IV
It is not every generation that can witness the emergence of a masterpiece which may truly be called epoch-making; yet when France—not the Italy of Peri and Monteverdi; nor the Germany of Gluck and Wagner—produced, doubtless to the stupefaction of the shades of Meyerbeer, Bizet, and Gounod, the "Pelléas et Mélisande" of Claude Debussy, it produced a work which is as commanding in quality as it is unique in conception and design.
It has been left for Debussy to write an absolutely new page in the eventful history of the opera. This remarkable composer is to-day regarded with suspicion by the vigilant conservators of our musical integrity—those who are vigorous and unconquerable champions of æsthetic progress so long as it involves no change in established methods and no reversal of traditions; for he has shown a perverse disinclination to conform to those rules of procedure which, in music as in the other arts, are held to be inviolable until they are set aside by the practice of successive generations of inspired innovators. He has, in brief, affronted the orthodox by creating a form and method of his own, and one which stubbornly refuses to square with any of the recognised laws of the game. He is nowhere so significant a phenomenon to the curious student of musical development as in his setting of Maeterlinck's drama. For the first time in the history of opera we are confronted here with the spectacle of a lyric-drama in which, while the drama itself holds without compromise the paramount place in the structural scheme, the musical envelope with which it is surrounded is not only transparent and intensifying, but, as music, beautiful and remarkable in an extraordinary degree. The point to be emphasised is this: that the postulate of Count Bardi's sixteenth century "reformers," formulated by Gluck almost two hundred years later in the principle that the true function of music in the opera is "to second poetry in expressing the emotions and situations of the plot," has its first consistent and effective application in Debussy's "Pelléas et Mélisande." What the Camerata, and their successors, could not accomplish for lack of adequate musical means, what Gluck fell short of compassing for want of boldness and reach of vision, what Wagner might have effected but for too great a preoccupation with one phase of the problem, a Frenchman of to-day has quietly and (I say it deliberately) perfectly achieved.
His success is as much a result of time and circumstance and the slow growth of the art as of a preeminent natural fitness for the task. The Florentines, for all their eagerness and sincerity, were helpless before the problem of putting their principles into concrete and effective form, for they were hopelessly blocked by reason of the desperate poverty of the musical means at their disposal. Spurning the elaborate and lovely art of the contrapuntists, they found themselves in the sufficiently hopeless situation of artists filled with passionate convictions but without tools—in other words, they aspired to write dramatic music for single voices and instruments with nothing to aid them save a rudimentary harmonic system and an almost non-existent orchestra, and with virtually no perception of the possibilities of melodic effect. Their failure was due, not to any infirmity of purpose, but to a simple lack of materials. Of Gluck it is to be said that, ardent and admirable reformer as he was, and clear as was his perception of the rightful demands of the drama in any serious association with music, he failed, as Mr. Henry T. Finck justly says, to effect a "real amalgamation of music and drama," failed to strike out "a form organically connecting each part of the opera with every other." His unconnected "numbers," his indulgence in vocal embroidery, his retention of many of the encumbrances of the operatic machinery, are all testimony to a not very rigorous or far-seeing reformatory impulse. If, as Mr. Finck pointedly observes, he "insisted on the claims of the composer as against the singer, he did not, on the other hand, alter the relations of poet and composer. Such a thing as allowing the drama to condition the form of the music never occurred to him." A spontaneous master of musico-dramatic speech, he stopped far short of striking out a form of lyric-drama in which the music was really made to exercise, continuously and undeviatingly, what he stated to be "its true function." It would be absurd to dispute the fact that his sense of dramatic expression was both keen and rich; but it was an instinct which manifested itself in isolated and particular instances, and it was not strong enough or exigent enough to compel him to devise a new and more intelligent manner of treating his dramatic text as a whole.
Of the degree in which Wagner fell short of embodying his principles—which were of course in essence the principles of the Florentines and of Gluck—and the evident reason for his failure, enough has already been said. So we come again to Debussy. For it is a singular fact—and this is the point to insist upon—that this French mystic of to-day is the first opera-maker in the records of musical art who has exhibited the courage, and who has possessed the means, to carry the principles of the Camerata, of Gluck, and of Wagner to their ultimate conclusion. In "Pelléas et Mélisande" he has made his music serve his dramatic subject, in all its parts, with absolute fidelity and consistency, and with a rigorous and unswerving logic that is without parallel in the history of operatic art; we are here as far from the method of Richard Strauss, with its translation of the entire dramatic material into the terms of the symphonic poem, and with the singing actors contending against a Gargantuan and merciless orchestra (which is nothing, after all, but an exaggeration of the method of Wagner), as we are from the futile experimentings of the Camerata.