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Updated: May 7, 2025
An interlude of some fifty measures, in which the Forest, Fate, and Mélisande themes are exploited, introduces the second scene of the act. To an accompaniment of long-sustained chords varied by recurrences of the Mélisande theme, Geneviève reads to the venerable Arkël Golaud's letter to his brother.
The music of the ensuing scene does not call for extended description rather for the single comment that in it Debussy has proved once for all his power of forceful, direct, and tangible dramatic utterance: the music here, to apply to it Golaud's phrase in the play, is compact of "blood and iron" as well it needed to be for the accentuation of this perturbing and violent episode.
It may be called the motive of Mélisande's Gentleness: XXIV. MÉLISANDE'S GENTLENESS As Golaud's still unvanquished doubts and suspicions torture him into harsh interrogations, and he asks her if she loved Pelléas "with a forbidden love," an oboe and two flutes recall, p et doux, the Rapture motive.
The music of the vault scene forms a pointed commentary on the implications of the action and dialogue in character it is dark-hued, forbidding, sinister. As the scene changes again, a very short interlude introduces a new theme that of Little Yniold, Golaud's son, whom he is to use as the innocent tool of his suspicions.
The rhythm of the Fate motive is hinted by violas, 'cellos, and horns as Golaud, in answer to Mélisande's compassionate questioning, observes that he is "made of iron and blood." Nothing has happened, no one has harmed her, she answers, in response to Golaud's questionings: "It is no one. You do not understand me.
He falls in love with her and carries her back to the castle as his wife. At the castle dwells also Pelléas, Golaud's brother, whose growing love for Mélisande is traced through a succession of interviews.
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.
Remember, for example, her question to Pelléas at the end of the first act, "Pourquoi partez-vous?" to which she imparts a kind of dreamy intuitive longing; recall the amazement shining through her grief at Golaud's command that she ask Pelléas to accompany her on her search for the lost ring: "Pelléas! Avec Pelléas!
Here, too, lives Golaud's young half-brother, Pelléas for they are not sons of the same father. Half a year has passed, and it is spring. Geneviève reads to her father, the ancient Arkël, a letter sent by Golaud to Pelléas.
This "vieille et triste légende de la forêt" is alive with images, such as the old and somber castle inhabited by aging people and lying lost amid sunless forests, the rose that blooms in the shadow underneath Mélisande's casement, Mélisande's hair that falls farther than her arms can reach, the black tarn that broods beneath the castle-vaults and breathes death, Golaud's anguished search for truth in the prattle of the child, that could not but call a profound response from Debussy's imagination.
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