V
One cannot but wonder what Hazlitt, who could not think of beauty, simplicity, or sensibility as qualities having any possible association with opera, would have said of a manner of writing for the lyric stage which ignores even those opportunities for musical effect which composers of unimpeachable artistic integrity have always held to be desirable and legitimate. There is an even richer invitation to the Spirit of Comedy in trying to imagine what Richard Wagner would have said to the suggestion of a lyric-drama in which the orchestra is not employed at its full strength more than three times in the course of a score almost as long as that of "Tristan und Isolde," and in which the singers scarcely ever raise their voices above a mezzo-forte. Debussy's orchestra is unrivalled in musico-dramatic art for the exquisite justness with which it enforces the moods and action of the play. It never seduces the attention of the auditor from the essential concerns of the drama itself: never, as with Wagner, tyrannically absorbs the mind. Always in this unexampled music-drama there is maintained, as to emphasis and intensity, a scrupulous balance between the movement of the drama and the tonal undercurrent which is its complement: the music is absolutely merged in the play, suffusing it, colouring it, but never dominating or transcending it. It is for this reason that it deserves, as an exemplification of the ideal manner of constructing a music-drama, the hazardous epithet "perfect"; for it is, one cannot too often repeat, a work far more faithful to Wagner's avowed principles than are his own magnificently inconsistent scores. In this music there is no excess of gesture, there is none of Wagner's gorgeously expansive rhetoric: the "Je t'aime," "Je t'aime aussi" of Debussy's lovers are expressed with a simplicity and a stark sincerity which could not well go further; and it is a curious and significant fact that the moment of their profoundest ecstasy, though it is artfully and eloquently prepared, is represented in the orchestra by a blank measure, a moment of complete silence. This, indeed, is almost the supreme distinction of Debussy's music-drama: that it should be at once so eloquent and so discreet: that it should be, in the exposition of its subject-matter, so rich and intense yet so delicately and heedfully reticent. After the grave speech and simple gestures of these naïve yet subtle and passionate tragedians, as Debussy has translated them into fluid tone, the posturings and the rhetoric of Wagner's splendid personages seem, for a time, violently extravagant, excessive, and overwrought. To attempt to resist the imperious sway which the most superb of musical romantics must always exert over his kingdom would be a futile endeavour; yet it cannot be denied that for some the method of Debussy as a musical dramatist will seem the more viable and the more sound, as it is grateful to the mind a little wearied by the drums and tramplings of Wagnerian conquests.
His use of the orchestra differs from Wagner's in degree rather than in kind. As he employs it, it is a veracious and pointed commentary on the text and the action of the play, underlining the significance of the former and colouring and intensifying the latter; but its comments are infinitely less copious and voluble than are Wagner's—indeed, their reticence and discretion are, as it has been said, extreme. Debussy's choric orchestra is often as remarkable for what it does not say as for what it does. Can one, for example, imagine Wagner being able to resist the temptation to indulge in some graphic and detailed tone-painting, at the cost of delaying the action and overloading the score, at the passage wherein Golaud, coming upon the errant and weeping Mélisande in the forest, and seeing her crown at the bottom of the spring where she has thrown it, asks her what it is that shines in the water? Yet observe the curiously insinuating effect which results from Debussy's deft and reticent treatment of this episode—the pianissimo chords on the muted horns, followed by a measure in which the voices declaim alone. And would not Wagner have wrung the last drop of emotion out of the death scene of Mélisande?—a scene for which Debussy has written music of almost insupportable poignancy, yet of a quality so reserved and unforced that it enters the consciousness almost unperceived as music.
The discursive and exegetical tendencies of Wagner are forgotten; nor are we reminded of the manner in which Strauss, in his "Salome," overlays the speech and action of the characters with a dense, oppressive, and many-stranded web of tone. Yet always Debussy's musical comment is intimately and truthfully reflective of what passes visibly upon the stage and in the hearts of his dramatic personages; though often it transmits not so much the actual speech and apparent emotions of the characters, as that dim and pseudonymous reality,—"the thing behind the thing," as the Celts have named it,—which hovers, unspoken and undeclared, in the background of Maeterlinck's wonderful play. We are reminded at times, in listening to this lucent and fluid current of orchestral tone, of Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's description of the voice of his Elen: "... it was taciturn, subdued, like the murmur of the river Lethe, flowing through the region of shadows." This orchestra, seldom elaborate in thematic exfoliation, and still less frequently polyphonic in texture, is, for the most part, a voice that speaks in hints and through allusions. The huge and imperious eloquence of Wagner is not to be sought for here. Taine once spoke of the "violent sorcery" of Victor Hugo's style, and it is a phrase that comes often to the mind in thinking of the music of the titanic German. Debussy in his "Pelléas" has written music that is rich in sorcery; but it is not violent. In it inheres a capacity for expression, and a quality of enchantment in the result, that music had not before exerted—an enchantment that invades the mind by stealth yet holds it with enchaining power. In a curious degree the music is both contemplative and impassioned; its pervading note is that of still flame, of emotional quietude—the sweeping and cosmic winds of "Tristan und Isolde" are absent. Yet the dramatic fibre of the score is strong and rich; for all its fineness and delicacy of texture and its economy of accent, it is neither amorphous nor inert.