18, measure 2).
+As the two go out together, the motive of <i>Fate</i> is quietly intoned by
+the horns (page 22, measure 3).</p>
+
+<p>An interlude of some fifty measures, in which the <i>Forest, Fate</i>, and
+<i>M&eacute;lisande</i> themes are exploited, introduces the second scene of the
+act. To an accompaniment of long-sustained chords varied by recurrences
+of the <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme, Genevi&egrave;ve reads to the venerable Ark&euml;l
+Golaud's letter to his brother. The entrance of Pell&eacute;as is accompanied
+by the theme which characterizes him throughout&mdash;the second of the two
+motives (that of M&eacute;lisande being the other) which most conspicuously
+dominate the score. It is announced (page 33, measure 10) by three
+flutes and a clarinet, over a viola accompaniment:</p>
+
+<h3>VII. PELL&Eacute;AS</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/vii-pelleas.png"
+      alt="VII. PELL&Eacute;AS" title="VII. PELL&Eacute;AS" />
+</div>
+<p>The scene closes with a variant of this, and there is an interlude in
+which the orchestra weaves a com<a name="Page_71" id="Page_71" />mentary out of the themes of <i>Fate</i> and
+<i>Golaud's Love</i>.</p>
+
+<p>As the third scene opens (before the castle), the <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme is
+sung, <i>m&eacute;lancolique et doux</i>, by the oboe against a murmuring
+accompaniment of the strings. Together with the <i>Pell&eacute;as</i> theme, it
+accompanies the opening portion of the scene. A suggestive use is made
+of a fragment of the <i>Fate</i> theme at M&eacute;lisande's words, after Pell&eacute;as
+prophesies the approach of a storm: &quot;And yet it is so calm now!&quot; (page
+44, measure 5). Just before the voices of the departing sailors are
+heard, the curious student will note a characteristic passage in the
+orchestra (page 45, measure 1)&mdash;a sequence of descending &quot;ninth-chords&quot;
+built on a downward scale of whole tones. The <i>Fate</i> theme, combined
+with that of <i>M&eacute;lisande</i>, colors the rest of the scene to the end. The
+conclusion of the act is striking: two flutes outline a variant of the
+<i>M&eacute;lisande</i> motive; a horn sounds the first three notes of the second
+measure of the <i>Fate</i> theme, and four horns and flute sustain, <i>pp</i>, an
+unresolved suspension&mdash;C#-F#-A#-D#-G#.<a name="Page_72" id="Page_72" /></p>
+
+<h3>VIII.</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/viii.png"
+      alt="MUSIC" title="MUSIC" />
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="ACT_II_THEMES" id="ACT_II_THEMES" />ACT II</h2>
+
+<p>The <i>Pell&eacute;as</i> theme, sung by two flutes, opens the brief introduction to
+the second act. It is repeated, interwoven with harp arpeggios.
+Immediately preceding the entrance of Pell&eacute;as and M&eacute;lisande a muted
+horn, two flutes, two oboes, and harp sound a chord of singularly liquid
+quality&mdash;one of those fragmentary effects in the invention of which
+Debussy is so curiously happy. It is the motive of <i>The Fountain</i>.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8" /><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73" /></p>
+
+<h3>IX. THE FOUNTAIN</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/ix-thefountain.png"
+      alt="THE FOUNTAIN" title="THE FOUNTAIN" />
+</div>
+<p>It is repeated, with still more magical effect (scored for divided
+violins and violas, two muted horns, and harp), as M&eacute;lisande remarks
+upon the clearness of the water, while the violins and violas weave
+about it a shimmering figure in sixteenth-notes with which its
+appearances are usually associated. As Pell&eacute;as warns M&eacute;lisande to take
+care, while she leans above the water along the marble edge of the
+basin, the clarinet, over a string accompaniment, announces an
+impassioned phrase (page 62, measure 3)&mdash;the theme of <i>Awakening
+Desire</i>:<a name="Page_74" id="Page_74" /></p>
+
+<h3>X. AWAKENING DESIRE</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/x-awakeningdesire.png"
+      alt="AWAKENING DESIRE" title="AWAKENING DESIRE" />
+</div>
+<p>As Pell&eacute;as questions M&eacute;lisande about the ring with which she is
+playing,&mdash;her wedding-ring,&mdash;and when it falls into the water while she
+is tossing it in the air, we hear persistently the theme of <i>Fate</i>,
+which, with the <i>Golaud</i> theme (portentously sounded, <i>pp</i>, by horns and
+bassoons), closes the scene. There is an interlude in which the
+<i>Golaud</i>, <i>M&eacute;lisande</i>, and <i>Fate</i> themes are heard.</p>
+
+<p>The rhythm of the latter theme mutters ominously in the bass as the
+second scene is disclosed. When <i>Golaud</i>, lying wounded on his bed,
+describes to M&eacute;lisande how, &quot;at the stroke of noon,&quot; his horse &quot;swerved
+suddenly, with no apparent cause,&quot; and threw him, as he was hunting in
+the forest (&quot;could he have seen something extraordinary?&quot;), the oboe
+recalls the theme of <i>Awakening Desire</i>, which was first heard as
+M&eacute;lisande and Pell&eacute;as sat together by the fountain in the forest during
+the <a name="Page_75" id="Page_75" />heat of midday. The rhythm of the <i>Fate</i> motive is hinted by
+violas, 'cellos, and horns as Golaud, in answer to M&eacute;lisande's
+compassionate questioning, observes that he is &quot;made of iron and blood.&quot;
+M&eacute;lisande 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: &quot;It is no one. You do not understand
+me. It is something stronger than I,&quot; she says; and we hear the
+<i>Pell&eacute;as</i> theme, dulcetly harmonized, in the strings. When, later,
+Golaud mentions his brother's name inquiringly, and she replies that she
+thinks he dislikes her, although he speaks to her sometimes, we hear,
+very softly, the theme of <i>Awakening Desire</i>. As their talk progresses
+to its climax, there is a recurrence of the <i>Fate</i> theme; then, as
+Golaud, upon discovering the loss of her wedding-ring, harshly tells her
+that he &quot;would rather have lost everything than that,&quot; the trombones and
+tuba declaim (page 99, measure 5) a threatening and sinister phrase
+which will later be more definitely associated with the thought of
+Golaud's vengeful purpose:<a name="Page_76" id="Page_76" /></p>
+
+<h3>XI. VENGEANCE</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xi-vengeance.png"
+      alt="XI. VENGEANCE" title="XI. VENGEANCE" />
+</div>
+<p>This is repeated still more vehemently three measures further on, and
+there is a return of the <i>Fate</i> motive as M&eacute;lisande, at the bidding of
+Golaud, goes forth to seek the missing ring. An interlude, in which are
+blended the variant of the <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme, which denotes her
+grieving, and the shimmering figure in sixteenth-notes heard during the
+dialogue at the fountain, leads into the scene before the grotto.</p>
+
+<p>As Pell&eacute;as and M&eacute;lisande stand in the darkness of the cavern we hear
+again (page 110, measure 2) the variant of the <i>Fate</i> 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 <i>glissando</i>, string tremolos, cymbals <i>pp</i>). While they talk of
+the beggars sleeping in a corner of the cave, an oboe and flute trace a
+tenuous and melancholy phrase (<i>doux et triste</i>) which continues <a name="Page_77" id="Page_77" />almost
+to the end of the scene; it leads into a quiet coda formed out of the
+theme of <i>Fate</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="ACT_III_THEMES" id="ACT_III_THEMES" />ACT III</h2>
+
+<p>After several bars of preluding by flute, harp, violas, and 'cellos
+(harmonics), on an arpeggio figure, <i>ppp</i>, flutes and oboe present (page
+115, measure 6) a theme which, in an ampler version, dominates the
+entire scene. Its complete form, in which I conceive it to be suggestive
+of the magic of night, is as follows (page 118, measure 2):</p>
+
+<h3>XII. NIGHT</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xii-night.png"
+      alt="XII. NIGHT" title="XII. NIGHT" />
+</div>
+<p>It continues in the orchestra until, as Pell&eacute;as urges M&eacute;lisande to lean
+further out of the window that he may see her hair unbound, a new theme
+enters, seeming to characterize the ardor of Pell&eacute;as' mood (page 120,
+measure 3<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9" /><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a>):<a name="Page_78" id="Page_78" /></p>
+
+<h3>XIII. ARDOR</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xiii-ardor.png"
+      alt="XIII. ARDOR" title="XIII. ARDOR" />
+</div>
+<p>As M&eacute;lisande leans further and further out of her window, these two
+themes (<i>Night</i> and <i>Ardor</i>) grow increasingly insistent. They are
+interrupted at Pell&eacute;as' words, &quot;I see only the branches of the willow
+drooping over the wall,&quot; 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&mdash;the progression in the first measure of page 125 (scored for
+violins and violas). Then suddenly M&eacute;lisande's unloosed hair streams
+down from the open window and envelops Pell&eacute;as, and we hear (a famous
+passage) in the strings alone, <i>ff</i>, a precipitate descending series of
+seventh-chords built on the familiar whole-tone scale which Debussy
+finds so impelling (page 127, measure 1).<a name="Page_79" id="Page_79" /></p>
+
+<h3>XIV.</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xiv.png"
+      alt="XIV." title="XIV." />
+</div>
+<p>Then begins (page 128, measure 1) a delectable episode. Over a murmurous
+accompanying figure given out by violas, 'cellos, harp, and horn, a
+clarinet sings a variant of the <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme. The harmonic changes
+are kaleidoscopic, the orchestral color of prismatic variety. The lovely
+rhapsody over his belov&egrave;d's</p>
+
+<h3>XV.</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xv.png"
+      alt="XV." title="XV." />
+</div>
+<p>tresses which Maeterlinck puts into the mouth of Pell&eacute;as is exquisitely
+enforced by the music. There is ravishing tenderness and beauty here,
+and an intensity of expression as penetrating as it is restrained. As
+M&eacute;lisande's doves come from the tower and fly about the heads of the
+lovers, we hear, <a name="Page_80" id="Page_80" />tremolo in the strings, a variation of her motive.
+Golaud enters by the winding stair, and the threatening phrase quoted as
+Ex. XI is heard sombrely in the horns, bassoons, violas, and
+'cellos&mdash;its derivation from Golaud's own theme (see Ex. VI) is here
+apparent. The latter motive sounds, <i>p</i>, as he warns M&eacute;lisande that she
+will fall from the window if she leans so far out. It is followed by the
+<i>Fate</i> theme as he departs, laughing nervously. A short interlude is
+evolved from the <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme (the <i>Pell&eacute;as</i> motive forming a
+counterpoint), and the <i>Fate</i> and <i>Vengeance</i> motives&mdash;the latter
+outlined, over a roll of the timpani and a sustained chord in the horns
+and wood-wind, by a muted trumpet, <i>pp</i>.</p>
+
+<p>No new thematic matter is presented during the two succeeding scenes (in
+the vaults under the castle and, afterward, on the terrace), nor are
+there significant reminiscences of themes already brought forward. The
+music of the vault scene forms a pointed commentary on the implications
+of the action and dialogue&mdash;in character it is dark-hued, forbidding,
+sinister. As Golaud and Pell&eacute;as emerge from the vaults, much use is made
+in the orchestra of a jubilant figure in triplets (first given out
+<i>fortissimo</i> by flutes and oboes, over an undulating accompaniment, on
+page 152, measure 1) which seems to express a certain irresponsible
+exuberance on the <a name="Page_81" id="Page_81" />part of Pell&eacute;as; it accompanies his light-hearted
+remarks about the odor of the flowers, the sheen of the water, and the
+invigorating air, as they come out upon the sunlit terrace. As the scene
+changes again, a very short interlude introduces a new theme&mdash;that of
+Little Yniold, Golaud's son, whom he is to use as the innocent tool of
+his suspicions. This motive, which occurs repeatedly during the ensuing
+scene, is one of the less important, but most typical and haunting ones,
+in the entire score. It is first presented (page 158, measure 4) by the
+oboe, <i>doux et expressif</i>:</p>
+
+<h3>XVI. YNIOD</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xvi-yniod.png"
+      alt="XVI. YNIOD" title="XVI. YNIOD" />
+</div>
+
+<p>It is heard again as an accompaniment to Yniold's na&iuml;ve answers to
+Golaud's interrogations (page 160); when he cries out that his father,
+in his agitation, has hurt him (page 164); and, in a particularly
+touching form, on page 165, measure 4, when Golaud promises that he will
+give him a present on the morrow if Yniold will tell him what he knows
+concerning M&eacute;lisande and Pell&eacute;as. We hear the<a name="Page_82" id="Page_82" /> <i>Pell&eacute;as</i> theme in the
+strings and wood-wind (page 172, measure 7) when Yniold says that they
+&quot;weep always in the dark,&quot; and that &quot;that makes one weep also,&quot; and
+again when he tells of having seen them kiss one day&mdash;&quot;when it rained.&quot;
+Thereafter it is heard repeatedly in varying forms to the end of the
+scene, at times underlying a persistent triplet-figure which has the
+effect of an inverted pedal-point. A tumultuous and agitated <i>crescendo</i>
+passage brings the act to a portentous close.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="ACT_IV_THEMES" id="ACT_IV_THEMES" />ACT IV</h2>
+
+<p>A variant of the <i>Pell&eacute;as</i> theme, with the opening notes of the <i>Fate</i>
+motive as an under voice, begins the short prelude to the fourth act;
+there is a hint of the <i>Yniold</i> theme, and the first two notes of the
+<i>Pell&eacute;as</i> motive introduce the first scene. The interview between
+M&eacute;lisande and her lover, in which they arrange their tryst at the
+fountain in the park, is treated with restraint; an expressive phrase
+sung by the 'cellos (page 194, measure 11) may be noted at the point
+where Pell&eacute;as informs M&eacute;lisande that she will look in vain for his
+return after he has gone. The <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme, in a new form, opens
+the moving scene between M&eacute;lisande and Ark&euml;l in <a name="Page_83" id="Page_83" />which he tells her of
+his compassionate observation of her since first she came to the castle.
+During his speech and her replies we hear her motive and that of <i>Fate</i>
+(page 205), the latter theme announcing the entrance of Golaud,
+distraught, blood-bespattered, seeking, he says, his sword. The music of
+the ensuing scene does not call for extended description&mdash;rather for the
+single comment that in it Debussy has proved once for all his power of
+forceful, direct, and tangible dramatic utterance: the music here, to
+apply to it Golaud's phrase in the play, is compact of &quot;blood and
+iron&quot;&mdash;as well it needed to be for the accentuation of this perturbing
+and violent episode. The <i>Fate</i> motive courses ominously through its
+earlier portions. We hear, too, what I have called the &quot;second&quot;
+<i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme&mdash;that which seems to denote her na&iuml;vet&eacute; (see Ex. IV),
+and a strange variant of the first <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme (page 212, measure
+4). At the climax of the scene, when Golaud seizes his wife by her long
+hair and flings her from side to side, the music is as brutal, as
+&quot;virile,&quot; as the most exigent could reasonably demand. Later, as he
+hints at his purpose,&mdash;&quot;I shall await my chance,&quot;&mdash;the trombones, tubas,
+and double-basses <i>pizzicato</i> mutter, <i>pp</i>, the motive of <i>Vengeance</i>.
+The orchestral interlude is long and elaborate. We hear a variant of the
+<i>Fate</i> theme, which reaches a <a name="Page_84" id="Page_84" />climax in a <i>fortissimo</i> outburst of the
+full orchestra. The theme in this form is developed at length; there is
+a reminiscence of the <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme, and the music, by a gradual
+<i>diminuendo</i>, passes into the third scene of the act&mdash;in the park,
+before the Fountain of the Blind. At the beginning occurs the incident
+of the passing flock of sheep observed by Yniold. This scene need not
+detain us long, since it is musically as well as dramatically episodic.
+There are no new themes, and no significant recurrences of familiar
+ones, though the music is rich in suggestive and imaginative details; as
+I have previously noted, it is omitted in the performances at the
+Op&eacute;ra-Comique.</p>
+
+<p>Pell&eacute;as enters, and there is an impassioned declaration of his theme,
+scored, <i>f</i>, for wood-wind, horns, and strings, as he observes that he
+is about to depart, &quot;crying out for joy and woe like a blind man fleeing
+from his burning house.&quot; There is a return of the <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme; and
+then, as she herself enters, and Pell&eacute;as urges her not to stay at the
+edge of the moonlight, but to come with him into the shadow of the
+linden, there enters a theme of great beauty and tenderness, announced,
+<i>myst&eacute;rieusement</i>, by horns and 'cellos (page 236, measure 6). I may
+call it, for want of a better name, the motive of <i>The Shadows</i>, since
+it appears only in association <a name="Page_85" id="Page_85" />with the thought of sheltering darkness
+and concealment:</p>
+
+<h3>XVII. THE SHADOWS</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xvii-theshadows.png"
+      alt="XVII. THE SHADOWS" title="XVII. THE SHADOWS" />
+</div>
+<p>We hear the <i>Fate</i> motive when M&eacute;lisande warns Pell&eacute;as that it is late,
+that they must take care, as the gates of the castle will soon be closed
+for the night. There is a gracious variant of this motive as M&eacute;lisande
+tells how she caught her gown on the nails of the gate as she left the
+castle, and so was delayed. Then comes a reminiscence of the <i>Fountain</i>
+theme (the authentic wonder of which is that it is not a theme at all,
+but merely a single chord introduced by a grace-note; yet the vividness
+of its effect is indisputable), suggested, <i>pp</i>, by horns and harp, at
+M&eacute;lisande's words: &quot;We have been here before.&quot; As Pell&eacute;as asks her if
+she knows why he has bidden her to meet him, strings and horn give out,
+<i>pp et tr&egrave;s expressif</i>, a lovely phrase derived from the <i>Pell&eacute;as</i> theme
+(page 242, measure 1). Their mutual<a name="Page_86" id="Page_86" /></p>
+
+<h3>XVIII.</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xviii.png"
+      alt="XVIII." title="XVIII." />
+</div>
+<div class="noindent" />confessions of love, so simply uttered in the text, are entirely
+unaccompanied by the orchestra; but as Pell&eacute;as exclaims: &quot;The ice is
+melted with glowing fire!&quot; four solo 'cellos, with sustained harmonics
+in the violins and violas, sound, <i>pianissimo</i>, a ravishing series of
+&quot;ninth-chords&quot; (page 244, measure 6)&mdash;a sheer Debussy-esque effect, for
+the relation between the chords is as absolutely anarchistic as it is
+deeply beautiful. &quot;Your voice seems to have
+
+
+<a name="Page_87" id="Page_87" />
+
+<h3>XIX.</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xix-a.png"
+      alt="XIX." title="XIX." />
+</div>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xix-b.png"
+      alt="XIX." title="XIX." />
+</div>
+
+<div class="noindent" />blown across the sea in spring,&quot; says Pell&eacute;as, and a horn, accompanied
+by violins in six parts, announces the motive of <i>Ecstasy</i> (page 245,
+measure 7):
+
+
+<h3>XX. ECSTASY</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xx.png"
+      alt="XX. ECSTASY" title="XX. ECSTASY" />
+</div>
+
+<p>The 'cellos intone the <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme as Pell&eacute;as tells her that he
+has never seen anyone so beautiful as she; the theme of <i>Ecstasy</i>
+follows in the strings, <a name="Page_88" id="Page_88" />horns, and wood-wind, <i>forte</i>; the theme of
+<i>The Shadows</i> returns as Pell&eacute;as again invites her into the darkness
+beneath the trees; there is a dolorous hint of the <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme as
+she says that she is happy, yet sad. And then the amorous and caressing
+quality of the music is sharply altered. There is a harsh and sinister
+muttering in the double-basses as Pell&eacute;as, startled by a distant sound,
+cries that they are closing the gates of the castle, and that they are
+shut out. The <i>Golaud</i> motive is recalled with sombre force in the
+strings as the rattle of the great chains is heard. &quot;All the better! All
+the better!&quot; cries M&eacute;lisande; and, as they embrace in sudden
+abandonment, we hear, introduced by an exquisite interplay of
+tonalities, the motive of <i>Rapture</i>, announced, <i>pp</i>, by divided strings
+and flutes (page 258, measure 12):</p>
+
+<h3>XXI. RAPTURE</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xxi.png"
+      alt="XXI. RAPTURE" title="XXI. RAPTURE" />
+</div>
+<p>As M&eacute;lisande whispers suddenly to Pell&eacute;as that there is some one behind
+them, a menacing version <a name="Page_89" id="Page_89" />of the <i>Vengeance</i> theme is played, <i>pp</i>, by
+the basses, trombones, and timpani. This theme and that of <i>Rapture</i>
+hasten the music toward its culminating point of intensity. The
+<i>Pell&eacute;as</i> theme is given out by the 'cellos, the <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme (this
+is not indicated in the piano version) by the violins, and as the lovers
+embrace desperately, a <i>crescendo</i> leads to a <i>fortissimo</i> proclamation,
+by all the orchestral forces, of a greatly broadened version of the
+motive of <i>Ecstasy</i>. As Golaud rushes upon them and strikes down
+Pell&eacute;as, the <i>Fate</i> theme is declaimed by four horns in unison over
+string tremolos; and, as he turns and silently pursues the fleeing
+M&eacute;lisande through the forest, his <i>Vengeance</i> theme brings the act, by a
+rapid <i>crescendo</i>, to a crashing close.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="ACT_V_THEMES" id="ACT_V_THEMES" />ACT V</h2>
+
+<p>The last act opens with a dolorous phrase derived from the variant of
+the <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme noted on page 82 of the piano score. It is played
+by the violas, with harp accompaniment. The violins repeat it, and two
+flutes announce a new theme (page 268, measure 5), the motive of
+<i>Pity</i>:<a name="Page_90" id="Page_90" /></p>
+
+<h3>XXII. PITY</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xxii-pity.png"
+      alt="XXII. PITY" title="XXII. PITY" />
+</div>
+<p>As Golaud bends with Ark&euml;l over the unconscious figure of M&eacute;lisande
+where she lies stretched upon her bed, muted horns and 'cellos play a
+gentle variant of the <i>Fate</i> theme, followed by the <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> motive
+as Golaud exclaims that they had but &quot;kissed like little children.&quot; The
+theme of <i>Pity</i> accompanies M&eacute;lisande's awakening, and a new motive is
+heard as she responds, to Ark&euml;l's question: &quot;I have never been better.&quot;
+This new theme (page 274, measure 4), of extraordinary poignancy, is
+given out by an oboe supported by two flutes, and its expression is
+marked <i>triste et tr&egrave;s doucement expressif</i>. I shall call it the motive
+of <i>Sorrow</i>, for it seems like the comment of the music upon the
+transporting and utter sadness of the play's d&eacute;nouement. It voices a
+gentle and passive commiseration, rather than a profound and shaking
+grief:<a name="Page_91" id="Page_91" /></p>
+
+<h3>XXIII. SORROW</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xxiii-sorrow.png"
+      alt="XXIII. SORROW" title="XXIII. SORROW" />
+</div>
+<p>A third new theme, also of searching pathos, occurs in the strings, <i>p,
+tr&egrave;s doux</i>, as M&eacute;lisande quietly greets her husband (page 279, measure
+1), and later, when she says that she forgives him (page 282, measure
+1). It may be called the motive of <i>M&eacute;lisande's Gentleness</i>:</p>
+
+<h3>XXIV. M&Eacute;LISANDE'S GENTLENESS</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xxiv-melisandesgentleness.png"
+      alt="XXIV. M&Eacute;LISANDE'S GENTLENESS" title="XXIV. M&Eacute;LISANDE'S GENTLENESS" />
+</div>
+<p>As Golaud's still unvanquished doubts and suspicions torture him into
+harsh interrogations, and he asks her if she loved Pell&eacute;as &quot;with a
+forbidden love,&quot; an oboe and two flutes recall, <i>p et doux</i>, the
+<i>Rapture</i> motive. Later, in succession, we hear (on a solo violin over
+flute and clarinets) the <i>Pell&eacute;as</i> theme (page 289, measure 2), the
+motive of <i>Gentleness</i>, <a name="Page_92" id="Page_92" />for the last time (page 290, measure 3), and
+the <i>M&eacute;lisande</i> theme (pages 290-292). As M&eacute;lisande recognizes Ark&euml;l,
+and asks if it be true &quot;that the winter is coming,&quot; a solo violin, solo
+'cello, and two clarinets play an affecting phrase (page 294, measure
+5). She tells Ark&euml;l that she does not wish the windows closed until the
+sun has sunk into the sea, and the orchestra accompanies her in a
+passage of curiously delicate sonority (page 295, measure 6).</p>
+
+<p>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
+M&eacute;lisande's death&mdash;it is music which dims the eyes and subdues the
+spirit. The <i>pianissimo</i>-repeated chords in the divided strings which
+accentuate Ark&euml;l'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); Ark&euml;l's simple requiem over the body of the
+little princess, with the grave and tender orchestral commentary woven
+out of familiarly poignant themes (pages 308-309); the murmurous coda,
+with its muted trumpet singing a gentle dirge under an accompaniment of
+two flutes (page 310, measure 7),&mdash;these things are easy to<a name="Page_93" id="Page_93" /></p>
+
+<h3>XXV.</h3>
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/xxv.png"
+      alt="XXV." title="XXV." />
+</div>
+<div class="noindent" />value, but they may not easily be praised with adequacy.
+
+
+<p>Concerning felicities of structural and technical detail in the work as
+a whole, this has not been the place to speak; but if curious
+appreciators, or others who are merely curious, should perhaps be
+induced, by what has been written here, to explore for themselves
+Debussy's beautiful and in many ways incomparable score, the purpose of
+this study will have been achieved.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94" />
+
+
+
+<h2>FOOTNOTES:</h2>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1" /><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> He no longer uses the first of these given names.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2" /><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> A revised version of these songs was published fifteen
+years later, in 1903, dedicated <i>&agrave; Miss Mary Garden, inoubliable
+M&eacute;lisande</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3" /><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> M. Debussy sends me the information that, although the
+music of <i>Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande</i> 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 Op&eacute;ra-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.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4" /><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> The above is written in July, 1907.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5" /><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Although this scene was set to music by Debussy, and
+appears in both the orchestral and piano scores, it is omitted from the
+performances at the Op&eacute;ra-Comique.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6" /><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Its curious progressions, based on the Dorian mode of the
+plain-chant (corresponding to a scale of D-minor without accidentals), I
+have alluded to in a previous chapter.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7" /><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> These indications refer to the arrangement of the score for
+voices and piano, with French and English text, published by A. Durand &amp;
+Fils of Paris in 1907. I have indicated in each case, in addition to the
+page, the measure in which the example begins.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8" /><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> I quote it in the completer and more beautiful form in
+which it appears on page 57, measures 1-3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9" /><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> I quote it as it appears in its maturer form on page 125
+(measure 3).</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande, by Lawrence Gilman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande
+       A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score
+
+Author: Lawrence Gilman
+
+Release Date: August 8, 2005 [EBook #16488]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEBUSSY'S PELLEAS ET MELISANDE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Newman, Chuck Greif and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+"Maeterlinck's man," says S.C. de Soissons in a penetrating study of the
+Belgian's dramatic methods, "is a being whose sensuous life is only a
+concrete symbol of his infinite transcendental side; and, further, is
+only a link in an endless change of innumerable existences, a link that
+remains in continual communication, in mutual union with all the other
+links.... In Maeterlinck's dramas the whole of nature vibrates with man,
+either warning him of coming catastrophes or taking on a mournful
+attitude after they have happened. 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 role 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." This "rhythmic correspondence," as Mr. James
+Huneker calls it, between man and his environment, is nowhere more
+effectively insisted upon by Maeterlinck than in _Pelleas et Melisande_.
+Note the incident at the conclusion of the first act, where the
+departure of the ship and the gathering of the storm are commented upon
+by the two lovers in a scene which is charged with an inescapable
+atmosphere of foreboding; note the incident of the fugitive doves in the
+scene at Melisande's tower window; or the episodic passage near the end
+of the third act, during the tense and painful scene of Golaud's
+espionage: "Do you see those poor people down there trying to kindle a
+little fire in the forest?--It has rained. And over there, do you see
+the old gardener trying to lift that tree that the wind has blown down
+across the road?--He cannot; the tree is too big ... too heavy; ... it
+will lie where it fell." Note, further on (in the third scene of the
+fourth act), just in advance of the culmination of the tragedy, the
+strange and ominous scene wherein Little Yniold describes the passing of
+the flock of sheep:
+
+     "Why, there is no more sun.... They are coming, the little sheep.
+     How many there are! They fear the dark! They crowd together! They
+     cry! and they go quick! They are at the crossroads, and they know
+     not which way to turn!... Now they are still.... Shepherd! why do
+     they not speak any more?
+
+     THE SHEPHERD (_who is out of sight_)
+    "Because it is no longer the road to the fold.
+
+     YNIOLD
+    "Where are they going?--Shepherd! Shepherd!--where are they
+     going?--Where are they going to sleep to-night? Oh! oh! it is too
+     dark!--I am going to tell something to somebody."
+
+Always the setting, the accessories, reflect and underscore the inner
+movement of the drama, and always with arresting and intense effect.
+
+It tempts one to extravagant praise, this heart-shaking and lovely
+drama; this _vieille et triste legende de la foret_, with its
+indescribable glamour, its affecting sincerity, its restraint, its
+exquisite and unflagging simplicity. The hesitant and melancholy
+personages who invest its scenes--Melisande, timid, naive, child-like,
+wistful, mercurial, infinitely pathetic; Pelleas, dream-filled, ardent,
+yet honorable in his passion; old Arkel, wise, gentle, and resigned; the
+tragic and brooding figure of Golaud; Little Yniold, artless and
+pitiful, a figure impossible anywhere save in Maeterlinck; the grave and
+simple diction, at times direct and homely in phrasing and imagery, at
+times rapturous, subtle, and evasive; the haunting _mise-en-scene_: the
+dim forest, the fountain in the park, the luminous and fragrant
+nightfall, the occasional glimpses, sombre and threatening, of the sea,
+the silent and gloomy castle,--all these unite to form a dramatic and
+poetic and pictorial ensemble which completely fascinates and enchains
+the mind. The result would have been as inconceivable before Maeterlinck
+undertook the writing of drama as, to-day, it is inimitable and
+untouched.
+
+
+ITS ACTION
+
+Maeterlinck's play, as adapted by Debussy for musical setting, becomes a
+"lyric drama in five acts and twelve tableaux." Certain portions have
+been left out--as the scenes, at the beginning of Act I and Act V, in
+which the servingwomen of the castle appear; the fourth scene of Act II,
+in which Pelleas is persuaded by Arkel to postpone his journey to the
+bedside of his dying friend Marcellus; the opening scene of Act III,
+between Pelleas, Melisande, and Yniold. Numerous passages that are
+either not essential to the development of the action, or that do not
+invite musical transmutation, have been curtailed or omitted, with the
+result that the movement of the drama has been compressed and
+accelerated throughout. In outlining very briefly the action of the
+play (which should be read in the original by all who would know
+Debussy's setting of it) I shall adhere to the slightly altered version
+which forms the actual text of the opera.
+
+The characters are these:
+
+ARKEL, _King of Allemonde_
+PELLEAS & GOLAUD, _half-brothers, grandsons of_ ARKEL
+MELISANDE, _an unknown princess; later the bride of_ GOLAUD
+LITTLE YNIOLD, _Son of_ GOLAUD _by a former marriage_
+GENEVIEVE, _Mother of_ PELLEAS _and_ GOLAUD
+A PHYSICIAN
+_Servants, Beggars, etc._
+
+
+
+
+ACT I
+
+The opening scene is in a forest, in an unknown land. It is autumn.
+Golaud, gray-bearded, stern, a giant in stature ("I am made of iron and
+blood," he says of himself), has been hunting a wild boar, and has been
+led astray. His dogs have left him to follow a false scent. He is about
+to retrace his steps, when he comes upon a young girl weeping by a
+spring. She is very beautiful, and very timid. She would flee, but
+Golaud reassures her. Her dress is that of a princess, though her
+garments have been torn by the briars. Golaud questions her. Her name,
+she says, is Melisande; she was born "far away;" she has fled, and is
+lost; but she will not tell her age, or whence she came, or what injury
+has been done her, or who it is that has harmed or threatened
+her--"Every one! every one!" she says. Her golden crown has fallen into
+the water--"It is the crown he gave me," she cries; "it fell as I was
+weeping." Golaud would recover it for her, but she will have no more of
+it.... "I had rather die at once!" she protests. Golaud prevails upon
+her to go with him--the night is coming on, and she cannot remain alone
+in the forest. She refuses, at first, in terror, then reluctantly
+consents. "Where are you going?" she asks. "I do not know.... I, too, am
+lost," replies Golaud. They leave together.
+
+The scene changes to a hall in the castle--the silent and forbidding
+castle near the sea, surrounded by deep forests, where Golaud, with his
+mother Genevieve and his little son Yniold (the child of his first wife,
+now dead), lives with his aged father, Arkel, king of Allemonde. Here,
+too, lives Golaud's young half-brother, Pelleas--for they are not sons
+of the same father. Half a year has passed, and it is spring. Genevieve
+reads to her father, the ancient Arkel, a letter sent by Golaud to
+Pelleas. After recounting the circumstances of his meeting with
+Melisande, Golaud continues: "It is now six months since I married her,
+and I know as little of her past as on the day we met. Meanwhile, dear
+Pelleas, you whom I love more than a brother, ... make ready for our
+return. I know that my mother will gladly pardon me; but I dread the
+King, in spite of all his kindness. If, however, he will consent to
+receive her as if she were his own daughter, light a lamp at the summit
+of the tower overlooking the sea, upon the third night after you receive
+this letter. I shall be able to see it from our vessel. If I see no
+light, I shall pass on and shall return no more." They decide to receive
+Golaud and his child-bride, although the marriage has prevented a union
+which, for political reasons, Arkel had arranged for his grandson.
+
+Again the scene changes. Melisande and Genevieve are walking together in
+the gardens, and they are joined by Pelleas. "We shall have a storm
+to-night," he says, "yet it is so calm now.... 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
+Melisande.... "The night comes quickly," observes Pelleas. A silence
+falls between them. "It is time to go in," says Genevieve. "Pelleas,
+show the way to Melisande. I must go 'tend to little Yniold," and she
+leaves them alone. "Will you let me take your hand?" says Pelleas to
+Melisande. Her hands are full of flowers, she responds. He will hold her
+arm, he says, for the road is steep. He tells her that he has had a
+letter from his dying friend Marcellus, summoning him to his bedside,
+and that he may perhaps go away on the morrow. "Oh! why do you go away?"
+says Melisande.
+
+
+ACT II
+
+The second act begins at an old and abandoned fountain in the park--the
+"Fountain of the Blind," so called because it once possessed miraculous
+healing powers. Pelleas and Melisande enter together. It is a stifling
+day, and they seek the cool tranquillity of the fountain and the shadow
+of the overarching trees--"One can hear the water sleep," says Pelleas.
+Their talk is dangerously intimate. Melisande dips her hand in the cool
+water, and plays with her wedding-ring as she lies stretched along the
+edge of the marble basin. She throws the ring in the air and it falls
+into the deep water. Melisande displays agitation: "What shall we say if
+Golaud asks where it is?" "The truth, the truth," replies Pelleas.
+
+The scene changes to an apartment in the castle. Golaud lies upon a bed,
+with Melisande bending over him. He has been wounded while hunting.
+Melisande is compassionate, perhaps remorseful. She too, she confesses,
+is ill, unhappy, though she will not tell Golaud what it is that ails
+her. Her husband discovers the absence of her wedding-ring, and harshly,
+suspiciously, asks where it is. Melisande, 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 Pelleas to
+accompany her.
+
+The next scene discovers Melisande with Pelleas in the grotto. They are
+deeply agitated. It is very dark, but Pelleas 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 moon breaks through the clouds and illumines
+brightly the interior, revealing three old and white-haired beggars
+asleep against a ledge of rock. Melisande is uneasy, and would go. They
+depart in silence.
+
+
+ACT III
+
+The opening scene of the third act shows the exterior of one of the
+towers of the castle, with a winding staircase passing beneath a window
+at which sits Melisande, combing her unbound hair, and singing in the
+starlit darkness--"like a beautiful strange bird," says Pelleas, who
+enters by the winding stair. He entreats her to lean further forward out
+of the window, that he may come closer, that he may touch her hand; for,
+he says, he is leaving on the morrow. She leans further out, telling him
+that he may take her hand if he will promise not to leave on the next
+day. Suddenly her long tresses fall over her head and stream about
+Pelleas. He is enraptured. "I have never seen such hair as yours,
+Melisande! See! see! Though it comes from so high, it floods me to the
+heart!... And it is sweet, sweet as though it fell from heaven!... I can
+no longer see the sky through your locks.... My two hands can no longer
+hold them.... They are alive like birds in my hands. And they love me,
+they love me more than you do!" Melisande begs to be released, Pelleas
+kisses the enveloping tresses.... "Do you hear my kisses?--They mount
+along your hair." Doves come from the tower--Melisande's doves--and fly
+about them. They are frightened, and are flying away. "They will be
+lost in the dark!" laments Melisande. Golaud enters by the winding
+stair, and surprises them. Melisande is entrapped by her hair, which is
+caught in the branches of a tree. "What are you doing here?" asks
+Golaud. They are confused, and stammer inarticulately. "Melisande, do
+not lean so far out of the window," cautions her husband. "Do you not
+know how late it is? It is almost midnight. Do not play so in the
+darkness. You are a pair of children!" He laughs nervously. "What
+children!"
+
+He and Pelleas go out, and the scene shifts to the vaults in the depths
+under the castle,--dank, unwholesome depths, that exhale an odor of
+death, where the darkness is "like poisoned slime." Golaud leads his
+brother through the vaults, which Pelleas had seen only once, long ago.
+"Here is the stagnant water of which I spoke; do you smell the
+death-odor?--That is what I wanted you to perceive," insinuates Golaud.
+"Let us go to the edge of this overhanging rock, and do you lean over a
+little. You will feel it in your face.... Lean over; have no fear; ... I
+will hold you ... give me ... no, no, not your hand, it might slip....
+Your arm, your arm! Do you see down into the abyss, Pelleas?" "Yes, I
+think I can see to the bottom of the abyss," rejoins Pelleas. "Is it the
+light that trembles so?" He straightens up, turns, and looks at Golaud.
+"Yes, it is the lantern," answers Melisande's husband, his voice
+shaking. "See--I moved it to throw light on the walls." "I stifle
+here.... Let us go!" exclaims Pelleas. They leave in silence.
+
+The succeeding scene shows them on a terrace at the exit of the vaults.
+Golaud warns Pelleas. "About Melisande: I overheard what passed and what
+was said last night. I realize that it was but child's play; but it must
+not be repeated.... She is very delicate, and it is necessary to be more
+than usually careful, as she is perhaps with child, and the least
+emotion might cause serious results. It is not the first time I have
+noticed that there might be something between you.... You are older than
+she; it will suffice to have said this to you. Avoid her as much as
+possible, though not too pointedly."
+
+The next scene passes before the castle. Golaud and his little son
+Yniold, the innocent playfellow of Melisande and Pelleas, 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 Pelleas, is she
+not?" The child's naive 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.... That makes one weep,
+too.... She is pale, papa." "Ah! ah!... patience, my God, patience!"
+cries the anguished Golaud.... "They kiss each other sometimes?" he
+queries. "Yes ... yes; ... once ... when it rained." "They kissed each
+other?--But how, how did they kiss?" "So, papa, so!" laughs the boy, and
+then cries out as he is pricked by his father's beard. "Oh, your
+beard!... It pricks! It is getting all gray, papa; and your hair,
+too--all gray, all gray!" 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
+Pelleas 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 Melisande is there, and that his uncle Pelleas is
+there, too. "What are they doing? Are they near each other?" "They are
+looking at the light." "They do not say anything?" "No, papa, they do
+not close their eyes.... Oh! oh!... I am terribly afraid!" "Why, what
+are you afraid of?--look! look!" demands Golaud. "Oh, oh! I am going to
+cry, papa!--let me down! let me down!" insists Yniold, in nameless
+terror.
+
+
+ACT IV
+
+Melisande and Pelleas meet in an apartment in the castle. Pelleas is
+about to leave, to travel, he tells her, now that his father is
+recovering; but before he goes he must see her alone--he must speak to
+her that night. He asks that she meet him in the park, at the "Fountain
+of the Blind." It will be the last night, he says, and she will see him
+no more. Melisande consents to meet him, but she will not hear of his
+going away. "I shall see you always; I shall look upon you always," she
+tells him. "You will look in vain," says Pelleas; "I shall try to go
+very far away." They separate. Arkel enters. He tells Melisande that he
+has pitied her since she came to the castle: "I observed you. You were
+listless--but with the strange, astray look of one who, in the sunlight,
+in a beautiful garden, awaits ever a great misfortune.--I cannot
+explain.--But I was sad to see you thus. Come here; why do you stay
+there mute and with downcast eyes?--I have kissed you but once hitherto,
+the day of your coming; and yet the old need sometimes to touch with
+their lips a woman's forehead or the cheek of a child, that they may
+still keep their faith in the freshness of life and avert for a moment
+the menaces of death. Are you afraid of my old lips? How I have pitied
+you these months!" She tells him that she has not been unhappy. But
+perhaps, he says, she is of those who are unhappy without knowing it.
+Golaud enters, ferocious and distraught. He has blood on his forehead.
+It is nothing, he says--he has passed through a thicket of thorns.
+Melisande would wipe his brow. He repulses her fiercely. "I will not
+have you touch me, do you understand?" he cries. "I came to get my
+sword." "It is here, on the prie-Dieu," says Melisande, and she brings
+it to him. "Why do you tremble so?" he says to her. "I am not going to
+kill you.--You hope to see something in my eyes without my seeing
+anything in yours? Do you suppose I may know something?" He turns to
+Arkel. "Do you see those great eyes?--it is as if they gloried in their
+power." "I see," responds Arkel, "only a great innocence." "A great
+innocence!" cries Golaud wildly. "They are more than innocent!... They
+are purer than the eyes of a lamb.--They might teach God lessons in
+innocence! A great innocence! Listen! I am so near them that I can feel
+the freshness of their lashes when they close--and yet I am less far
+from the great secrets of the other world than from the smallest secret
+of those eyes!--A great innocence?--More than innocence! One would say
+that the angels of heaven celebrated there an unceasing baptism. I know
+those eyes! I have seen them at their work! Close them! close them! or I
+shall close them forever!--You need not put your right hand to your
+throat so; I am saying a very simple thing--I have no concealed meaning.
+If I had, why should I not speak it? Ah!--do not attempt to
+flee!--Here!--Give me that hand!--Ah! your hands are too hot!--Away! the
+touch of your flesh disgusts me!--Here!--You shall not escape me now!"
+He seizes her by the hair. "Down on your knees! On your knees before
+me!--Ah! your long hair is of some use at last!" He throws her from side
+to side, holding her by her hair. "Right, left!--Left, right!--Absalom!
+Absalom!--Forward! now back! To the ground! to the ground! Ha! ha! you
+see, I laugh already like an imbecile!" Arkel, running up, seeks to
+restrain him. Golaud affects a sudden and disdainful calmness. "You are
+free to act as you please," he says.--"It is of no consequence to me.--I
+am too old to care; and, besides, I am not a spy. I shall await my
+chance; and then.... Oh! then!... I shall simply act as custom demands."
+"What is the matter?--Is he drunk?" asks Arkel. "No, no!" cries
+Melisande, weeping. "He hates me--and I am so wretched! so wretched!"
+
+"If I were God," ruminates the aged king, "how infinitely I should pity
+the hearts of men!"
+
+The scene changes once more to the fountain in the park. Yniold is
+discovered seeking to move a great rock behind which his golden ball has
+rolled. Night is coming on. The distant bleating of sheep is heard.
+Yniold looks over the edge of the terrace and sees the flock crowding
+along the road. Suddenly they cease their crying. Yniold calls to the
+shepherd. "Why do they not speak any more?" "Because," answers the
+shepherd, who is concealed from sight, "it is no longer the road to the
+fold." "Where are they going to sleep to-night?" cries the child. There
+is no answer, and he departs, exclaiming that he must find somebody to
+speak to.[5] Pelleas enters, to keep his tryst with Melisande. "It is
+the last time," he meditates. "It must all be ended. I have been playing
+like a child with what I did not understand. I have played, dreaming
+about the snares of fate. By what have I been suddenly awakened? Who has
+aroused me all at once? I shall depart, crying out for joy and woe like
+a blind man fleeing from his burning house. I shall tell her I am going.
+My father is out of danger; and I can no longer lie to myself.--It is
+late; she is not coming.
+
+[5] Although this scene was set to music by Debussy, and appears in both
+the orchestral and piano scores, it is omitted from the performances at
+the Opera-Comique.
+
+--It would be better to go away without seeing her again.--But I must
+look well at her this time.--There are some things that I no longer
+recall.--It seems at times as though I had not seen her for a hundred
+years.--And I have not yet looked deep into her gaze. There remains
+nothing to me if I go away thus. And all those memories!--it is as if I
+were to carry away a little water in a muslin bag.--I must see her one
+last time, see to the bottom of her heart.--I must tell her all that I
+have never told her." Melisande enters. Their greeting is simple.
+Pelleas 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. Pelleas 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 Pelleas. "You know not what I am going to tell you?"
+"Why, no; I know nothing," says Melisande. "You know not why I must go?
+You know not that it is because [he kisses her abruptly] I love you?" "I
+love you too," says Melisande simply, in a low voice. "You love me? you
+love me too?" cries Pelleas. "Since when have you loved me?" "Since I
+saw you first," she answers. "Oh, how you say that!" cries Pelleas.
+"Your voice seems to have blown across the sea in spring!... You say it
+so frankly--like an angel questioned.--Your voice! your voice! It is
+cooler and more frank than the water is!--It is like pure water on my
+lips!--Give me, give me your hands!--Oh, how small your hands are!--I
+did not know you were so beautiful! I have never before seen anything so
+beautiful!--I was filled with unrest; I sought everywhere; yet I found
+not beauty.--And now I have found you!--I do not believe there can be
+upon the earth a woman more beautiful!" Their love-scene is harshly
+interrupted. "What is that noise?" asks Pelleas. "They are closing the
+gates!--We cannot return now. Do you hear the bolts?--Listen!--the great
+chains!--It is too late!" "So much the better!" cries Melisande, in
+passionate abandonment. "Do you say that?" exclaims her lover. "See, it
+is no longer we who will it so! Come, come!" They embrace. "Listen! my
+heart is almost strangling me! Ah! how beautiful it is in the shadows!"
+"There is some one behind us!" whispers Melisande. Pelleas has heard
+nothing. "I hear only your heart in the darkness." "I heard the
+crackling of dead leaves," insists Melisande. "A-a-h! he is behind a
+tree!" she whispers. "Who?" "Golaud!--he has his sword!" "And I have
+none!" cries Pelleas. "He does not know we have seen him," he cautions.
+"Do not stir; do not turn your head.--He will remain there so long as he
+thinks we do not know he is watching us.--He is still motionless.--Go,
+go at once this way. I will wait for him--I will hold him back." "No,
+no, no!" cries Melisande.
+
+"Go! go! he has seen everything!--He will kill us!"
+
+"All the better! all the better!"
+
+"He is coming!--Your mouth! your mouth!"
+
+"Yes! Yes! Yes!"
+
+They kiss desperately.
+
+"Oh, oh! All the stars are falling!" cries Pelleas.
+
+"Upon me also!"
+
+"Again! Again!--Give! give!"
+
+"All! all! all!"
+
+Golaud rushes upon them with drawn sword and kills Pelleas, who falls
+beside the fountain. Melisande flees in terror, crying out as she goes,
+"Oh! oh! I have no courage! I have no courage!"
+
+Golaud pursues her in silence through the forest.
+
+
+ACT V
+
+The last act opens in an apartment in the castle. Melisande is stretched
+unconscious upon a bed. Golaud, Arkel, and the physician stand in a
+corner of the room. Some days earlier Melisande and her husband had
+been found stretched out senseless before the castle gate, Golaud having
+still in his side the sword with which he had sought to kill himself.
+Melisande had been wounded,--"a tiny little wound that would not kill a
+pigeon;" yet her life is despaired of; and on her death-bed she has been
+delivered of a child--"a puny little girl such as a beggar might be
+ashamed to own--a little waxen thing that came before its time, that can
+be kept alive only by being wrapped in wool." The room is very silent.
+"It seems to me that we keep too still in her room," says Arkel; "it is
+not a good sign; look how she sleeps--how slowly.--It is as if her soul
+were forever chilled." Golaud laments that he has killed her without
+cause. "They had kissed like little children--and I--I did it in spite
+of myself!" Melisande wakes. She wishes to have the window open, that
+she may see the sunset. She has never felt better, she says, in answer
+to Arkel's questioning. She asks if she is alone in the room. Her
+husband is present, answers Arkel. "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 Pelleas? he asks in agony. "Why, yes, I
+loved him--where is he?" The answer maddens him. "Do you not understand?
+Will you not understand? It seems to me--it seems to me--well, then, it
+is this: I ask you if you loved him with a guilty love? Were you--were
+you both guilty?" "No, no; we were not guilty," she replies; "why do you
+ask me that?" Arkel and the physician appear at the door. "You may come
+in," says Golaud despairingly; "it is useless, I shall never know! I
+shall die here like a blind man!" "You will kill her," warns Arkel. "Is
+it you, grandfather?" questions Melisande; "is it true that winter is
+already coming?--it is cold, and there are no more leaves." "Are you
+cold? Shall I close the windows?" asks Golaud. "No, no, not till the sun
+has sunk into the sea--it sets slowly." Arkel asks her if she wishes to
+see her child. "What child?" she inquires. Arkel tells her that she is a
+mother. The child is brought, and put into her arms. Melisande can
+scarcely lift her arms to take her. "She does not laugh, she is little,"
+says Melisande; "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
+Arkel; "her eyes are full of tears. It is her soul, now, that weeps. Why
+does she stretch her arms out so?--what does she wish?" "Toward her
+child, without doubt," answers the physician. "It is the struggle of
+motherhood against...." "At this moment?--At once?" cries Golaud, in a
+renewed outburst of anguish.... "Oh, oh! I must speak to her! Melisande!
+Melisande!--leave me alone with her!" "Trouble her not," gravely
+interposes Arkel. "Do not speak to her again.--You know not what the
+soul is.--We must speak in low tones now. She must no longer be
+disturbed. The human soul is very silent. The human soul likes to depart
+alone. It suffers so timidly! But the sadness, Golaud, the sadness of
+all we see!" At this moment the servants fall suddenly on their knees at
+the back of the room. Arkel turns suddenly: "What is the matter?" The
+physician approaches the bed and examines the body of Melisande. "They
+are right," he says. There is a silence.
+
+"I saw nothing. Are you sure?" questions Arkel.
+
+"Yes, yes."
+
+"I heard nothing. So quickly! so quickly! She goes without a word!"
+
+Golaud sobs aloud.
+
+"Do not remain here," says Arkel. "She must have silence now. Come;
+come. It is terrible, but it is not your fault. It was a little being,
+so quiet, so timid, and so silent. It was a poor little mysterious being
+like everyone. She lies there as though she were the elder sister of her
+baby. Come; the child should not stay here in this room. She must live,
+now, in her place. It is the poor little one's turn."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE MUSIC
+
+A REVOLUTIONARY SCORE
+
+
+Debussy's _Pelleas et Melisande, drame lyrique en 5 actes et 12
+tableaux_, was performed for the first time on any stage at the
+Opera-Comique, Paris, April 30, 1902. Its first performance outside of
+Paris was at the Theatre de la Monnaie, Brussels, January 9, 1907; its
+second was at Frankfort, April 19, 1907. Its third will be the coming
+production at the Manhattan Opera House, New York. The original Paris
+cast was as follows: _Pelleas_, M. Jean Perier; _Melisande_, Miss Mary
+Garden; _Arkel_, M. Vieuille; _Golaud_, M. Dufrane; _Genevieve_, Mlle.
+Gerville-Reache; _Le petit Yniold_, M. Blondin; _Un Medicin_, M. Viguie.
+M. Andre Messager was the conductor. The work was admirably mounted
+under the supervision of the Director of the Opera-Comique, M. Albert
+Carre.
+
+The fortunes of the opera have not been altogether happy. It has been
+said that Debussy conceived the idea of writing music for Maeterlinck's
+play soon after its first performance at the Bouffes-Parisiens in 1893;
+that, although it was necessary to secure the dramatist's consent to its
+adaptation, he did not solicit Maeterlinck's permission until he had
+thought out his musical scheme to a considerable degree of elaboration;
+and that Maeterlinck (being of that complacent majority of literary men
+who neither care for nor are intelligently curious concerning musical
+art) was immensely surprised to learn that his play had suggested a
+tonal setting. There was much correspondence between composer and
+dramatist before Maeterlinck finally heard the music of Debussy at a
+rehearsal at the Opera-Comique: so, at least, runs the legend. Just when
+or precisely how the famous and probably inevitable rupture occurred
+between them, tradition does not make altogether clear. Maeterlinck is
+alleged to have become incensed on account of certain excisions made by
+Debussy in fitting the text of the play to music; then, it appears,
+there was a quarrel over the choice of a singer for the performance, and
+Maeterlinck published a letter of protest in which he declared that "the
+_Pelleas_ of the Opera-Comique" was "a piece which had become entirely
+foreign" to him, and that, as he was "deprived of all control over it,"
+he could only hope "that its fall would be prompt and noisy." The matter
+is important only as contributing to the history of Debussy's work, and
+would scarcely reward detailed examination or discussion.
+
+One would have said, in advance of the event, that Debussy, of all
+composers, living or dead, was best fitted to write music for
+Maeterlinck's beautiful and perturbing play. He was not only best
+fitted, he was ideally fitted; in listening to this music one catches
+oneself imagining that it and the drama issued from the same brain. It
+is impossible to conceive of the play wedded to any other music, and it
+is difficult, indeed, after knowing the work in its lyric form, to think
+of it apart from its tonal commentary. For Debussy has caught and
+re-uttered, with almost incredible similitude, the precise poetic accent
+of the dramatist. He has found poignant and absolute analogies for its
+veiled and obsessing loveliness, its ineffable sadness, the strange and
+fate-burdened atmosphere in which it is steeped--these things have here
+attained a new voice and tangibility.
+
+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; in which an enigmatic and wholly
+eccentric system of harmony is exploited; in which there are scarcely
+more than a dozen _fortissimo_ passages in the course of five acts; in
+which, for the greater part of the time, the orchestra employed is the
+orchestra of Mozart,--surely, this is something new in modern
+musico-dramatic art; surely, it requires some courage, or an
+indifference amounting to courage, to write thus in a day when the
+plangent and complex orchestra of the _Ring_ is considered inadequate,
+and the 113 instrumentalists of _Salome_, like the trumpeters of an
+elder time, are storming the operatic ramparts of two continents.
+
+The radicalism of the music was fully appreciated at the time of the
+first performances in Paris. To the dissenters, Debussy's musical
+personages were mere "stammering phantoms," and he was regaled with the
+age-worn charge of having "ignored melody altogether." Debussy has
+defended his methods with point and directness. "I have been
+reproached," he says, "because in my score the melodic phrase is always
+in the orchestra, never in the voice. I tried, with all my strength and
+all my sincerity, to identify my music with the poetical essence of the
+drama. Before all things, I respected the characters, the lives of my
+personages; I wished them to express themselves independently of me, of
+themselves. I let them sing in me. I tried to listen to them and to
+interpret them faithfully. I wished--intended, in fact--that the action
+should never be arrested; that it should be continuous, uninterrupted. I
+wished to dispense with parasitic musical phrases. When listening to a
+work, the spectator is wont to experience two kinds of emotions which
+are quite distinct: the musical emotion, on the one hand; the emotion of
+the character [in the drama], on the other; generally they 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,
+through technical exigencies, the changes of sentiment and passion felt
+by my characters. It is effaced as soon as it is necessary that these
+should have perfect liberty in their gestures as in their cries, in
+their joy as in their sorrow." However much one may hesitate to
+subscribe to Debussy's generalities, the final justification for his
+procedure is in the fact that it is ideally suited to its especial
+purpose,--the tonal utterance of Maeterlinck's rhymeless, metreless,
+and broken phrases. To have set them in the sustained arioso style of
+_Tristan und Isolde_ would have been as impossible as it would have been
+inept. As it is, the writing for the voices in _Pelleas_ never, as one
+might reasonably suppose, becomes monotonous. 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. His personages love and
+desire, exult and hate and die, with a surprising economy of vehemence
+and insistence. Yet, unrhetorical as the music is, it is never pallid;
+and in such truly climacteric moments as that of Golaud's agonized
+outbreak in the scene with Melisande, in the fourth act, and the
+ecstatic culmination of the final love-scene, the music supports the
+dramatic and emotional crisis with superb competency and vigor.
+
+He follows Wagner to the extent of using the inescapable device of
+representative themes, though he has, with his usual airy inconsistency,
+characterized the Wagnerian _Leitmotiv_ system as "rather coarse." It is
+true, however, that his typical phrases are employed far more sparingly
+and subtly than modern precedent would have led one to expect. They are
+seldom set in sharp and vividly dramatic contrast, as with Wagner; nor
+are they polyphonically deployed. Often they are mere sound-wraiths,
+intended to denote moods and nuances of emotion so impalpable and
+evanescent, so vague and interior, that it is more than a little
+difficult to mark their precise significance. Often they are mere
+fragments of themes, mere patches of harmonic color, evasive and
+intangible, designed almost wholly to translate phases of that psychic
+penumbra in which the characters and the action of the drama are
+enwrapped. They have a common kinship in their dim and muted loveliness,
+their grave reticence, the deep and immitigable sadness with which, even
+at their most rapturous, they are penetrated. This is a score rich in
+beauty and strangeness, yet the music has often a deceptive naivete, a
+naivete that is so extreme that it reveals itself, finally, as the
+quintessence of subtlety and reticence--in which respect, again, we are
+reminded of its perfect, its well-nigh uncanny, correspondence with the
+quality of Maeterlinck's drama.
+
+As it has been remarked, Debussy's orchestra is here, with few
+exceptions, the orchestra of Mozart's day. On page after page he writes
+for strings alone, or for strings with wood-wind and horns. He uses the
+full modern orchestra only upon the rarest occasions, and then more
+often for color than for volume. He has an especial affection for the
+strings, particularly in the lower registers; and he is exceedingly fond
+of subdividing and muting them. It is rare to find him using the
+wood-wind choir alone, or the wood and brass without the strings. His
+orchestra contains the usual modern equipment--3 flutes, 2 oboes, 2
+clarinets, an English horn, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3
+trombones, bass tuba, kettledrums, glockenspiel, cymbals, 2 harps, and
+strings; yet one may count on but little more than the fingers of both
+hands the pages in which this apparatus is employed in its full
+strength. And in spite of this curious and unpopular reticence, we
+listen here, as M. Bruneau has observed, to "a magic orchestra"--an
+orchestra of indescribable richness, delicacy, and suppleness--an
+orchestra that melts and shimmers with opalescent hues--an orchestra
+that has substance without density, sonority without blatancy,
+refinement without thinness.
+
+The music, as a whole, is as insinuating as it is unparalleled. Many
+passages are of an hypnotic and abiding fascination. There is something
+necromantic in the art which can so swiftly and so surely cast an
+ineluctable spell upon the heart and the imagination: such a spell as is
+cast in the scene at the _Fontaine des Aveugles_, in the second act; or
+when, from the window in the castle tower, Melisande's unbound hair
+falls and envelops Pelleas--an unforgettable page; or when the lovers
+meet for the last time at the Fountain of the Blind; or in the scene of
+Melisande's death--one of the most pathetic and affecting pages in all
+music. One must wonder at the elasticity and richness of the harmonic
+texture--which, while it is incurably "irregular," is never crude or
+inchoate; at the distinction of the melodic line; at the rhythmical
+variety; at the masterly and individual orchestration. No faculty of
+trained perception is required justly to value the excellences of
+Debussy's score. There is great beauty, great eloquence, in this music.
+It has sincerity, dignity, and reserve, yet it is both deeply
+impassioned and enamoringly tender; and it is as absolutely personal, as
+underived, as was _Tristan_ forty years ago.
+
+
+THE THEMES AND THEIR TREATMENT
+
+The score of _Pelleas et Melisande_ ill brooks the short and ruthless
+method of the thematic annotator. As I have pointed out in the foregoing
+pages, its themes are often so indeterminate, so shadowy and elusive, as
+to rebuke the analyst who would disengage and expose them. 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. If one ventures to
+exhibit and to name them, one does so rather for the purpose of drawing
+attention to their beauty, their singularity, and their delicate
+potency, than with any thought of imposing an arbitrary character upon
+them or of insisting upon what seems to be their essential
+meaning--which is often altogether too recondite for positive
+identification. I shall not, therefore, attempt to dissect the music
+measure by measure, but shall endeavor rather to survey it "in the
+large," to offer simply a general indication of its more significant
+features. Nor shall I offer any further justification or apology for
+the titles which I have adopted for the various representative themes
+than to say that they have seemed to me to be sufficiently supported by
+their association with the moods and events of the drama. It is, of
+course, entirely possible that apter designations might be found for
+them; I offer those that I have chosen more as an invitation to the
+sympathetic and the inquisitive than from any desire to impose my own
+interpretation upon unwilling, dissenting, or indifferent minds.
+
+
+ACT I
+
+A brief orchestral prelude, less than twenty measures in length,
+introduces the opening scene of the first act. Divided and muted
+'cellos, double-basses, and bassoons intone, _pp_, a solemn and brooding
+theme[6] designed to evoke the thought of the forest, which, sombre,
+mysterious, and oppressive, forms the background against which the
+events of the drama are projected (page 1, measure 1):[7]
+
+[6] Its curious progressions, based on the Dorian mode of the
+plain-chant (corresponding to a scale of D-minor without accidentals), I
+have alluded to in a previous chapter.
+
+[7] These indications refer to the arrangement of the score for voices
+and piano, with French and English text, published by A. Durand & Fils
+of Paris in 1907. I have indicated in each case, in addition to the
+page, the measure in which the example begins.
+
+
+I. THE FOREST [Illustration: Tres modere]
+
+This is immediately followed by one of the most important themes in the
+opera, that which seems to typify the veiled and overshadowing destiny
+which is very close to the central thought of Maeterlinck's play.
+Strangely harmonized, this _Fate_ theme (it is in the second measure
+that its kernel is contained, and it is this portion of it that is most
+frequently repeated) is sounded, _pp, tres modere_, by oboes, English
+horn, and clarinets (page 1, measure 5):
+
+
+II. FATE
+
+[Illustration]
+
+These two themes are repeated, with altered harmonization; then follows
+one of the two principal themes of the score--that of _Melisande_, sung,
+_doux et expressif_, by the oboe over tremolos in the divided strings
+(page 1, measure 14):
+
+
+III. MELISANDE
+
+[Illustration: _p doux et expressif_]
+
+It is followed by a derivative theme which, in the drama, suggests the
+naivete of Melisande's personality (page 1, measure 1):
+
+
+IV. MELISANDE'S NAIVETE [Illustration]
+
+
+Flute, oboe and clarinet repeat it over a counterpoint formed by the
+_Fate_ theme (2 horns), and the curtain opens to the accompaniment of
+the _Forest_ motive. This latter theme, with the motive of _Fate_,
+underscores the earlier portions of the dialogue between Golaud and
+Melisande. At Golaud's words: "Oh! you are beautiful!" we hear (page 7,
+measure 1) an ardent phrase in the strings expressive of his awakened
+passion for the distressful little princess:
+
+
+V. GOLAUD'S LOVE
+
+[Illustration: Animee]
+
+This theme is sounded again, with peculiarly penetrating effect, in the
+divided strings, as Golaud entreats Melisande not "to weep so" (page 9,
+measure 4), and, later in the scene (page 19, measure 1), when he tells
+her that she must not stay in the forest alone after nightfall, and
+urges her to go with him. As he informs her that he is "Prince Golaud,
+grandson of Arkel, the aged king of Allemonde," we hear, on the bassoons
+and horns, his own motive (page 14, measure 8):
+
+
+VI. GOLAUD
+
+[Illustration: Tres soutenu]
+
+"You look like a mere child," he says, and the _Melisande_ theme is
+given out, _doux et calme_, by the divided strings (page 18, measure 2).
+As the two go out together, the motive of _Fate_ is quietly intoned by
+the horns (page 22, measure 3).
+
+An interlude of some fifty measures, in which the _Forest, Fate_, and
+_Melisande_ themes are exploited, introduces the second scene of the
+act. To an accompaniment of long-sustained chords varied by recurrences
+of the _Melisande_ theme, Genevieve reads to the venerable Arkel
+Golaud's letter to his brother. The entrance of Pelleas is accompanied
+by the theme which characterizes him throughout--the second of the two
+motives (that of Melisande being the other) which most conspicuously
+dominate the score. It is announced (page 33, measure 10) by three
+flutes and a clarinet, over a viola accompaniment:
+
+
+VII. PELLEAS
+
+[Illustration: Animez un peu]
+
+The scene closes with a variant of this, and there is an interlude in
+which the orchestra weaves a commentary out of the themes of _Fate_ and
+_Golaud's Love_.
+
+As the third scene opens (before the castle), the _Melisande_ theme is
+sung, _melancolique et doux_, by the oboe against a murmuring
+accompaniment of the strings. Together with the _Pelleas_ theme, it
+accompanies the opening portion of the scene. A suggestive use is made
+of a fragment of the _Fate_ theme at Melisande's words, after Pelleas
+prophesies the approach of a storm: "And yet it is so calm now!" (page
+44, measure 5). Just before the voices of the departing sailors are
+heard, the curious student will note a characteristic passage in the
+orchestra (page 45, measure 1)--a sequence of descending "ninth-chords"
+built on a downward scale of whole tones. The _Fate_ theme, combined
+with that of _Melisande_, colors the rest of the scene to the end. The
+conclusion of the act is striking: two flutes outline a variant of the
+_Melisande_ motive; a horn sounds the first three notes of the second
+measure of the _Fate_ theme, and four horns and flute sustain, _pp_, an
+unresolved suspension--C#-F#-A#-D#-G#.
+
+
+VIII
+
+[Illustration: _presque plus rien_]
+
+
+
+
+ACT II
+
+The _Pelleas_ theme, sung by two flutes, opens the brief introduction to
+the second act. It is repeated, interwoven with harp arpeggios.
+Immediately preceding the entrance of Pelleas and Melisande a muted
+horn, two flutes, two oboes, and harp sound a chord of singularly liquid
+quality--one of those fragmentary effects in the invention of which
+Debussy is so curiously happy. It is the motive of _The Fountain_.[8]
+
+[8] I quote it in the completer and more beautiful form in which it
+appears on page 57, measures 1-3.
+
+
+IX. THE FOUNTAIN
+
+[Illustration: Modere]
+
+It is repeated, with still more magical effect (scored for divided
+violins and violas, two muted horns, and harp), as Melisande remarks
+upon the clearness of the water, while the violins and violas weave
+about it a shimmering figure in sixteenth-notes with which its
+appearances are usually associated. As Pelleas warns Melisande to take
+care, while she leans above the water along the marble edge of the
+basin, the clarinet, over a string accompaniment, announces an
+impassioned phrase (page 62, measure 3)--the theme of _Awakening
+Desire_:
+
+
+X. AWAKENING DESIRE
+
+[Illustration: En animant]
+
+As Pelleas questions Melisande about the ring with which she is
+playing,--her wedding-ring,--and when it falls into the water while she
+is tossing it in the air, we hear persistently the theme of _Fate_,
+which, with the _Golaud_ theme (portentously sounded, _pp_, by horns and
+bassoons), closes the scene. There is an interlude in which the
+_Golaud_, _Melisande_, and _Fate_ themes are heard.
+
+The rhythm of the latter theme mutters ominously in the bass as the
+second scene is disclosed. When _Golaud_, lying wounded on his bed,
+describes to Melisande how, "at the stroke of noon," his horse "swerved
+suddenly, with no apparent cause," and threw him, as he was hunting in
+the forest ("could he have seen something extraordinary?"), the oboe
+recalls the theme of _Awakening Desire_, which was first heard as
+Melisande and Pelleas sat together by the fountain in the forest during
+the heat of midday. The rhythm of the _Fate_ motive is hinted by
+violas, 'cellos, and horns as Golaud, in answer to Melisande's
+compassionate questioning, observes that he is "made of iron and blood."
+Melisande 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
+_Pelleas_ theme, dulcetly harmonized, in the strings. When, later,
+Golaud mentions his brother's name inquiringly, and she replies that she
+thinks he dislikes her, although he speaks to her sometimes, we hear,
+very softly, the theme of _Awakening Desire_. As their talk progresses
+to its climax, there is a recurrence of the _Fate_ theme; then, as
+Golaud, upon discovering the loss of her wedding-ring, harshly tells her
+that he "would rather have lost everything than that," the trombones and
+tuba declaim (page 99, measure 5) a threatening and sinister phrase
+which will later be more definitely associated with the thought of
+Golaud's vengeful purpose:
+
+
+XI. VENGEANCE
+
+[Illustration: Anime, un peu retenu]
+
+This is repeated still more vehemently three measures further on, and
+there is a return of the _Fate_ motive as Melisande, at the bidding of
+Golaud, goes forth to seek the missing ring. An interlude, in which are
+blended the variant of the _Melisande_ theme, which denotes her
+grieving, and the shimmering figure in sixteenth-notes heard during the
+dialogue at the fountain, leads into the scene before the grotto.
+
+As Pelleas and Melisande 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; it leads into a quiet coda formed out of the
+theme of _Fate_.
+
+
+
+
+ACT III
+
+After several bars of preluding by flute, harp, violas, and 'cellos
+(harmonics), on an arpeggio figure, _ppp_, flutes and oboe present (page
+115, measure 6) a theme which, in an ampler version, dominates the
+entire scene. Its complete form, in which I conceive it to be suggestive
+of the magic of night, is as follows (page 118, measure 2):
+
+
+XII. NIGHT
+
+[Illustration: Modere sans lenteur]
+
+It continues in the orchestra until, as Pelleas urges Melisande to lean
+further out of the window that he may see her hair unbound, a new theme
+enters, seeming to characterize the ardor of Pelleas' mood (page 120,
+measure 3[9]):
+
+[9] I quote it as it appears in its maturer form on page 125 (measure
+3).
+
+
+XIII. ARDOR
+
+[Illustration: Animez toujours]
+
+As Melisande leans further and further out of her window, these two
+themes (_Night_ and _Ardor_) grow increasingly insistent. They are
+interrupted at Pelleas' 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). Then suddenly Melisande's unloosed hair streams
+down from the open window and envelops Pelleas, and we hear (a famous
+passage) in the strings alone, _ff_, a precipitate descending series of
+seventh-chords built on the familiar whole-tone scale which Debussy
+finds so impelling (page 127, measure 1).
+
+
+XIV
+
+[Illustration: Animez toujours]
+
+Then begins (page 128, measure 1) a delectable episode. Over a murmurous
+accompanying figure given out by violas, 'cellos, harp, and horn, a
+clarinet sings a variant of the _Melisande_ theme. The harmonic changes
+are kaleidoscopic, the orchestral color of prismatic variety. The lovely
+rhapsody over his beloved's
+
+
+XV
+
+[Illustration: Moins vite et passionnement contenu]
+
+tresses which Maeterlinck puts into the mouth of Pelleas is exquisitely
+enforced by the music. There is ravishing tenderness and beauty here,
+and an intensity of expression as penetrating as it is restrained. As
+Melisande's doves come from the tower and fly about the heads of the
+lovers, we hear, tremolo in the strings, a variation of her motive.
+Golaud enters by the winding stair, and the threatening phrase quoted as
+Ex. XI is heard sombrely in the horns, bassoons, violas, and
+'cellos--its derivation from Golaud's own theme (see Ex. VI) is here
+apparent. The latter motive sounds, _p_, as he warns Melisande that she
+will fall from the window if she leans so far out. It is followed by the
+_Fate_ theme as he departs, laughing nervously. A short interlude is
+evolved from the _Melisande_ theme (the _Pelleas_ motive forming a
+counterpoint), and the _Fate_ and _Vengeance_ motives--the latter
+outlined, over a roll of the timpani and a sustained chord in the horns
+and wood-wind, by a muted trumpet, _pp_.
+
+No new thematic matter is presented during the two succeeding scenes (in
+the vaults under the castle and, afterward, on the terrace), nor are
+there significant reminiscences of themes already brought forward. The
+music of the vault scene forms a pointed commentary on the implications
+of the action and dialogue--in character it is dark-hued, forbidding,
+sinister. As Golaud and Pelleas emerge from the vaults, much use is made
+in the orchestra of a jubilant figure in triplets (first given out
+_fortissimo_ by flutes and oboes, over an undulating accompaniment, on
+page 152, measure 1) which seems to express a certain irresponsible
+exuberance on the part of Pelleas; it accompanies his light-hearted
+remarks about the odor of the flowers, the sheen of the water, and the
+invigorating air, as they come out upon the sunlit terrace. As the scene
+changes again, a very short interlude introduces a new theme--that of
+Little Yniold, Golaud's son, whom he is to use as the innocent tool of
+his suspicions. This motive, which occurs repeatedly during the ensuing
+scene, is one of the less important, but most typical and haunting ones,
+in the entire score. It is first presented (page 158, measure 4) by the
+oboe, _doux et expressif_:
+
+
+XVI. YNIOLD
+
+[Illustration: _p doux et expressif_]
+
+It is heard again as an accompaniment to Yniold's naive answers to
+Golaud's interrogations (page 160); when he cries out that his father,
+in his agitation, has hurt him (page 164); and, in a particularly
+touching form, on page 165, measure 4, when Golaud promises that he will
+give him a present on the morrow if Yniold will tell him what he knows
+concerning Melisande and Pelleas. We hear the _Pelleas_ theme in the
+strings and wood-wind (page 172, measure 7) when Yniold says that they
+"weep always in the dark," and that "that makes one weep also," and
+again when he tells of having seen them kiss one day--"when it rained."
+Thereafter it is heard repeatedly in varying forms to the end of the
+scene, at times underlying a persistent triplet-figure which has the
+effect of an inverted pedal-point. A tumultuous and agitated _crescendo_
+passage brings the act to a portentous close.
+
+
+
+
+ACT IV
+
+A variant of the _Pelleas_ theme, with the opening notes of the _Fate_
+motive as an under voice, begins the short prelude to the fourth act;
+there is a hint of the _Yniold_ theme, and the first two notes of the
+_Pelleas_ motive introduce the first scene. The interview between
+Melisande and her lover, in which they arrange their tryst at the
+fountain in the park, is treated with restraint; an expressive phrase
+sung by the 'cellos (page 194, measure 11) may be noted at the point
+where Pelleas informs Melisande that she will look in vain for his
+return after he has gone. The _Melisande_ theme, in a new form, opens
+the moving scene between Melisande and Arkel in which he tells her of
+his compassionate observation of her since first she came to the castle.
+During his speech and her replies we hear her motive and that of _Fate_
+(page 205), the latter theme announcing the entrance of Golaud,
+distraught, blood-bespattered, seeking, he says, his sword. The music of
+the ensuing scene does not call for extended description--rather for the
+single comment that in it Debussy has proved once for all his power of
+forceful, direct, and tangible dramatic utterance: the music here, to
+apply to it Golaud's phrase in the play, is compact of "blood and
+iron"--as well it needed to be for the accentuation of this perturbing
+and violent episode. The _Fate_ motive courses ominously through its
+earlier portions. We hear, too, what I have called the "second"
+_Melisande_ theme--that which seems to denote her naivete (see Ex. IV),
+and a strange variant of the first _Melisande_ theme (page 212, measure
+4). At the climax of the scene, when Golaud seizes his wife by her long
+hair and flings her from side to side, the music is as brutal, as
+"virile," as the most exigent could reasonably demand. Later, as he
+hints at his purpose,--"I shall await my chance,"--the trombones, tubas,
+and double-basses _pizzicato_ mutter, _pp_, the motive of _Vengeance_.
+The orchestral interlude is long and elaborate. We hear a variant of the
+_Fate_ theme, which reaches a climax in a _fortissimo_ outburst of the
+full orchestra. The theme in this form is developed at length; there is
+a reminiscence of the _Melisande_ theme, and the music, by a gradual
+_diminuendo_, passes into the third scene of the act--in the park,
+before the Fountain of the Blind. At the beginning occurs the incident
+of the passing flock of sheep observed by Yniold. This scene need not
+detain us long, since it is musically as well as dramatically episodic.
+There are no new themes, and no significant recurrences of familiar
+ones, though the music is rich in suggestive and imaginative details; as
+I have previously noted, it is omitted in the performances at the
+Opera-Comique.
+
+Pelleas enters, and there is an impassioned declaration of his theme,
+scored, _f_, for wood-wind, horns, and strings, as he observes that he
+is about to depart, "crying out for joy and woe like a blind man fleeing
+from his burning house." There is a return of the _Melisande_ theme; and
+then, as she herself enters, and Pelleas urges her not to stay at the
+edge of the moonlight, but to come with him into the shadow of the
+linden, there enters a theme of great beauty and tenderness, announced,
+_mysterieusement_, by horns and 'cellos (page 236, measure 6). I may
+call it, for want of a better name, the motive of _The Shadows_, since
+it appears only in association with the thought of sheltering darkness
+and concealment:
+
+
+XVII. THE SHADOWS
+
+[Illustration: Modere]
+
+We hear the _Fate_ motive when Melisande warns Pelleas that it is late,
+that they must take care, as the gates of the castle will soon be closed
+for the night. There is a gracious variant of this motive as Melisande
+tells how she caught her gown on the nails of the gate as she left the
+castle, and so was delayed. Then comes a reminiscence of the _Fountain_
+theme (the authentic wonder of which is that it is not a theme at all,
+but merely a single chord introduced by a grace-note; yet the vividness
+of its effect is indisputable), suggested, _pp_, by horns and harp, at
+Melisande's words: "We have been here before." As Pelleas asks her if
+she knows why he has bidden her to meet him, strings and horn give out,
+_pp et tres expressif_, a lovely phrase derived from the _Pelleas_ theme
+(page 242, measure 1). Their mutual
+
+
+XVIII
+
+[Illustration: Modere]
+
+confessions of love, so simply uttered in the text, are entirely
+unaccompanied by the orchestra; but as Pelleas exclaims: "The ice is
+melted with glowing fire!" four solo 'cellos, with sustained harmonics
+in the violins and violas, sound, _pianissimo_, a ravishing series of
+"ninth-chords" (page 244, measure 6)--a sheer Debussy-esque effect, for
+the relation between the chords is as absolutely anarchistic as it is
+deeply beautiful. "Your voice seems to have
+
+
+XIX
+
+[Illustration: Lent]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+blown across the sea in spring," says Pelleas, and a horn, accompanied
+by violins in six parts, announces the motive of _Ecstasy_ (page 245,
+measure 7):
+
+
+XX. ECSTASY
+
+[Illustration: Modere]
+
+The 'cellos intone the _Melisande_ theme as Pelleas tells her that he
+has never seen anyone so beautiful as she; the theme of _Ecstasy_
+follows in the strings, horns, and wood-wind, _forte_; the theme of
+_The Shadows_ returns as Pelleas again invites her into the darkness
+beneath the trees; there is a dolorous hint of the _Melisande_ theme as
+she says that she is happy, yet sad. And then the amorous and caressing
+quality of the music is sharply altered. There is a harsh and sinister
+muttering in the double-basses as Pelleas, startled by a distant sound,
+cries that they are closing the gates of the castle, and that they are
+shut out. 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 Melisande; 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
+
+[Illustration: Modere]
+
+As Melisande whispers suddenly to Pelleas that there is some one behind
+them, a menacing version of the _Vengeance_ theme is played, _pp_, by
+the basses, trombones, and timpani. This theme and that of _Rapture_
+hasten the music toward its culminating point of intensity. The
+_Pelleas_ theme is given out by the 'cellos, the _Melisande_ theme (this
+is not indicated in the piano version) by the violins, and as the lovers
+embrace desperately, a _crescendo_ leads to a _fortissimo_ proclamation,
+by all the orchestral forces, of a greatly broadened version of the
+motive of _Ecstasy_. As Golaud rushes upon them and strikes down
+Pelleas, the _Fate_ theme is declaimed by four horns in unison over
+string tremolos; and, as he turns and silently pursues the fleeing
+Melisande through the forest, his _Vengeance_ theme brings the act, by a
+rapid _crescendo_, to a crashing close.
+
+
+
+
+ACT V
+
+The last act opens with a dolorous phrase derived from the variant of
+the _Melisande_ theme noted on page 82 of the piano score. It is played
+by the violas, with harp accompaniment. The violins repeat it, and two
+flutes announce a new theme (page 268, measure 5), the motive of
+_Pity_:
+
+
+XXII. PITY
+
+[Illustration: Lent et triste]
+
+As Golaud bends with Arkel over the unconscious figure of Melisande
+where she lies stretched upon her bed, muted horns and 'cellos play a
+gentle variant of the _Fate_ theme, followed by the _Melisande_ motive
+as Golaud exclaims that they had but "kissed like little children." The
+theme of _Pity_ accompanies Melisande's awakening, and a new motive is
+heard as she responds, to Arkel's question: "I have never been better."
+This new theme (page 274, measure 4), of extraordinary poignancy, is
+given out by an oboe supported by two flutes, and its expression is
+marked _triste et tres doucement expressif_. I shall call it the motive
+of _Sorrow_, for it seems like the comment of the music upon the
+transporting and utter sadness of the play's denouement. It voices a
+gentle and passive commiseration, rather than a profound and shaking
+grief:
+
+
+XXIII. SORROW
+
+[Illustration: Lent et triste]
+
+A third new theme, also of searching pathos, occurs in the strings, _p,
+tres doux_, as Melisande quietly greets her husband (page 279, measure
+1), and later, when she says that she forgives him (page 282, measure
+1). It may be called the motive of _Melisande's Gentleness_:
+
+
+XXIV. MELISANDE'S GENTLENESS
+
+[Illustration: _tres doux_]
+
+As Golaud's still unvanquished doubts and suspicions torture him into
+harsh interrogations, and he asks her if she loved Pelleas "with a
+forbidden love," an oboe and two flutes recall, _p et doux_, the
+_Rapture_ motive. Later, in succession, we hear (on a solo violin over
+flute and clarinets) the _Pelleas_ theme (page 289, measure 2), the
+motive of _Gentleness_, for the last time (page 290, measure 3), and
+the _Melisande_ theme (pages 290-292). As Melisande recognizes Arkel,
+and asks if it be true "that the winter is coming," a solo violin, solo
+'cello, and two clarinets play an affecting phrase (page 294, measure
+5). She tells Arkel that she does not wish the windows closed until the
+sun has sunk into the sea, and the orchestra accompanies her in a
+passage of curiously delicate sonority (page 295, measure 6).
+
+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
+Melisande's death--it is music which dims the eyes and subdues the
+spirit. The _pianissimo_-repeated chords in the divided strings which
+accentuate Arkel'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); Arkel's simple requiem over the body of the
+little princess, with the grave and tender orchestral commentary woven
+out of familiarly poignant themes (pages 308-309); the murmurous coda,
+with its muted trumpet singing a gentle dirge under an accompaniment of
+two flutes (page 310, measure 7),--these things are easy to
+
+
+XXV
+
+[Illustration: Tres lent]
+
+value, but they may not easily be praised with adequacy.
+
+Concerning felicities of structural and technical detail in the work as
+a whole, this has not been the place to speak; but if curious
+appreciators, or others who are merely curious, should perhaps be
+induced, by what has been written here, to explore for themselves
+Debussy's beautiful and in many ways incomparable score, the purpose of
+this study will have been achieved.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande, by Lawrence Gilman
+
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