Chapter VI: Act V

The last act opens in an apartment in the castle. Mélisande is stretched unconscious upon a bed. Golaud, Arkël, and the physician stand in a corner of the room. Some days earlier Mélisande and her husband had been found stretched out senseless before the castle gate, Golaud having still in his side the sword with which he had sought to kill himself. Mélisande had been wounded,--"a tiny little wound that would not kill a pigeon;" yet her life is despaired of; and on her death-bed she has been delivered of a child--"a puny little girl such as a beggar might be ashamed to own--a little waxen thing that came before its time, that can be kept alive only by being wrapped in wool." The room is very silent. "It seems to me that we keep too still in her room," says Arkël; "it is not a good sign; look how she sleeps--how slowly.--It is as if her soul were forever chilled." Golaud laments that he has killed her without cause. "They had kissed like little children--and I--I did it in spite of myself!" Mélisande wakes. She wishes to have the window open, that she may see the sunset. She has never felt better, she says, in answer to Arkël's questioning. She asks if she is alone in the room. Her husband is present, answers Arkël. "If you are afraid, he will go away. He is very unhappy." "Golaud is here?" she says; "why does he not come to me?" Golaud staggers to the bed. He begs the others to withdraw for a moment, as he must speak with her alone. When they have left him, his torturing suspicions, suspicions that will not down, find voice. He entreats her to tell him the truth. "The truth must be spoken to one about to die." Did she love Pelléas? he asks in agony. "Why, yes, I loved him--where is he?" The answer maddens him. "Do you not understand? Will you not understand? It seems to me--it seems to me--well, then, it is this: I ask you if you loved him with a guilty love? Were you--were you both guilty?" "No, no; we were not guilty," she replies; "why do you ask me that?" Arkël and the physician appear at the door. "You may come in," says Golaud despairingly; "it is useless, I shall never know! I shall die here like a blind man!" "You will kill her," warns Arkël. "Is it you, grandfather?" questions Mélisande; "is it true that winter is already coming?--it is cold, and there are no more leaves." "Are you cold? Shall I close the windows?" asks Golaud. "No, no, not till the sun has sunk into the sea--it sets slowly." Arkël asks her if she wishes to see her child. "What child?" she inquires. Arkël tells her that she is a mother. The child is brought, and put into her arms. Mélisande can scarcely lift her arms to take her. "She does not laugh, she is little," says Mélisande; "she, too, will weep--I pity her." Gradually the room has filled with the women-servants of the castle, who range themselves in silence along the walls and wait. "She is going to sleep," observes Arkël; "her eyes are full of tears. It is her soul, now, that weeps. Why does she stretch her arms out so?--what does she wish?" "Toward her child, without doubt," answers the physician. "It is the struggle of motherhood against...." "At this moment?--At once?" cries Golaud, in a renewed outburst of anguish.... "Oh, oh! I must speak to her! Mélisande! Mélisande!--leave me alone with her!" "Trouble her not," gravely interposes Arkël. "Do not speak to her again.--You know not what the soul is.--We must speak in low tones now. She must no longer be disturbed. The human soul is very silent. The human soul likes to depart alone. It suffers so timidly! But the sadness, Golaud, the sadness of all we see!" At this moment the servants fall suddenly on their knees at the back of the room. Arkël turns suddenly: "What is the matter?" The physician approaches the bed and examines the body of Mélisande. "They are right," he says. There is a silence.

"I saw nothing. Are you sure?" questions Arkël.

"Yes, yes."

"I heard nothing. So quickly! so quickly! She goes without a word!"

Golaud sobs aloud.

"Do not remain here," says Arkël. "She must have silence now. Come; come. It is terrible, but it is not your fault. It was a little being, so quiet, so timid, and so silent. It was a poor little mysterious being like everyone. She lies there as though she were the elder sister of her baby. Come; the child should not stay here in this room. She must live, now, in her place. It is the poor little one's turn."

III

THE MUSIC

A REVOLUTIONARY SCORE

Debussy's _Pelléas et Mélisande, drame lyrique en 5 actes et 12 tableaux_, was performed for the first time on any stage at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, April 30, 1902. Its first performance outside of Paris was at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, January 9, 1907; its second was at Frankfort, April 19, 1907. Its third will be the coming production at the Manhattan Opera House, New York. The original Paris cast was as follows: _Pelléas_, M. Jean Périer; _Mélisande_, Miss Mary Garden; _Arkël_, M. Vieuille; _Golaud_, M. Dufrane; _Geneviève_, Mlle. Gerville-Réache; _Le petit Yniold_, M. Blondin; _Un Médicin_, M. Viguié. M. André Messager was the conductor. The work was admirably mounted under the supervision of the Director of the Opéra-Comique, M. Albert Carré.

The fortunes of the opera have not been altogether happy. It has been said that Debussy conceived the idea of writing music for Maeterlinck's play soon after its first performance at the Bouffes-Parisiens in 1893; that, although it was necessary to secure the dramatist's consent to its adaptation, he did not solicit Maeterlinck's permission until he had thought out his musical scheme to a considerable degree of elaboration; and that Maeterlinck (being of that complacent majority of literary men who neither care for nor are intelligently curious concerning musical art) was immensely surprised to learn that his play had suggested a tonal setting. There was much correspondence between composer and dramatist before Maeterlinck finally heard the music of Debussy at a rehearsal at the Opéra-Comique: so, at least, runs the legend. Just when or precisely how the famous and probably inevitable rupture occurred between them, tradition does not make altogether clear. Maeterlinck is alleged to have become incensed on account of certain excisions made by Debussy in fitting the text of the play to music; then, it appears, there was a quarrel over the choice of a singer for the performance, and Maeterlinck published a letter of protest in which he declared that "the _Pelléas_ of the Opéra-Comique" was "a piece which had become entirely foreign" to him, and that, as he was "deprived of all control over it," he could only hope "that its fall would be prompt and noisy." The matter is important only as contributing to the history of Debussy's work, and would scarcely reward detailed examination or discussion.

One would have said, in advance of the event, that Debussy, of all composers, living or dead, was best fitted to write music for Maeterlinck's beautiful and perturbing play. He was not only best fitted, he was ideally fitted; in listening to this music one catches oneself imagining that it and the drama issued from the same brain. It is impossible to conceive of the play wedded to any other music, and it is difficult, indeed, after knowing the work in its lyric form, to think of it apart from its tonal commentary. For Debussy has caught and re-uttered, with almost incredible similitude, the precise poetic accent of the dramatist. He has found poignant and absolute analogies for its veiled and obsessing loveliness, its ineffable sadness, the strange and fate-burdened atmosphere in which it is steeped--these things have here attained a new voice and tangibility.

In calling this a "revolutionary" score one is being simply and baldly literal. To realize the justness of the epithet, one has only to speculate upon what Wagner would have said, or what Richard Strauss may think, of an opera (let us adhere, for convenience, to an accommodating if inaccurate term) written for the voices, from beginning to end, in a kind of recitative which is virtually a chant; an opera in which there is no vocal melody whatsoever, and comparatively little symphonie development of themes in the orchestra; in which an enigmatic and wholly eccentric system of harmony is exploited; in which there are scarcely more than a dozen _fortissimo_ passages in the course of five acts; in which, for the greater part of the time, the orchestra employed is the orchestra of Mozart,--surely, this is something new in modern musico-dramatic art; surely, it requires some courage, or an indifference amounting to courage, to write thus in a day when the plangent and complex orchestra of the _Ring_ is considered inadequate, and the 113 instrumentalists of _Salome_, like the trumpeters of an elder time, are storming the operatic ramparts of two continents.

The radicalism of the music was fully appreciated at the time of the first performances in Paris. To the dissenters, Debussy's musical personages were mere "stammering phantoms," and he was regaled with the age-worn charge of having "ignored melody altogether." Debussy has defended his methods with point and directness. "I have been reproached," he says, "because in my score the melodic phrase is always in the orchestra, never in the voice. I tried, with all my strength and all my sincerity, to identify my music with the poetical essence of the drama. Before all things, I respected the characters, the lives of my personages; I wished them to express themselves independently of me, of themselves. I let them sing in me. I tried to listen to them and to interpret them faithfully. I wished--intended, in fact--that the action should never be arrested; that it should be continuous, uninterrupted. I wished to dispense with parasitic musical phrases. When listening to a work, the spectator is wont to experience two kinds of emotions which are quite distinct: the musical emotion, on the one hand; the emotion of the character [in the drama], on the other; generally they 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, through technical exigencies, the changes of sentiment and passion felt by my characters. It is effaced as soon as it is necessary that these should have perfect liberty in their gestures as in their cries, in their joy as in their sorrow." However much one may hesitate to subscribe to Debussy's generalities, the final justification for his procedure is in the fact that it is ideally suited to its especial purpose,--the tonal utterance of Maeterlinck's rhymeless, metreless, and broken phrases. To have set them in the sustained arioso style of _Tristan und Isolde_ would have been as impossible as it would have been inept. As it is, the writing for the voices in _Pelléas_ never, as one might reasonably suppose, becomes monotonous. The achievement--an astonishing _tour de force_, at the least--is as artistically successful as it is unprecedented in modern music.

In his treatment of the orchestra, Debussy makes a scarcely less resolute departure from tradition. There is little symphonic development in the Wagnerian sense. His orchestra reflects the emotional implications of the text and action with absolute and scrupulous fidelity, but suggestively rather than with detailed emphasis. The drama is far less heavily underscored than with Wagner; the note of passion or of conflict or of tragedy is never forced. His personages love and desire, exult and hate and die, with a surprising economy of vehemence and insistence. Yet, unrhetorical as the music is, it is never pallid; and in such truly climacteric moments as that of Golaud's agonized outbreak in the scene with Mélisande, in the fourth act, and the ecstatic culmination of the final love-scene, the music supports the dramatic and emotional crisis with superb competency and vigor.

He follows Wagner to the extent of using the inescapable device of representative themes, though he has, with his usual airy inconsistency, characterized the Wagnerian _Leitmotiv_ system as "rather coarse." It is true, however, that his typical phrases are employed far more sparingly and subtly than modern precedent would have led one to expect. They are seldom set in sharp and vividly dramatic contrast, as with Wagner; nor are they polyphonically deployed. Often they are mere sound-wraiths, intended to denote moods and nuances of emotion so impalpable and evanescent, so vague and interior, that it is more than a little difficult to mark their precise significance. Often they are mere fragments of themes, mere patches of harmonic color, evasive and intangible, designed almost wholly to translate phases of that psychic penumbra in which the characters and the action of the drama are enwrapped. They have a common kinship in their dim and muted loveliness, their grave reticence, the deep and immitigable sadness with which, even at their most rapturous, they are penetrated. This is a score rich in beauty and strangeness, yet the music has often a deceptive naïveté, a naïveté that is so extreme that it reveals itself, finally, as the quintessence of subtlety and reticence--in which respect, again, we are reminded of its perfect, its well-nigh uncanny, correspondence with the quality of Maeterlinck's drama.

As it has been remarked, Debussy's orchestra is here, with few exceptions, the orchestra of Mozart's day. On page after page he writes for strings alone, or for strings with wood-wind and horns. He uses the full modern orchestra only upon the rarest occasions, and then more often for color than for volume. He has an especial affection for the strings, particularly in the lower registers; and he is exceedingly fond of subdividing and muting them. It is rare to find him using the wood-wind choir alone, or the wood and brass without the strings. His orchestra contains the usual modern equipment--3 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, an English horn, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, bass tuba, kettledrums, glockenspiel, cymbals, 2 harps, and strings; yet one may count on but little more than the fingers of both hands the pages in which this apparatus is employed in its full strength. And in spite of this curious and unpopular reticence, we listen here, as M. Bruneau has observed, to "a magic orchestra"--an orchestra of indescribable richness, delicacy, and suppleness--an orchestra that melts and shimmers with opalescent hues--an orchestra that has substance without density, sonority without blatancy, refinement without thinness.

The music, as a whole, is as insinuating as it is unparalleled. Many passages are of an hypnotic and abiding fascination. There is something necromantic in the art which can so swiftly and so surely cast an ineluctable spell upon the heart and the imagination: such a spell as is cast in the scene at the _Fontaine des Aveugles_, in the second act; or when, from the window in the castle tower, Mélisande's unbound hair falls and envelops Pelléas--an unforgettable page; or when the lovers meet for the last time at the Fountain of the Blind; or in the scene of Mélisande's death--one of the most pathetic and affecting pages in all music. One must wonder at the elasticity and richness of the harmonic texture--which, while it is incurably "irregular," is never crude or inchoate; at the distinction of the melodic line; at the rhythmical variety; at the masterly and individual orchestration. No faculty of trained perception is required justly to value the excellences of Debussy's score. There is great beauty, great eloquence, in this music. It has sincerity, dignity, and reserve, yet it is both deeply impassioned and enamoringly tender; and it is as absolutely personal, as underived, as was _Tristan_ forty years ago.

THE THEMES AND THEIR TREATMENT

The score of _Pelléas et Mélisande_ ill brooks the short and ruthless method of the thematic annotator. As I have pointed out in the foregoing pages, its themes are often so indeterminate, so shadowy and elusive, as to rebuke the analyst who would disengage and expose them. Many of them are simply harmonic hues and half-lights, melodic shreds and fragments, whose substance is as impalpable as mist and whose outlines waver and fade almost before they are perceived. Few of them are clearly and definitely articulated; for the most part they are, as I have called them, mere "sound-wraiths," intentionally suggestive rather than definitive, evocative rather than descriptive. If one ventures to exhibit and to name them, one does so rather for the purpose of drawing attention to their beauty, their singularity, and their delicate potency, than with any thought of imposing an arbitrary character upon them or of insisting upon what seems to be their essential meaning--which is often altogether too recondite for positive identification. I shall not, therefore, attempt to dissect the music measure by measure, but shall endeavor rather to survey it "in the large," to offer simply a general indication of its more significant features. Nor shall I offer any further justification or apology for the titles which I have adopted for the various representative themes than to say that they have seemed to me to be sufficiently supported by their association with the moods and events of the drama. It is, of course, entirely possible that apter designations might be found for them; I offer those that I have chosen more as an invitation to the sympathetic and the inquisitive than from any desire to impose my own interpretation upon unwilling, dissenting, or indifferent minds.