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Updated: June 27, 2025
The fortunes of the opera have not been altogether happy. 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.
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.
As to Vincent d'Indy, you differ with his scheme, yet he is a master, as was César Franck a master, as are masters the two followers of D'Indy, Albert Roussel and Theodat de Sévérac. Personally I admire Paul Dukas, though without any warrant whatever for placing him on the same plane with Claude Debussy, who, after all, has added a novel nuance to art.
He whom one might suppose almost native to the Paris of Debussy and Magnard and Ravel, of Verlaine and Gustave Kahn and Huysmans, has found comfortable an environment essentially tight and illiberal, a society that masks philistinism with toryism, and manages to drive its radical and vital and artistic youth, in increasing numbers every year, to other places in search of air.
Sommerville, lose their money, and you'd see how unimportant Debussy and Masaccio would be to them, compared to having to black their own shoes!" "Well, upon my word!" exclaimed Morrison. "Are you at eighteen presuming to a greater knowledge of life than I at forty?" "I'm not eighteen, I'm twenty-three," said Sylvia. "The difference is enormous.
The tone-poems of Debussy and the ballets of Ravel and Strawinsky, the scintillating orchestral compositions of Strauss and Rimsky and Bloch, could scarcely have come to be had not Berlioz called the attention of the world to the instruments in which the colors and timbres in which it is steeped, lie dormant.
Although Berlioz has his place at the Chevillard and Conservatoire concerts, it is to the Châtelet that his followers flock; and their enthusiasm has not been affected by the campaign that for several years has been directed against Berlioz by some French critics under the influence of the younger musical party the followers of d'Indy and Debussy.
We have the scale of Debussy and his successors to draw upon, their new chords and successions of fourths and fifths for new technical formulas are always evolved out of and follow after new harmonic discoveries though there is as yet no violin method which gives a fingering for the whole-tone scale.
But the sexual impulse which underlies it is singularly fine, strong, and controlled. The strange and burdened winds, the subtle delirium, the disorder of sense, that stir at times in the music of Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, are not to be found here.
Not often subtle in impulse or recondite in mood, his art has nothing of the impalpability, the drifting, iridescent vapours of Debussy, nothing of the impenetrable backgrounds of Brahms. He would have smiled at the dictum of Emerson: "a beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty of which we can see the end."
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