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Updated: June 26, 2025


Mozart shared the same thought: "Music," he said, "even in the most terrible situations, ought never to offend the ear; it should charm it even there; and, in short, always remain music." As for Debussy's harmonic language, his originality does not consist, as some of his foolish admirers have said, in the invention of new chords, but in the new use he makes of them.

This is the very definition of Debussy's recitative. The symphonic fabric of Pelléas et Mélisande differs just as widely from Wagner's dramas. With Wagner it is a living thing that springs from one great root, a system of interlaced phrases whose powerful growth puts out branches in every direction, like an oak.

In this theatre, which produced Carmen in 1875, Manon in 1884, and the Roi d'Ys in 1888, were played the principal dramas of M. Bruneau, as well as M. Charpentier's Louise, M. Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, and M. Dukas's Ariane et Barbebleue. It may seem astonishing that such works should have found a place at the Opéra-Comique and not at the Opera.

There is of course a typical difference between the "plastic" imagination, dealing with clear images, objective relations, and seen at its best in the arts of form like sculpture and architecture, and that "diffluent" imagination which prefers vaguely outlined images, which is markedly subjective and emotional, and of which modern music like Debussy's is a good example.

Helen's one aim is to translate tunes into the language of painting, and pictures into the language of music. It's very ingenious, and she says several pretty things in the process, but what's gained, I'd like to know? Oh, it's all rubbish, radically false. If Monet's really Debussy, and Debussy's really Monet, neither gentleman is worth his salt that's my opinion.

Not that Debussy's art entirely represents French genius any more than Racine's does; for there is quite another side to it which is not represented there; and that side is heroic action, the intoxication of reason and laughter, the passion for light, the France of Rabelais, Molière, Diderot, and in music, we will say for want of better names the France of Berlioz and Bizet.

And it is not on account of the peculiarities of Debussy's style of which one may find isolated examples in great composers before him, in Chopin, Liszt, Chabrier, and Richard Strauss but because with Debussy these peculiarities are an expression of his personality, and because Pelléas et Mélisande, "the land of ninths," has a poetic atmosphere which is like no other musical drama ever written.

It was not surprising that she had made the acquaintance of Debussy's music; nor that she had at her tongue's end all the arguments for and against it. Her music-teacher was, of course, accountable for this.

Fluid, flexible, vivid, these beautiful harmonies, seemingly woven of refracted rays of light, merge into shadowy melody, and free, flowing rhythm. What we first hear in Debussy's music, is the strangeness of the harmony, the use of certain scales, not so much new as unfamiliar. Also the employment of sequences of fifths or seconds.

'Pelléas et Mélisande' is founded upon Maeterlinck's play of that name, the action of which it follows closely, but not closely enough, it seems, to please the poet, who publicly dissociated himself from the production of Debussy's opera and, metaphorically speaking, cursed it root and branch. Golaud, the son of King Arkel, wandering in the wood finds the damsel Mélisande sitting by a fountain.

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