Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 8, 2025
With the production at Paris in the spring of 1902 of Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, based on the play of Maeterlinck, the history of music turned a new and surprising page. "It is necessary," declared an acute French critic, M. Jean Marnold, writing shortly after the event, "to go back perhaps to Tristan to find in the opera house an event so important in certain respects for the evolution of musical art." The assertion strikes one to-day, five years after, as, if anything, over-cautious. Pelléas et Mélisande exhibited not simply a new manner of writing opera, but a new kind of music a new way of evolving and combining tones, a new order of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic structure. The style of it was absolutely new and absolutely distinctive: the thing had never been done before, save, in a lesser degree, by Debussy himself in his then little known earlier work. Prior to the appearance of Pelléas et Mélisande, he had put forth, without appreciably disturbing the musical waters, all of the extraordinary and individual music with which his fame is now associated, except the three orchestral "sketches," La Mer (composed in 1903-1905 and published in the latter year), the piano pieces Estampes , and Images, Masques, l'Île joyeuse , and a few songs. Certain audiences in Paris had heard, nine years before, his setting of Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel" (La Demoiselle Élue), a "lyric poem" for two solo voices, female chorus, and orchestra; in the same year his string quartet was played by Ysaÿe and his associates; in 1894 his Prélude
And on all sides discerning and well-informed critics, such as M. Pierre Lalo of Le Temps, M. Louis Laloy of the Revue Musicale and the Mercure Musicale, and M. Marnold of Le Mercure de France, have championed his doctrines and his art.
H. T. Finck tells us that the sonata form is illogical, forgetting perhaps that once it served its purpose; Jean Marnold dubbed Armide an oeuvre bâtarde; John F. Runciman called Parsifal "decrepit stuff," while Ernest Newman assures us that it is "marvellous"; Pierre Lalo and Philip Hale disagree on the subject of Debussy's La Mer while W. J. Henderson and James Huneker wrangle over Richard Strauss's Don Quixote.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking