Aspects of Modern Opera Part 2

VI

_Tristan_ and _Isolde_, in moments of exalted emotion, utter that emotion with the frankest lyricism; _Pelleas_ and _Melisande_, 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, pa.s.sionately 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 "Pelleas." "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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.ds of music have evoked. These published apprais.e.m.e.nts 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 ill.u.s.trates it, amounts to this: He employs in "Pelleas" 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 plat.i.tudes which have no excuse for existence in any sincere and vital score. Nor in "Pelleas" do the singers ever sing, it need hardly be said, anything remotely approaching a duet, a concerted number, or a chorus (the s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 surpa.s.sing degree by his unprecedentedly flexible, plastic, and resourceful harmonic vocabulary--the richest harmonic instrument, beyond comparison, that music has yet known. The score of "Pelleas"

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 a.s.sociations, consider the pa.s.sage in the grotto scene beginning at _Pelleas'_ words, "Elle est tres grande et tres belle", and continuing to "Donnez-moi la main"; or the astonishing pa.s.sage in the final love scene beginning at _Pelleas'_ words, "On a brise la glace avec des fers rougis!" or, in the last act, the expression that is given to _Melisande's_ phrase, "la grande fenetre...." Yet note that in such pa.s.sages 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 a.s.sertive and conspicuous that it comes within the cla.s.s 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 "Pelleas et Melisande" 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 a.s.sertion.

To begin with, its spiritual and emotional flavour are without a.n.a.logy 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 cas.e.m.e.nts 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 "Pelleas et Melisande," Debussy has, through a fortunate conjunction of circ.u.mstances, 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 _Pelleas_ 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sionate, 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 "pa.s.sionate exposition of the most delicate and strange intuitions" is not precisely the kind of aesthetic 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-Saens, Gounod, and Ma.s.senet. 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-Saens, but Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme; and, beyond his own frontier, Rossetti and Maeterlinck. There is scarcely a trace of French musical influence in the score of "Pelleas," 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-Saens and Ma.s.senet, and the French of Debussy, d'Indy, Duparc, Faure, Ravel: and the two orders are as ina.s.sociable 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.

VIII

Those who feel the beauty and recognise the important novelty of the music of "Pelleas et Melisande" 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 compa.s.sed 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 a.s.sert deliberately, and with a perfectly clear sense of all that the words denote and imply, that the score of "Pelleas" 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 n.o.bility, 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 _cliche_, 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 pa.s.sages, 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 _Melisande'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 pa.s.sion, 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 a.s.sertion that the score of "Pelleas" 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 a.s.sert its stupidity. The music of "Pelleas" 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 _Melisande_ and the benign and infinitely wise _Arkel_, 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 _Pelleas_ 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 compa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sage in which _Genevieve_ reads to the King the letter of _Golaud_ to his brother _Pelleas_[1]; of the extraordinary final measures of the first act, after _Melisande's_ question: "Oh! ... pourquoi partez-vous?"; of the delicious effect which is heard in the orchestra at _Pelleas'_ 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 _Melisande's_ hands; of the entire grotto scene,--a pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage in the tower scene where the two solo violins in octaves sing the ravishing phrase that accompanies the "Regarde, regarde, j'embra.s.se tes cheveux ..." of the enraptured _Pelleas_; of the piercing effect of the _Melisande_ theme where it is combined with that of _Pelleas_ in the interlude which follows the scene at the tower window; of the pa.s.sage preceding the entrance of _Melisande_ and _Arkel_ in the fourth act, where _Melisande's_ theme is heard in augmentation; of the pa.s.sage in the transitional music following the misusing of _Melisande_ by _Golaud_ where her theme is played by the oboe above an interchanging phrase in the horns--a _diminuendo_ of inexpressible poignancy; of the impa.s.sioned soliloquy of _Pelleas_ preparatory to the nocturnal meeting in the park; of the theme which is played by the horns and 'cellos as he invites _Melisande_ 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 _Arkel_ asks _Melisande_ if she is cold, and the mysterious majesty of the pa.s.sage which immediately follows, as _Melisande_ 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 _Melisande'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 _Pelleas_ and _Melisande_, with _Genevieve_, 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 _Pelleas_, sung over a lingering series of descending chords of the ninth; the strange, receding song of the departing sailors; the pa.s.sage in triplets which is heard when _Pelleas_ 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.

[Footnote 1: As one out of many instances of similarly striking detail, observe the remarkable and moving progression in the voice-part from the D in the ninth chord on B-flat to the B-natural in the chord of G-sharp minor, at _Genevieve's_ words "... tour qui regarde la mer."]

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 "Pelleas et Melisande." 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."

NOTE

Some of the material contained in the foregoing studies appeared originally in articles published in _Harper's Weekly_, _The North American Review_, and _The Musician_. But for the most part the essays are new; and such pa.s.sages of earlier origin as are retained have been considerably altered and amplified.