Aspects of Modern Opera: Estimates and Inquiries

by Lawrence Gilman

VII

It has been affirmed that in "Pelléas et Mélisande" Debussy has produced a work as commanding in quality as it is unique in conception and design. Let us consider what grounds there may be for the assertion.

To begin with, its spiritual and emotional flavour are without analogy in the previous history, not merely of opera, but of music. Debussy is a man of unhampered and clairvoyant imagination, a dreamer with a far-wandering vision. He views the spectacle of the world through the magic casements of the mystic who is also a poet and visionary. One can easily conceive him as taking the more tranquil part in that provocative dialogue put by Mr. Yeats into the mouths of two of his dramatic characters:

"And what in the living world can happen to a man that is asleep on his bed? Work must go on and coach-building must go on, and they will not go on the time there is too much attention given to dreams. A dream is a sort of a shadow, no profit in it to anyone at all."

"There are some would answer you that it is to those who are awake that nothing happens, and it is they who know nothing. He that is asleep on his bed is gone where all have gone for supreme truth."

In Maeterlinck's "Pelléas et Mélisande," Debussy has, through a fortunate conjunction of circumstances, found a perfect vehicle for his impulses and preoccupations. There will always be, naturally enough, persons who must inevitably regard such a work as that for which he and Maeterlinck are now responsible as, for the most part, vain, inutile, even preposterous. They are sincere in their dislike, these forthright and excellent people, and they are to be commiserated, for they are, in such a region of the imagination as this drama builds up about them, aliens in a world whose ways and whose wonders must be forever hidden from their most determined scrutiny. Such robust and worldly spirits, writes a thoughtful contemporary essayist, "that swim so vigorously on the surface of things," have always "a suspicion, a jealousy, a contempt, for one who dives deeper and brings back tidings of the strange secrets that the depth holds": they will not even grant that the depths are anything save murky, that the tidings have validity or importance. They take comfort in their detachment, and are apt to speak of themselves, with mock humility, as "plain, blunt persons," for whom the alleged vacuities of such an order of art are comfortably negligible. Well, it is, after all, as Maeterlinck's Pelléas himself observes, a matter not so much for mirth as for lament; yet even more is it a matter for resignation. There will always be, as has been observed, an immense and confident majority for whom that territory of the creative imagination which lies over the boundaries of the palpable world will seem worse than delusive: who will always and sincerely pin their faith to that which is definite and concrete, patent and direct, and who must in all honesty reject that which is undeclared, allusive, crepuscular: which communicates itself through echoes and in glimpses; by means of intimations, signs, and tokens. For them it would be of no avail to point to the dictum of one who, like Maeterlinck, is aware of remote voices and strange dreams: "Dramatic art," he has wisely said, "is a method of expression, and neither a hair-breadth escape nor a love affair more befits it than the passionate exposition of the most delicate and strange intuitions; and the dramatist is as free as the painter of good pictures and the writer of good books. All art is passionate, but a flame is not the less flame because we change the candle for a lamp or the lamp for a fire; and all flame is beautiful."

It is a dictum that is scarcely calculated to persuade a very general acceptance: a "passionate exposition of the most delicate and strange intuitions" is not precisely the kind of æsthetic fare which the "plain, blunt man," glorying in his plainness and his bluntness, is apt to relish. It is a point upon which it is perhaps needless to dwell; but its recognition serves as explanation of the fact that the music-drama into which Debussy has transformed Maeterlinck's play should not everywhere and always be either accepted or understood. For in the musical setting of Debussy, Maeterlinck's drama has found its perfect equivalent: the qualities of the music are the qualities of the play, completely and exactly; and, sharing its qualities, it has evoked and will always evoke the more or less contemptuous antagonism of those for whom it has little or nothing to say.

Of the quality of its style, perhaps the most obvious trait to note is its divergence from the kind of music-making which we are accustomed to regard as typically French. We have come to regard as inevitable the clear-cut precision, the finesse, the instinctive grace of French music; but we are not at all accustomed to discovering this fineness of texture allied with marked emotional richness, with depth and substance of thought—we do not look for such an alliance, nor find it, in any French music from Rameau to Saint-Saëns, Gounod, and Massenet. Yet Debussy has the typical French clarity and fineness of surface without the French hardness of edge and thinness of substance. The contours of his music are as melting and elastic as its emotional substance is rich; and it is phantasmal rather than definite and clear-cut; evasive rather than direct. His art, as a matter of fact, has its roots in the literature rather than in the music of his country. His true forebears are not Rameau, Couperin, Boieldieu, Bizet, Saint-Saëns, but Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé; and, beyond his own frontier, Rossetti and Maeterlinck. There is scarcely a trace of French musical influence in the score of "Pelléas," save for its limpidity of expression and its delicate logic of structure. The truth is that Debussy, with d'Indy, Ravel, and others, has made it impossible to speak any longer, without qualification, of "French" quality, or "French" style, in music; for to-day there is the French of Saint-Saëns and Massenet, and the French of Debussy, d'Indy, Duparc, Fauré, Ravel: and the two orders are as inassociable under a generic yoke as are the poetry of Hugo and the poetry of Verlaine.

But the essential thing to observe and to praise in this music is its astonishing, its almost incredible, affluence of substance: its richness in ideas that are both extraordinarily beautiful and wholly new. The score, in this respect alone, is epoch-making. Debussy is the first music-maker since Wagner to evolve a kind of style of which the substance is, so to say, newly-minted. Strauss is not to be compared with him in this regard; for the basis of the German master's style, upon which he has reared no matter how wonderful a superstructure, is compounded of materials which he got straight from Richard Wagner and his great forerunner, Franz Liszt; whereas the basis, the starting-point, of Debussy's style—its harmonic and melodic stuff—existed nowhere, in any artistic shape or condition, before him. To speak of it as in any vital sense a reversion, because it makes use of certain principles of plain-song, is mere trifling. Debussy is a true innovator, if ever there was one. He has added fresh materials to the matter out of which music is evolved; and no composer of whom this may be said, from Beethoven to Chopin, has failed to find himself eventually ranked as the originator of a new order of things in the development of the art.