Somewhat less than a century ago William Hazlitt, whose contempt for
opera as a form of art was genuine and profound, observed amiably that
the "Opera Muse" was "not a beautiful virgin, who can hope to charm by
simplicity and sensibility, but a tawdry courtesan, who, when her
paint and patches, her rings and jewels are stripped off, can excite
only disgust and ridicule." It may be conceded that matters have
improved somewhat since that receding day when Hazlitt, whose critical
forte was not urbanity, uttered this acrimonious opinion. The opera is
doubtless still, as it was in his day, ideally and exquisitely
contrived "to amuse or stimulate the intellectual languor of those
classes of society on whose support it immediately depends." Yet the
shade of Hazlitt might have been made sufficiently uncomfortable by
being confronted, half a century after his death, by the indignant and
voluble apparition of Richard Wagner. To tell the truth, though,
Wagner is scarcely the opera-maker with whose example one might
to-day most effectually rebuke the contempt of Hazlitt. While the Muse
which presided at the birth of the Wagnerian music-drama can certainly
not be conceived as "a tawdry courtesan," neither can she be conceived
as precisely virginal, persuasive by reason of her "simplicity" and
"sensibility." Wagner, for all his dramatic instinct, was, as we are
growing to see, as avid of musical effect, achieved by whatever
defiance of dramatic consistency, as was any one of the other facile
and conscienceless opera-wrights whom his doctrines contemned. The
ultimate difference between him and them, aside from any questions of
motive, principle, or method, is simply that he was a transcendent
genius who wrote music of superlative beauty and power, whereas they
were, comparatively speaking, Lilliputians.
Mr. William F. Apthorp, speaking of the condition of the Opera before
Wagner's reforms were exerted upon it, observes that it "remained
(despite the efforts of Gluck) virtually what Cesti had made it—not a
drama with auxiliary music, but a dramma per musica—a drama for
(the sake of) music." Now it was, of course, the passionate aim of
Wagner to write music-dramas which should be dramas with auxiliary
music, rather than dramas for the sake of music; yet it is becoming
more and more obvious that what he actually succeeded in producing,
despite himself, were dramas which we tolerate to-day only because of
their transfiguring and paramount music. In view of recent
developments in the modern lyric-drama which have resulted from both
his theories and his practice, it may not be without avail to review
certain aspects of his art in the perspective afforded by the
quarter-century which now stretches lengtheningly between ourselves
and him.
It is, of course, a truism to say that the corner-stone of Wagner's
doctrinal arch was that music in the opera had usurped a position of
pre-eminence to which it was not entitled, and which was not to be
tolerated in what he conceived to be the ideal music-drama. He
conceived the true function of music in its alliance with drama to be
strictly auxiliary—an aid, and nothing more than an aid, to the
enforcement, the driving home, of the play. As Mr. Apthorp has
excellently stated it, his basic principle was that "the text (what in
old-fashioned dialect was called the libretto) once written by the
poet, all other persons who have to do with the work—composer,
stage-architect, scene-painter, costumer, stage-manager, conductor and
singing actors—should aim at one thing only: the most exact, perfect,
and lifelike embodiment of the poet's thought." Wagner's chief quarrel
with the opera as he found it was with the preponderance of the
musical element in its constitution. If there is one principle that
is definite, positive, and unmistakable in his theoretical position it
is that, in the evolution of a true music-drama, the dramatist should
be the controlling, the composer an accessory, factor—like the
scene-painter and the costumer, ancillary and contributive. If it can
be shown that in the actual result of his practice this relationship
between the drama and the music is inverted—that in his music-dramas
the music is supreme, both in its artistic quality and in its effect,
while the drama is a mere framework for its splendours—it becomes
obvious that he failed (gloriously, no doubt, but still definitively)
in what he set out to achieve. It was his dearest principle that, in
Mr. Apthorp's words, "in any sort of drama, musical or otherwise, the
play's the thing." Yet what becomes of "Tristan und Isolde," of
"Meistersinger," of "Götterdämmerung," when this principle is tested
by their quality and effect? Would even the most incorruptible among
the Wagnerites of a quarter of a century ago, in the most exalted hour
of martyrdom, have ventured to say that in "Tristan," for example, the
play's the thing? Imagine what the second act, say, divorced from the
music, would be like; and then remember that the music of this act,
with the voice-parts given to various instruments, might, with a
little adjustment and condensation, be performed as a somewhat
raggedly constructed symphonic poem. The test is a rough and partial
one, no doubt, and it is subject to many modifications and
reservations. It is not to be disputed, of course, that here is music
which is always and everywhere transfused with dramatic emotion, and
that its form is dramatic form and not musical form; but is there
to-day a doubt in the mind of any candid student of Wagner as to the
element in this musico-dramatic compound which is paramount and
controlling?
It should be remembered that what Wagner thought he was accomplishing,
or imagined he had accomplished, is not in question. He conceived
himself to be primarily a dramatist, a dramatist using music solely
and frankly as an auxiliary, as a means of intensifying the action and
the moods of the play; and this end he pathetically imagined that he
had achieved. Yet it is becoming more and more generally recognised
and admitted, by the sincerest appreciators of his art, that as a
dramatist he was insignificant and inferior. Had any temerarious soul
assured him that his dramas would survive and endure by virtue of
their music alone, it is easy to fancy his mingled incredulity and
anger. He was not, judged by an ideal even less uncompromising than
his own, a musical dramatist at all. It is merely asserting a truth
which has already found recognition to insist that he was essentially
a dramatic symphonist, a writer of programme-music who used the drama
and its appurtenances, for the most part, as a mere stalking-horse
for his huge orchestral tone-poems. He was seduced and overwhelmed by
his own marvellous art, his irrepressible eloquence: his drama is
distorted, exaggerated, or spread to an arid thinness, to accommodate
his imperious musical imagination; he ruthlessly interrupts or
suspends the action of his plays or the dialogue of his personages in
order that he may meditate or philosophise orchestrally. He called his
operas by the proud title of "music-dramas"; yet often it is
impossible to find the drama because of the music.
It was not, as has been said before, that he fell short, but that he
went too far; he should have stopped at eloquent and pointed
intensification. Instead, he smothered his none too lucid dramas in a
welter of magnificent and inspired music—obscured them, stretched
them to intolerable lengths, filled up every possible space in them
with his wonderful tonal commentary, by which they are not, as he
thought, upborne, but grievously overweighted. Mr. James Huneker has
remarked that Wagner was the first and only Wagnerite. As a matter of
sober fact, he was one of the most formidable antagonists that
Wagnerism ever had.
It appears likely that his lyric-dramas will endure on the stage both
in spite of and because of their music. The validity and
persuasiveness of "Tristan" and the "Ring" as music-dramas, as
consistent and symmetrical embodiments of Wagner's ideals, seems less
certain than of old. But the music, qua music, is of undiminished
potency—it is still, regarded as an independent entity, of almost
unlimited scope in its voicing of the moods and emotions of men and
the varied pageant of the visible world; and it will always float and
sustain his dramas and make them viable. Gorgeous and exquisite,
epical and tender, sublimely noble, and earthly as passion and
despair, it is still, at its best, unparalleled and unapproached; and,
as Pater prophesied of the poetry of Rossetti, more torches will be
lit from its flame than even enthusiasts imagine. Nothing can ever dim
the glory of Wagner the conjurer of tones. His place is securely among
the Olympians, where he sits, one likes to fancy, apart—a little
lonely and disdainful. In his music he is almost always, as Arnold
said of the greatest of the Elizabethans, "divinely strong, rich, and
attractive"; and at his finest he is incomparable. No one but a
master of transcendent genius, and the most amazingly varied powers of
expression, could have conceived and shaped such perfect yet diverse
things as those three matchless passages in which he is revealed to us
as the riant and tender humanist, the impassioned lyrist, and the
apocalyptic seer: the exquisite close of the second act of "Die
Meistersinger," where is achieved a blend of magically poetic
tenderness and comedy for which there are analogies only in certain
supreme moments in Shakespeare; the tonal celebration of the ecstatic
swoon of Tristan and Isolde in the midst of which the warning
voice of the watcher on the tower is borne across an orchestral flood
of ineffable and miraculous beauty; and that last passage to which
this wonderful man set his hand, the culminating moment in the
adoration of the Grail by the transfigured Parsifal—music that is as
the chanting of seraphs: in which censers are swung before celestial
altars. Of the genius who could contrive such things as these, one can
say no less than that, regarded from any æsthetic standpoint at all,
he is, as the subtle appreciator whom I have quoted said of a great
though wayward poet, "a superb god of art, so proudly heedless or
reckless that he never notices the loss of his winged sandals, and
that he is stumbling clumsily when he might well lightly be lifting
his steps against the sun-way where his eyes are set."
As music-dramas, then, appraised by his own standard, the deficiency
of Wagner's representative works must be held to be the subordination
of the dramatic element in them to a constituent part—their
music—which should be accessory and contributive rather than
essential and predominant. This tyranny is exercised chiefly—and, let
it be cheerfully owned, to the glory of musical art—through Wagner's
orchestra: that magnificent vehicle of a tone-poet who was at once its
master and its slave. Yet Wagner sinned scarcely less flagrantly
against his most dearly held principles in his treatment of the voice.
He conceived it to be of vital importance that in the construction of
the voice-parts no merely musical consideration of any kind should be
permitted to interfere with the lucid utterance of the text. His
singers were to employ a kind of heightened and intensified speech,
necessarily musical in its intervals, but never musical at the expense
of truthfully expressive declamation. Yet in some of the vocal writing
in his later works he is false to this principle, for he not
infrequently permits himself to be ravishingly lyrical at moments
where lyricism is superfluous and distracting when it is not
impertinent. Again he is too much the musician; too little the musical
dramatist.
And herewith I come to a curious and interesting point. Mr. E.A.
Baughan, an English critic of authority, who has written with both
courage and wisdom concerning Wagnerian theories and practices,
entertains singular views concerning the nature of music-drama as an
art form. "There must be no false ideas of music-drama being drama,"
he has asserted: "it is primarily music. The drama of it is merely,"
he goes on, "the motive force of the whole, and technically takes the
place of form in absolute music"—a sentence which, one may be
permitted to observe, would contain an admirably concise statement of
the truth if the word "merely" were left out. Mr. Baughan is led by
this belief to take the position that whereas, in one respect Wagner
was, to put it briefly, too musical, in another respect he was not
musical enough. He acknowledges the fact that in Wagner's combination
of music and drama, the music, so far as the orchestra is concerned,
assumes an oppressive and obstructive prominence; it indulges for the
most part, he holds, in a "superheated commentary" which leaves little
to suggestion, which is persistently excessive and overbearing; yet at
the same time Mr. Baughan holds that Wagner, in his treatment of the
voice-parts, did not, as he says, "make use of the full resources of
music and of the beautiful human singing-voice in duets, concerted
numbers, and choruses." It is the second of these objections which, as
it seems to me, contains matter for discussion. So far from being
deficient in melodious effectiveness, Wagner's writing for the voice,
I would hold, errs upon the other side. It would be possible to name
page after page in the "Ring" and "Tristan" which is marred, from a
musico-dramatic standpoint, by an excess of lyricism. It is a little
difficult to understand, for example, how Wagner would have justified
his admission of the duet into his carefully reasoned scheme; for if
the ensemble piece—the quartette in "Rigoletto," for example—is
inherently absurd from a dramatic point of view, as it
incontrovertibly is, so also is the duet. Even the most liberal
attitude toward the conventions of the operatic stage makes it
difficult to tolerate what Mr. W.P. James describes as the spectacle
of two persons inside a house and two outside, supposed to be
unconscious of each other's presence, making their remarks in
rhythmic and harmonic consonance. Yet is Wagner much less distant from
the dramatic verities when, in the third act of "Die Meistersinger,"
he ranges five people in the centre of a room and causes them to
soliloquise in concert, to the end of producing a quintette of
ravishing musical beauty? Had he wholly freed himself from what he
regarded as the musical bondage of his predecessors when he could
tolerate such obvious anachronisms as the duet, the ensemble piece,
and the chorus? The truth of the matter seems to be that if Wagner's
music, in itself, were less wonderful and enthralling than it is,
those who would fain insist upon a decent regard for dramatic
consistency in the lyric-drama would not tolerate many things in the
vocal writing in "Tristan," "Meistersinger," the "Ring" and "Parsifal"
which are not a whit more dramatically reasonable than the absurdities
which Wagner contemptuously derided in the operas of the old school.
His vocal writing, far from being deficient in melodic quality, far
from ignoring "the full resources of music and of the beautiful
singing voice," is saturated and overflowing with musical beauty, and
with almost every variety of melodic effectiveness except that which
is possible to purely formal song. Mr. Baughan complains that the
voice-parts have "no independent life" of their own. "In many cases,"
he says, "the vocal parts, if detached from the score [from the
orchestral support] are without emotional meaning of any kind—the
expression is absolutely incomplete." An astonishing complaint! For
the same thing is necessarily true of any writing for the voice allied
with modern harmony in the accompaniment. How many songs written
since composers began to discover the modulatory capacities of
harmony, one might ask Mr. Baughan, would have "emotional meaning," or
any kind of expression or effect, if the voice part were sung without
its harmonic support?
No; Wagner cannot justly be convicted of a paucity of melodic effect
in his writing for the voice. He would, one must venture to believe,
have come closer to realising his ideal of what a music-drama should
be if, in the first place, he had been able and willing to restrain
the overwhelming tide of his orchestral eloquence; and if, in the
second place, he had been content to let his dramatis personæ
employ, not (in accordance with Mr. Baughan's wish) a form of lyric
speech richer in purely musical elements of effect, but one of more
naturalistic contour, simpler, more direct, less ornately and
intrusively melodic in its utterance of the text.
It would be fatuous, of course, to deny that there are passages in
Wagner's later music-dramas to which one can point, by reason of their
continent and transparent expression of the dramatic situation, as
examples of a perfect kind of music-drama: which satisfy, not only
every conceivable demand for fullness of musical utterance (for that
Wagner almost always does), but those intellectual convictions as to
what an ideal music-drama should be which he himself was pre-eminently
instrumental in diffusing. In such passages his direct and pointedly
dramatic use of the voice, and his discreet and sparing, yet deeply
suggestive, treatment of the orchestral background, are of
irresistible effect. How admirable, then, is his restraint! As in, for
example, Waltraute's narrative in "Götterdämmerung"; the early
scenes between Siegmund and Sieglinde, and Brunnhilde's
announcement of the decree of death to the Volsung, in "Walküre"; and
in "Tristan" the passage wherein the knight proffers to Isolde his
sword; the opening of the third act; and the first sixteen measures
that follow the meeting of the lovers in the second act—where the
breathless, almost inarticulate ecstasy of the moment is uttered with
extraordinary fidelity, only to lead into a passage wherein the pair
suddenly recover their breath in time to respond to the need of
battling against one of the most glorious but dramatically inflated
outpourings of erotic rapture ever given to an orchestra.
But scenes of such perfect musico-dramatic adjustment are rare in
Wagner. It is not likely, in view of his insuperable propensity toward
musical rhetoric and his amazingly fecund eloquence, that, even if he
had kept a more sternly repressive hand upon his impulse toward
musical elaboration, he could have accomplished the union of drama and
music in that exquisite and scrupulously balanced relationship which
produces the ideal music-drama. That achievement had to wait until the
materials of musical expression had attained a greater ductility and
variety, and until the intellectual and æsthetic seed which Wagner
sowed had ripened into a maturer harvest than was possible in his own
time—it had to wait, in short, until to-day. For there are those of
us who believe that the feat has at last been actually achieved—that
the principles of musico-dramatic structure inimitably stated by Gluck
in his preface to "Alceste" have been, for the first time, carried out
with absolute fidelity to their spirit; and, moreover, with that
cohesion of organism which Gluck signally failed to achieve, and with
that fineness of dramatic instinct the lack of which is Wagner's prime
deficiency.
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.
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.
Tristan and Isolde, in moments of exalted emotion, utter that
emotion with the frankest lyricism; Pelléas and Mélisande, in
moments of like fervour, still adhere to the unformed and
unsymmetrical declamation in which their language is elsewhere
couched. It is the orchestra which sings—which, passionately or
meditatively, colours the dramatic moment. Wherein we come to what is
perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this extraordinary score:
the treatment of the voice-parts. Debussy's accomplishment in this
respect, justly summarised, is this: He has released the orchestra
from its thraldom to the methods of the symphonic poem (to which
Wagner committed it) by making it a background, a support, rather than
a thing of procrustean dominance, thus restoring liberty and
transparency of dramatic utterance to the singing actors. He himself
has succinctly stated the principles which guided him in his manner of
writing for the voices in "Pelléas." "I have been reproached," he has
said, "because in my score the melodic phrase is always found in the
orchestra, never in the voice. I wished—intended, in fact,—that the
action should never be arrested; that it should be continuous,
uninterrupted. I wanted to dispense with parasitic musical phrases.
When listening to a [musico-dramatic] work, the spectator is wont to
experience two kinds of emotion: the musical emotion on the one hand;
and the emotion of the character [in the drama], on the other.
Generally these 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 ... the changes of sentiment and passion felt by
my characters. Its demands are ignored as soon as it is necessary that
these should have perfect liberty in their gestures as in their cries,
in their joys as in their sorrow."
Now Debussy in his public excursions as a critic is not always to be
taken seriously; indeed, it is altogether unlikely that he has
refrained from demonstrations of exquisite delight over the startled
or contemptuous comment which some of his vivacious heresies
concerning certain of the gods of music have evoked. These published
appraisements of his are, of course, nothing more than impertinent,
though at times apt and sagacious, jeux d'esprit. But when he speaks
seriously, as in the defence of his practice which I have just quoted,
of the menace of "parasitic" musical phrases in the voice-parts, and
when he observes that melody, when it occurs in the speech of
characters in music-drama, is "almost anti-lyric," he speaks with
penetration and truth. His practice, which illustrates it, amounts to
this: He employs in "Pelléas" a continuous declamation, uncadenced,
entirely unmelodic (in the sense in which melodious declamation has
been understood). Save for a brief and particular instance, there is
no melodic form whatsoever, from beginning to end of the score. There
is not a hint of the Wagnerian arioso. The declamation is founded
throughout upon the natural inflections of the voice in speaking—it
is, indeed, virtually an electrified and heightened form of speech.
It is never musical, for the sake of sheer musical beauty, when the
emotion within the text or situation does not lift it to the plane
where the quality of utterance tends naturally and inevitably toward
lyricism of accent. He does not, for example, commit the kind of
indiscretion that Wagner commits when he makes Isolde sing the
highly unlyrical line, "Der 'Tantris' mit sorgender List sich nannte,"
to a phrase that has the double demerit of being "parasitically" and
intrusively melodic and wholly conventional in pattern—one of those
musical platitudes which have no excuse for existence in any sincere
and vital score. Nor in "Pelléas" do the singers ever sing, it need
hardly be said, anything remotely approaching a duet, a concerted
number, or a chorus (the snatches of distant song heard from the
sailors on the departing ship is a mere touch of atmospheric
suggestion). The dialogue is everywhere and always clearly
individualised, as in the spoken drama. Yet this surprising fact is to
be noted: undeviatingly naturalistic as are the voice-parts in their
structure and inflection, and despite their haughty and stoic
intolerance of melodic effect, they yet are so contrived that they
often yield—incidentally, as it were—effects of musical beauty; and
in so doing, they demonstrate the unfamiliar truth that there is
possible in music-drama a use of the voice which permits of an
expressiveness that is both telling and beautiful, though it yields
nothing that accepted canons would warrant us in describing as either
melody or melodious declamation. Now Mr. Baughan, whose views
concerning Wagner and his habits have been discussed, craves in the
music-dramas of Wagner a frankness of melody in the vocal writing
whose absence he deplores; and he seems to think that when this
melodiousness of utterance is denied to the voices in modern opera,
all that is left them is something "that an orchestral instrument
could do as well"—something that, inferentially, is anti-vocal, or at
least unidiomatic. It would seem that Mr. Baughan, and those who think
as he does, fail to realise, as I have remarked before, the immensely
important part which it is possible for modern harmony to play in the
combination of a voice and accompanying instruments. It would not be
difficult to demonstrate that a large part of what we are in the
habit of regarding as a purely melodic form of vocal expression in the
modern lyric-drama owes a large and unsuspected measure of its potency
of effect to the modulatory character of its harmonic support. Take a
passage that we are apt to think of as one of the most ravishingly and
purely melodious in the whole of that fathomless well of lyric beauty,
"Tristan und Isolde"—the passage in the duet in the second act
beginning, "Bricht mein Blick sich wonn' erblindet." As one hears it
sung by the two voices above the orchestra, it seems a perfect
example of pure melodic inspiration; yet play the voice-parts, alone
or together, without their harmonic undercurrent, and all the beauty,
all the meaning, vanish at once: without the kaleidoscopic harmonic
color the melodic phrases are without point, coherence, or design. But
this is aside from the point that I would make—that the
potentialities of modern harmony make possible a use of the voice in
music-drama which, while it is remote from the character of formal
melody, may yet be productive of a kind of emotional eloquence that is
exceedingly puissant and beautiful, and that may even possess a
seemingly lyric quality. We find a foreshadowing of this kind of
effect in such a passage as Tristan's "Bin ich in Kornwall?" where
all of the haunting effect of the phrase is due to the modulation in
the harmony into the G-major chord at the first syllable of
"Kornwall." And one might point out to Mr. Baughan that this effect is
subtly dependent upon the co-operation of the voice and the
instruments. The phrase in the voice-part is not one "that an
orchestral instrument could do as well", as Mr. Baughan would at once
recognise if he were to play the accompanying chords on a piano and
give the progression in the voice to a 'cello or a violin.
But while Wagner foreshadowed this manner of making his harmonic
support confer a special character upon the effect of the voice-part,
he did not begin to sound its possibilities. That was left for Debussy
to do; and for the task he was obviously equipped in a surpassing
degree by his unprecedentedly flexible, plastic, and resourceful
harmonic vocabulary—the richest harmonic instrument, beyond
comparison, that music has yet known. The score of "Pelléas"
overflows with instances of this—one may paradoxically call it
harmonic—use of the voice: things that Wagner, with his comparatively
limited harmonic range, could not have accomplished. As instances
where the voice-part, without being inherently melodic, borrows a
semblance of almost lyrical beauty from its harmonic associations,
consider the passage in the grotto scene beginning at Pelléas'
words, "Elle est très grande et très belle", and continuing to
"Donnez-moi la main"; or the astonishing passage in the final love
scene beginning at Pelléas' words, "On a brisé la glace avec des
fers rougis!" or, in the last act, the expression that is given to
Mélisande's phrase, "la grande fenêtre...." Yet note that in such
passages the voice-part does not, in Mr. Baughan's phrase, merely
"weave up" with the orchestra, as he protests that it does in Wagner's
practice; in other words, it is not simply an incidental strand in the
general harmonic texture; it has character and individuality of its
own, though these are absolutely dependent for their full effect upon
their harmonic background. Nor is it, on the other hand, so assertive
and conspicuous that it comes within the class of that which Debussy
repudiates as "parasitic." Here, then, is a method of uttering the
text that not only permits of a just and veracious rendering of every
possible dramatic nuance, but which, by virtue of the means of
musical enforcement that are applied to it, takes on a character and
quality, as music, which are as influential as they are unparalleled.
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.
Those who feel the beauty and recognise the important novelty of the
music of "Pelléas et Mélisande" will for some time to come find it
difficult to speak of it appreciatively without an appearance of
extravagance. One owns, in trying to appraise it, to a compunction
similar to that expressed by one of the wisest of modern critics,
when, after applauding some notable poetry, he whimsically reminded
himself that he "must guard against too great appreciation," and "must
mix in a little depreciation," to show that he had "read attentively,
critically, authoritatively." Well, there is no doubt a very definite
risk in praising too warmly a masterpiece which has the effrontery to
intrude itself upon contemporary observation, and upon a critical
function which has but just compassed the abundantly painful task of
adjusting its views to the masterpieces of the immediate past. I am
quite aware that such praise of Debussy's lyric-drama as is spoken
here will seem to many preposterous, or at best excessive. I am also
aware that the mistaking of geese for swans is a delusion which
afflicts generation after generation of over-confident critics, to the
entertainment of subsequent generations and the inextinguishable
delight of the Comic Muse—which, as Mr. Meredith has pointed out,
watches not more vigilantly over sentimentalism than over every kind
of excess. Yet I am willing to assert deliberately, and with a
perfectly clear sense of all that the words denote and imply, that the
score of "Pelléas" is richer in inner musical substance, in ideas that
are at once new and valuable, than anything that has come out of
modern music since Wagner wrote his final page a quarter of a century
ago. The orchestral score is almost as long as that of "Tristan und
Isolde"; yet in the course of its 409 pages there are scarcely half a
dozen measures in which one cannot point out some touch of genius.
The music is studded with felicities. One carries away from a survey
of it a conviction of its almost continuous inspiration, of its
profound originality. The score overflows with ideas, ideas that
possess character and nobility, and that are often of deep and
ravishing beauty—a beauty that takes captive both the spirit and the
sense. It is difficult to think of more than a few scores in which the
inspiration is so persistent and so fresh—in which there is so little
that is cliché, perfunctory, derivative. Certainly, if one is
thinking of music written for the stage, one has to go to the author
of "Tristan" for anything comparable to it. It has been said that in
this music Debussy is not always at his best, and the comment is
justified. There are passages, most of them to be found in the
interludes connecting the earlier scenes (which, it is well known,
were extended to meet a mechanical exigency), wherein the fine and
rare gold of his thought is intermixed with the dross of alien ideas.
And it is equally true that the vast and wellnigh inescapable shadow
of Wagner's genius impinges at moments upon the score: thus we hear
"Parsifal" in the first interlude, "Parsifal" and "Siegfried" in the
interlude following the scene at the fountain—the scene wherein
Mélisande's ring is lost. But the fact is mentioned here only that
it may be dismissed. The voice of Debussy speaks constantly out of
this music, even when it momentarily takes the timbre of another; and
none other, since the superlative voice of Wagner himself was stilled,
has spoken with so potent and magical a blend of tenderness and
passion, with so rare yet limpid a beauty, with an accent so touching
and so underived.
The nature of Debussy's harmony, and the emphasis which is laid upon
its remarkable quality by his appreciators, have provoked the
assertion that the score of "Pelléas" is devoid of melody, or at least
that it is weak in melodic invention. Of course the whole matter rests
upon what one means by "melody." The comment is a perfect
exemplification of that critical method which consists in measuring
new forms of expression by the standards of the past, instead of
seeking to learn whether they do not themselves establish new
standards by which alone they are to be appraised. The method has
been applied to every innovator in the records of art, and it is
probably futile to cry out against it, or to assert its stupidity. The
music of "Pelléas" is rich in melody. It does not, as we have seen,
reside in the voice-parts, for there Debussy, for reasons which have
already been discussed, has deliberately and wisely avoided formal
melodic contours. It is to be found in the orchestra—an orchestra
which, while it depends in an unexampled degree upon a predominantly
harmonic mode of expression, is at the same time very far from being
devoid of melodic effect. But the melody is Debussy's melody—it is
fatuous to expect to find in this score the melodic forms which have
been made familiar to us by the practice of his predecessors,—men who
themselves were made to bear the primeval accusation of melodic
barrenness. Debussy's melodic idiom is his own, and it often baffles
impatient or inhospitable ears by reason of its seeming
indefiniteness, its apparently wayward movement, and because of the
shifting and mercurial basis of harmony upon which it is imposed. It
would be easy to instance page after page in the score where the
melodic expression is, for those who are open to its address, of
instant and irresistible effect: as the greater part of the scene by
the fountain, in the second act; the whole of the tower scene—an
outpouring of rapturous lyric beauty which, again, sends one to the
loveliest pages of "Tristan" for a comparison; the affecting interview
between Mélisande and the benign and infinitely wise Arkël, in the
fourth act; the calamitous love scene in the park; and almost the
whole of the last act. If Debussy had written nothing else than the
entrancing music to which he has set the ecstatic apostrophe of
Pelléas to his beloved's hair, he would have established an
indisputable claim to a melodic gift of an exquisite and original
kind. It has been said that he is "incapable of writing sustained
melody"; and though just how extended a melodic line must be in order
to merit the epithet "sustained" is not quite clear, it would seem
that in this particular scene, at all events, Debussy may be said to
have compassed even "sustained" melody; for the melodic line—varied,
sensitive, and plastic though it is—is here of almost unbroken
continuity.
In its total aspect as a dramatic commentary the score provokes wonder
at its precision and flexibility. The manner in which each scene is
individualised, differentiated and set apart from every other scene,
is of a vividness and fidelity beyond praise. For every changing
aspect of the play, for its every emotional phase, the composer has
discovered the exact and illuminating equivalent. The eloquence of
this music is seldom abated; it is as pervasive as it is extreme. One
would not be far wrong, probably, in finding this music-drama's chief
and final claim to the highest excellence in its triumphant character
as an expressional achievement; in this it ranks with the supreme
things in music. There are in the score innumerable passages which one
is tempted to adduce as particular instances of ideally fit and
beautiful expression. It is probably unnecessary to allege the quality
of such examples as the scene by the fountain, the perilous encounter
at the tower window, the final tryst in the park, or the interlude
which accompanies the change of scene from the castle vaults to the
sunlit terrace above the sea—music that has an entrancing radiance
and perfume, through which blows "all the air of all the sea"—these
things will be rightly valued by every observer of liberal
comprehension and sensitive discernment: to name them is to praise
them. But there are other triumphs of expression in the score whose
quality is not so immediately to be perceived. I do not speak of the
countless felicities of structural and external detail: felicities
which will repay close and protracted study. I am thinking of remoter,
less obvious felicities: of the grave beauty of the passage in which
Geneviève reads to the King the letter of Golaud to his brother
Pelléas[1]; of the extraordinary final measures of the first act,
after Mélisande's question: "Oh! ... pourquoi partez-vous?"; of the
delicious effect which is heard in the orchestra at Pelléas' words,
in the scene at the fountain, "... le soleil n'entre jamais"; of the
exquisite setting of Golaud's exclamation of delight over the beauty
of Mélisande's hands; of the entire grotto scene,—a passage of
superb imaginative fervour,—with its indescribably poetic ending (the
fragment of a descending scale given out in imitation by two flutes
and a harp); of the passage in the tower scene where the two solo
violins in octaves sing the ravishing phrase that accompanies the
"Regarde, regarde, j'embrasse tes cheveux ..." of the enraptured
Pelléas; of the piercing effect of the Mélisande theme where it is
combined with that of Pelléas in the interlude which follows the
scene at the tower window; of the passage preceding the entrance of
Mélisande and Arkël in the fourth act, where Mélisande's theme
is heard in augmentation; of the passage in the transitional music
following the misusing of Mélisande by Golaud where her theme is
played by the oboe above an interchanging phrase in the horns—a
diminuendo of inexpressible poignancy; of the impassioned soliloquy
of Pelléas preparatory to the nocturnal meeting in the park; of the
theme which is played by the horns and 'cellos as he invites
Mélisande to come out of the moonlight into the shadow of the trees;
of the exquisite phrase given out by the strings and a solo horn as he
asks her if she knows why he wished her to meet him; of the interplay
of "ninth" chords which is heard, in the final act, when Arkël asks
Mélisande if she is cold, and the mysterious majesty of the passage
which immediately follows, as Mélisande says that she wishes the
window to remain open until the sun has sunk into the sea; of, indeed,
the whole of the incomparable music of Mélisande's death; and
finally, of that scene wherein the genius of the musician and musical
dramatist is, as I think, most characteristically exerted: the
curiously potent and haunting scene in which Pelléas and
Mélisande, with Geneviève, watch the departure of the ship from
the port and speak of the approaching storm. Here Debussy, in setting
the simple yet elliptical speeches of the two tragedians, has written
music which is of marvellously subtle eloquence in its suggestion of
the atmosphere of impending disaster, of vague foreboding and
oppressive mystery, which rests upon the scene. The penetrating "On
s'embarquerait sans le savoir et l'on ne reviendrait plus" of
Pelléas, sung over a lingering series of descending chords of the
ninth; the strange, receding song of the departing sailors; the
passage in triplets which is heard when Pelléas speaks of the
beacon light shining dimly through the mist; the veiled and sinister
phrase in thirds on the muted horns which follows the dying-away of
the sailors' call: these are salient moments in a masterly piece of
psychological and (there is no other word for it) subliminal
delineation.
Whatever Debussy may in the future accomplish—and it is not unlikely
that he may transcend this score in adventurousness and novelty of
style—will not imperil the unique distinction, the unique value, of
"Pelléas et Mélisande." It has had, it has been truly said, no
predecessor, no forerunner; and there is nothing in the musical art
that is now contemporary with it which in the remotest degree
resembles it in impulse or character. That, as an example of the ideal
welding of drama and music, it will exert a formative or suggestive
influence, it is not now possible to say; but that its extraordinary
importance as a work of art will compel an ever-widening appreciation,
seems, to many, certain and indisputable. Thinking of this score,
Debussy might justly say, with Coventry Patmore: "I have respected
posterity."
