Pelléas et Mélisande: an introduction

“First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.” Debussy’s advice to the cast rehearsing the original production of Pelléas et Mélisande, which was to open at the Opéra-Comique in April 1902, accurately reflected his approach to writing it. While not forgetting that he was a composer – he obviously could not agree with Mallarmé’s opinion that any music added to Maeterlinck’s play would be worse than superfluous – he did try to forget that he was an opera composer. He tried, that is, to forget what the audience of the day expected from opera which, as he knew from his work on the abandoned Rodrigue et Chimène project, “demands a type of music I can no longer write.” He avoided not only the arias, duets and other set-pieces already rejected by Wagner but also, he hoped, Wagnerism itself.

The fact that he was less than completely successful in excluding operatic precedent is scarcely a matter for regret. Take the key scene, Act IV Scene 4, where Pelléas and Mélisande meet for the last time in the park outside the castle. Nothing could be less operatic than their confession of love: “Je t’aime,” declares Pelléas on a minimal melodic inflection and in complete orchestral silence; “Je t’aime aussi,” Mélisande replies on an unaccompanied monotone. But then, after a pause, and over expressive melody on horn, flute and solo cello in radiant F sharp major harmonies, Pelléas all but bursts into song with the poetic observation “On dirait que ta voix a passé sur la mer au printemps!” If he is not “singing” at this point, he surely is a little later when the instrumental melody reappears fortissimo in the strings and he enters at the top of his range with an ecstatic “Je l’ai trouvée.”

This was the first scene Debussy wrote when he started on the work in 1893 and, although he revised it several times and was able to exorcise from it what he called “the ghost of old Klingsor, alias R. Wagner,” the echoes of Massenet, happily, remain.

Planning at this time to write an article on “The uselessness of Wagnerism,” Debussy was very conscious of the dangers of succumbing, like so many of his French contemporaries, to “old Klingsor’s” influence. And yet the score of Pelléas et Mélisande is abundant in examples of it. Indeed, Maeterlinck’s play has several close parallels with Tristan und Isolde – which might be one reason why, in addition to its uncanny correspondence to what he had once described as the ideal material for an opera, he chose to fashion a libretto from it. Paradoxical that might be but the fact is that, while he could resist Die Meistersinger and the Ring cycle, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, which he saw in Bayreuth in 1888 and 1889 respectively, made an impression too profound to leave him unaffected.

Although he claimed to know Tristan und Isolde by heart – and proved it one day by playing it through from start to finish – it is perhaps less in evidence here than Parsifal. Even so, the Tristan love scene is a significant presence in another nocturnal erotic encounter, Act III Scene 1, where Mélisande lets down her hair from her room in the tower to Pelléas standing enraptured below. Several of the, more numerous, echoes of Parsifal occur in the orchestral interludes, particularly in the extensions Debussy was called upon to make, under pressure, during the rehearsal period (and which are omitted in this version). There are others, however, not least in the musical characterisation of Golaud, whose motif is not unlike that of Parsifal himself and whose brutal treatment of Mélisande in Act IV Scene 2 recalls Klingsor’s tormenting of Kundry. Arkel is related by his harmonic language and the orchestral colours that go with it to the veteran knight Gurnemanz.

Another paradox associated with Debussy’s attitude to Wagner is his use of leitmotifs. On the one hand, he condemned the Wagnerian leitmotif as a “visiting card” presented automatically on entry; on the other hand, he made extensive use of the leitmotif himself. According to one estimate there are as many as 13 leitmotifs in Pelléas et Mélisande, although for the listener, as distinct from the analyst, there are no more than three of vital importance. Two of them are introduced in the orchestral prelude – Golaud’s ominous theme on woodwind in only the fifth bar, after lower strings briefly set the medieval scene, and Mélisande’s expressive melody on oboe shortly after (it has been calculated that Golaud’s makes 59 appearances during the course of the opera and Mélisande’s 74!). The other, which is as languid as Golaud’s motif is muscular, is heard on flute as Pelléas makes his first entry in the Act I Scene 2.

Debussy was careful, however, to draw a distinction between his use of leitmotifs and Wagner’s. Wagner uses them, he said, “to make symphonic music in the theatre” with the result that the words and the dramatic action are subservient to thematic development. If the drama does not require development he avoids it: “Notice that the motif which accompanies Mélisande is never altered,” he wrote. “It comes back in the fifth act unchanged in every respect, because in fact Mélisande always remains the same and dies without anyone – only old Arkel, perhaps? – ever having understood her.”

It is this concern for absolute fidelity to the text that distinguishes Pelléas et Mélisande from all but a few other operas in the repertoire. Richard Strauss clearly understood much of the essence of Debussy’s art when he saw the opera in Paris in 1906 and just as clearly disapproved of it. “Is that all there is?” he asked his companion after the first act. “There’s nothing … no musical phrases, no development. But I’m a musician above all. From the moment music is in a work I want it to dominate. I don’t want it to be subordinate to something else. It’s too humble. There isn’t enough music for me. There are very fine harmonies, very good orchestral effects… But as far as I am concerned it is no more than Maeterlinck’s play alone, without music.”

While Strauss’s reaction is for the most part understandable, his assertion that there are “no musical phrases” is just wrong. Debussy’s score is seething with them – not as song (except in Mélisande’s folk style “Mes longs cheveux”) or as aria, still less as dance. Musical phrases are to be found in the detail of nearly every bar in the orchestra or in a vocal line which, neither recitative nor heightened speech, finds the melodic implications of the natural pitch inflections and rhythms of Maeterlinck’s poetic prose. Strauss might not have liked it but it is rare case of true equality between word and music.

Debussy did not achieve this unaided. We know that he studied Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, which was written with similar ideals in mind and echoes of which are a fairly regular feature in Pelléas et Mélisande, not least in the role of Yniold. But Mussorgsky would never have told his Boris or Dmitri to forget they were singers. Debussy was going back here to the first principles of opera – as the arch-Wagnerite Vincent d’Indy so perceptively and so surprisingly acknowledged when he declared, “Debussy is our Monteverdi!”

Gerald Larner 2008