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The result would have been as inconceivable before Maeterlinck undertook the writing of drama as, to-day, it is inimitable and untouched. Maeterlinck's play, as adapted by Debussy for musical setting, becomes a "lyric drama in five acts and twelve tableaux."
Being so young, so pale, and so contemporary, one expected him to sing thin, elusive music by Debussy, Faure, or Ravel. He seemed never to have heard of these composers, but sang instead threatening songs, such as, 'I'll sing thee Songs of Araby! or defiant, teetotal melodies, like 'Drink to Me only with thine Eyes! His voice was good, and louder and deeper than one would expect.
He was one of the young Germans who was passionately fond of Berlioz; and it is due to Wolf that France was afterwards honoured in the possession of this great artist, whom French critics, whether of the school of Meyerbeer, Wagner, Franck, or Debussy, have never understood.
Very little art, as she had once said, would "stand" daylight; only Shakespeare or Dante or Beethoven and perhaps Bach, could complete with the sun. Georgie, for his part, would have liked rather more light, but after all Debussy wrote such very odd chords and sequences that it was not necessary to wear his spectacles.
His art succeeds to that of Moussorgsky and Debussy quite as much as does that of Strawinsky and Ravel; he rests quite as heavily on the great European traditions of music as he does on his own hereditary strain. Indeed, he is of the modern masters one of those the most conscious of the tradition of his art. He falls heir to Bach and to Haydn and to Beethoven quite as much as any living musician.
But, like a Byzantine Empress, slender and feeble in body, laden with precious stones, it was surrounded with eunuchs: snobs, esthetes, and critics. The nation was not musical: and the craze, so much talked of during the last twenty years, for Wagner, Beethoven, Bach, or Debussy, never reached farther than a certain class.
The significant work of the most considerable musicians of our time of Strauss, Debussy, Loeffler, d'Indy has few essentially romantic characteristics. It is necessary to distinguish between that fatuous Romanticism of which Mr.
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.
There was nothing like it to be found in Wagner, or in his more conspicuous and triumphant successors in, so to speak, the direct and royal line. Richard Strauss was, clearly, not writing in that manner; nor were the brother musicians of Debussy in his own France; nor, quite as obviously, were the Russians.
If they had artistic enthusiasms, it was because they regarded the arts as did the Roman conquerors as elements created for no other reason than to enhance their triumphs. Debussy, she suggested, had been born to give them a cause for displaying their jewels at the opera, just as Titian had existed in order that their acquisition of a painting by his hand might be cabled round the world.
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