Bedouins /

George Moore has remarked that we never speak of Shakespeare or Hugo or Flaubert as the authors of any particular work. Simply to utter their names suffices. I give the illustrations haphazard. Any great artist will do. From Claude Debussy we never ask of what he is the composer. Pelléas and Mélisande is his monument; rather, Mélisande and Pelléas; as, in the case of Isolde and Tristan, it is the woman who is protagonist. Is it because in creating characters of our mother’s sex that the Eternal Masculine is projected across the feminine soul? Or, is woman the genuine, the aboriginal force, that we unwittingly obey, all the while calling her “little woman”? (condescendingly, of course). Oh, what a joke of almost cosmical proportions it would be if the latter supposition be the truer one! But mere male mortals may always console themselves with the ineluctable fact that it is man who has endowed woman with a vital figure in the arts. He has created Ophelia and Gretchen, Beatrice and Francesca, the Milo Venus, the Winged Victory and Isolde, Lady Macbeth and Emma Bovary, Carmen and Mélisande. Honors, then, are even. Even if models existed in nature, the art of man it was that shaped them and breathed life into their clay. But Mélisande is the protagonist in the drama.

The music to Maurice Maeterlinck’s strangely haunting play is so wedded to the moods and situations that as absolute music it is unthinkable. And these moods are usually “con sordino.” Despite his musicianship, Debussy is obviously a “literary” composer; his brain had first to be excited by a dramatic situation, a beautiful bouquet of verse, an episode in fiction, or the contemplation of a picture.

Why demand if the initial impulse be the Monna Lisa or a quatrain by Verlaine? A composer who can interpret in tone the recondite moods of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, or the dramatic prose-poem of Maeterlinck, need not have been daunted by criticism; in sooth, it is the angle of critical incidence that must be shifted to adapt itself to the new optique. Pelléas and Mélisande is a study in musical decomposition; the phrase is decomposed, rhythms are dislocated, the harmonic structure melts and resolves itself into air. His themes are developed in opposition to the old laws of musical syntax. But what have laws in common with genius? Once assimilated, they may be broken as were broken the stone tablets by the mighty iconoclast, Moses. Besides, every law has its holiday. In the Debussyan idiom there seems to be no normal sequence. I say seems, for much water has gone under the bridge since his appearance, and compared with Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ornstein, and Prokofieff he is a conservative; in another decade he may be called a reactionary. Life is brief and art is swift.

Our ears were not accustomed to his novel progressions and the forced marriage of harmonies. His tonalities are vague, but his values just. The introduction to the forest scene when Golaud discovers Mélisande is of an acid sweetness. Without anxious preoccupation Debussy has caught the exact Maeterlinckian note. As it is impossible to divorce music and text—Debussy seems to be Maeterlinck’s musical other self—so it is needless to dwell upon the characteristic qualities of the score. It is like some antique and lovely tapestry that hypnotizes the gaze. It has the dream-drugged atmosphere of Edgar Allan Poe; the Poe of the dark tarn of Auber, of Ligeia, of Ellenora, of Berenice, and Helen, those frail apparitions from claustral solitudes and the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, all as exotic as they are incorporeal. It is the complete envelopment of the poem by an atmospheric musical haze shot through with gleams of light never shown before on land or sea.

We pardon the monotone of mood and music, the occasional muffled cacophonies, the lack of exterior action, and the absence of climaxes; after so long waiting for a passionate outburst, when it does come it is overpowering in its intensity. In music the tact of omission has never been pushed so far. From the pianoforte partition little may be gleaned of its poetic fervor, its reticences, its delicate landscapes, psychologic subtleties. The pattern seldom obtrudes, as the web is spun “exceeding fine.” The orchestration reveals the silver-greys of Claude Monet and the fire-tipped iridescence of Monticelli. His musical palette proclaims Debussy a symbolist, one in the key of Verlaine, who loved nuance for its own sake and detested flauntingly brilliant hues. “Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance ... et tout le reste est littérature,” sang Paul of the asymmetrical jaws and supernal thirst.

Debussy is the most interesting of contemporary music-makers and the most subtle composer for the pianoforte since Chopin. His originality is not profoundly rooted in the history of his art, but his individuality is indisputable. He is a musician doubled by a poet. He is almost as Gallic as Chopin is Polish. Debussy shows race. His artistic pedigree stems from a grafting of old French composers upon ultramodern methods. Wagner, Chopin, certain aspects of Liszt, and Moussorgsky. The visit he made to Russia in 1879 had important consequences. He read the manuscript score of Boris at Rome, he absorbed Moussorgsky and the whole-tone scale, and this influence contributed to the richness and complexity of his style. Above all, he is a stylist. He has Wagner at his finger-tips, and, like Charpentier, he can’t keep Tristan out of his music; it is his King Charles’s head. Naturally such highly peptonized aural diet is not nourishing. Like the poetry and prose-poems of Stéphane Mallarmé, too much Debussy becomes trying to the nerves. Schumann has spoken of the singularly irritating effect of muted dissonances. Pelléas is nearly all muted. The mental and emotional concentration involved in the hearing of this music fatigues as does no other music; not even Tristan.

The range of ideas, like the dynamic range, is limited. Yet there is magic in his music, the magic of evocation. Not to describe, but to evoke, in effortless imagery, is the quintessence of his art. He is a painter of cameos and aquarelles. Never does he carve from the big block; an exquisite miniaturist, he does not handle a bold brush, nor boast the epical sweep of his predecessors; Berlioz for one. But he is more intimate, he is the poet of crepuscular moods. The sadness of tender, bruised souls is in his pages. Of virility there is little trace, it is music of the distaff, and seldom sounds the masculine ring of crossed swords. Chopin, too, had his nocturnal moments, but he also wrote the A flat Polonaise, with its heroic defiance of a Poland crushed yet never conquered; with its motto: “Jescze Polska nie zginiela!”

Long before his death this French master was critically ranged. Lawrence Gilman, the most sympathetic of his commentators, is also the fairest. To his essays I go for delectation. It would be rash to say that Debussy had achieved his artistic apogee; he may have had surprises in store, but it is safe to conclude that Pelléas and Mélisande is his masterpiece, that the dewy freshness of L’Après Midi d’un Faune would never have been recaptured. The symphonic suite, Printemps, the Nocturnes, La Mer, and Images, at once reveal the strength and limitations of Debussy, who was not a builder of the “lofty rhyme,” though he is a creator of complex rhythms; not a cerebral composer—like Vincent d’Indy, for example—but an emotional one; not a master of linear design, but a colorist; a poet, not an architect. His vision is authentic. He knew that the core of reality is poetry; he lived not at the circumference but the hub of things. He loathed the academic. He is the antipodes of Saint-Saëns. He gave us a novel nuance in music, as did Maeterlinck in literature. (Think of Interior with its motive—again Poe—the fear of fear!) Debussy is a composer of nuance, of half-hinted murmurings of “the silent thunder afloat in the leaves,” of the rutilant faun with his metaphysical xenomania, of music overheard, and of mirrored dreams. Little wonder he sought to interpret in his weaving tones Baudelaire and Verlaine, Mallarmé and Maeterlinck. He was affiliated to that choir of sensitive and unhappy souls, of which Maurice Maeterlinck is the solitary survivor. A poet himself, Claude Achille Debussy, even if he had never written a bar of music.

One summer evening in 1903 I was introduced to him at a café on the Boulevard des Italiens. Debussy spoke a few polite words when I told him that I belonged to the critical chain-gang. He had written much musical criticism, chiefly memorable for its unsympathetic attitude toward Schubert and Wagner, not because of reasons chauvinistic, but doubtless the result of a natural reaction against the principal educative forces in his life. At least once in his career an artist curses his artistic progenitors. Wagner must have hated Weber because of his borrowings from him, and I am quite sure Chopin despised Hummel; internal evidence may be collated in the Pole’s wide departure from the academic patterns of Hummel’s passage-work. However, Debussy never went so far as his friend Jean Marnold, who in the Mercure de France concludes a comparative study of Pelléas and Tristan in these words: “Le pathos de Tristan vient trop tard; si tard, qu’il semble aujourd’hui, à sa place adéquate en notre Opéra toulousain.” Yet if Tristan came so late, how is it that there is so much of its music in Pelléas? a fact that Philip Hale doubts. There’s the score. Who steals my idea steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; ’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands; but he that filches from me my style robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed! (This is reorchestrated to suit the simile.) Tristan always seems to be waiting in the wings when Pelléas is played, awaiting his cue to enter. It never fails to be given by Debussy.

Later I asked Maurice Maeterlinck his opinion of Debussy’s music to Pelléas and Mélisande. It was an imprudent question, for Lucienne Bréval had captured the rôle of Mélisande, not Georgette Leblanc. Maeterlinck is a polite man, and his answer was guarded; nevertheless, his dislike of the music pierced his phrases. To him it was evident that his play needed no tonal embellishment, that it was more poetic, more dramatic, without the Debussy frame. He is quite right. And yet the spiritual collaboration of poet and musician is irresistible. And in the garden of the gods there is only one Mélisande. Some little dramas, like little books, have their destiny. The composer of Pelléas and Mélisande suffered from the nostalgia of the ideal, suffered from homesickness for his patrie psychique, the land of fantasy and evanescent visions. The world will not willingly forget him.