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.
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.
VI
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.
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."
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