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How beautiful those pale pink roses were in that old silver bowl-like a little strange poem, or a piece of Debussy music, or a Mathieu Maris picture-reminding him oddly of the word Leila. Was he wrong in letting Noel see so much of Leila? But then she was so improved dear Leila!... The pink roses were just going to fall!
The Pelléas theme, sung by two flutes, opens the brief introduction to the second act. It is repeated, interwoven with harp arpeggios. Immediately preceding the entrance of Pelléas and Mélisande a muted horn, two flutes, two oboes, and harp sound a chord of singularly liquid quality one of those fragmentary effects in the invention of which Debussy is so curiously happy.
If one has fathomed Debussy, it is easier to play Milhaud, Roger-Ducasse, Samazeuil for the music of the modern French school has much in common.
Mr. Ernest Newman, in writing of Debussy, warmly praises the delightful naturalness of his early compositions. "One would feel justified in building the highest hopes on the young genius who can manipulate so easily the beautiful shapes his imagination conjures up." The work of the early period shows Debussy developing freely and naturally.
Had the new time produced no musical art, had no Debussy nor Scriabine, no Strawinsky nor Bloch, put in appearance, one might possibly have found oneself compelled to believe the mournful decadence of Richard Strauss the inevitable development awaiting musical genius in the modern world.
She was very amiable and gracious, and told me I must marry a German! Because, she said, all good music is by rights, by natural rights, the property of Germany. I wanted to say what about Debussy, and Ravel, and Stravinski, but I didn't.
He knew how to evoke a kind of beauty that was both aerial and enchanted; but it was a clarified and lucid beauty, even then: it was never dim or wavering. He would never, as I have said, have comprehended the art of such a writer as Debussy he viewed the universe from a wholly different angle.
His music is "psychologically subtle and spiritually rarefied: in colour it corresponds to the violet end of the spectrum." Before he became acquainted with the later French idiom Harvey W. Loomis "spontaneously breathed forth the quality of spirit which we now recognize in a Debussy or a Ravel." Curiously enough, however, these statements did not annoy me.
For Debussy has caught and re-uttered, with almost incredible similitude, the precise poetic accent of the dramatist. He has found poignant and absolute analogies for its veiled and obsessing loveliness, its ineffable sadness, the strange and fate-burdened atmosphere in which it is steeped these things have here attained a new voice and tangibility.
It, too, is full of the sense of the shadowiness of things that weighed upon Debussy, has not a little of the accent of the time.
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