Debussy and Maeterlinck

During the highly fraught rehearsal period before the first performance of Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra-Comique in 1902, Maurice Maeterlinck challenged Claude Debussy to a duel. The composer did not accept the challenge. Frustrated by this failure to exact revenge for what he considered an abuse of his rights as the author of the play on which the opera was based, Maeterlinck burst into Debussy’s home in rue Cardinet and threatened him with a stick. The composer called for the smelling salts. When Maeterlinck wrote to Le Figaro to disassociate himself from the opera and to express the hope that its failure would be “prompt and resounding” Debussy made no reply.

The basic difference between Debussy and Maeterlinck, who was as accomplished in swordsmanship as he was in poetry, was that the playwright had a violent side to him and the composer did not. It was a difference surely more profound than the immediate cause of their dispute, which was that Debussy had given Maeterlinck’s mistress, Georgette Leblanc, reason to believe that she would be the first Mélisande and had then awarded the part to Mary Garden.

According to Leblanc, it was not Debussy who had turned against her but the management of the Opéra-Comique. When she had sung Carmen there she had “repulsed certain advances,” she said, “and I had to pay the price of my intransigence.” True or false, it made no difference to Maeterlinck who was just as happy to take on Albert Carré, the director of the theatre, as he had been to challenge Debussy. He even rehearsed the encounter: “Put yourself there in the place of Carré,” he told a friend as he backed him to a wall and thrust a sword into his hand.

While Maeterlinck’s letter to Le Figaro was concerned mainly with the casting issue, it went on to say that Debussy and Carré had “imposed arbitrary and absurd cuts”on his play, making it “incomprehensible.” In fact, in order to finalise the libretto nine years earlier the composer had travelled to Ghent to discuss the project with the playwright who, Debussy wrote at the time, “authorized me to make any cuts I like and even suggested some very important and useful ones himself.”

Whoever was to blame, Maeterlinck did have a valid point at least about the loss of his Act III, Scene 1, which makes the problematic role of Yniold so much clearer in the play. The effect of the cutting of Act V, Scene 1, on the other hand, created a fascinating anomaly. This is where the servants of the castle discuss the events that have led to the present tragic situation, with Pelléas dead, Mélisande dying and Golaud so badly wounded that he cannot walk unaided. At the end of the previous act in the opera we see Golaud stab Pelléas with his dagger and that is all. In Act V of the opera we are not told that, after killing his half-brother, Golaud had turned his sword on himself. We are left to gather that he had also wounded Mélisande and, if we are to take him literally, that Golaud is dying too, but we don’t know why.

In his literally conceived production for Welsh National Opera - the direct antithesis of the present Glyndebourne production - Peter Stein clearly believed that this was a mistake on Debussy’s part: he had Golaud wrapped in bandages in the last act to demonstrate that he was suffering from a real, bleeding wound, however inflicted. But was it a mistake? Isn’t the characterization so much more interesting, Debussy might have asked himself, if Golaud’s mortal suffering derives from pure remorse rather than a self-inflicted wound? Debussy could, after all, have had Golaud turn his sword on himself in the stage directions at the end of Act IV. But, far from that, he shrinks, as Maeterlinck did not shrink, from instructing Golaud to pursue Mélisande through the forest.

By cutting the scene with the servants Debussy spares us the gory details of how Mélisande and Golaud were found lying outside the castle on the morning after the murder, the latter with his sword still stuck in his side. The servants also tell us that Pelléas was found at the bottom of the “fontaine des aveugles” - the well where Mélisande had apparently so frivolously and yet, in Pelléas’s presence, so significantly lost Golaud’s wedding ring in Act II. Presumably, Golaud had returned from his pursuit of Mélisande to dump Pelléas’s body there.

In avoiding, if not actually contradicting, the swordsman playwright’s account of the violent events on that fateful night, Debussy added a human dimension to Maeterlinck’s cardboard villain of a Golaud. It is true that Debussy did not shrink from the violence in Act IV, Scene 2, where Golaud in a jealous rage takes his pregnant wife by the hair, orders her to her knees, drags her from side to side and backwards and forwards and forces her down to the floor. Indeed, the dramatic impact of the music at this point makes it stand out in painfully sharp relief to the rest of the score. But the symbolism is vitally important here. This is the hair that Mélisande had let down into Pelléas’s passionate embrace when Golaud discovered them. This, in short, is Mélisande’s sexuality. Her husband abuses it but, in the opera if not in the play, the crippling remorse he experiences in the last act mitigates the offence.

Debussy can be forgiven too for opting for Mary Garden, in spite of her apparently comic Scottish accent, rather than Georgette Leblanc: “This is she…this is my Mélisande!” he exclaimed on first hearing her. No one else would do. Even Maeterlinck came round to her, eventually. Having refused to go anywhere near the opera for nearly twenty years, he finally saw it at the Metropolitan Opera with Garden as Mélisande. “For the first time I have entirely understood my own play,” he told her, “and because of you.” Later still, questioned about his quarrel with Debussy, he confessed that “today I find that I was completely wrong in this matter and that he was a thousand times right.”

Gerald Larner©