Claude Debussy and his opera "Pelléas et Mélisande"

In the end of the nineteenth century, the musical life in Paris was marked by the powerful presence of a German genius - Richard Wagner. The Grand Opera features performances by Lohengrin and Valkyrie. The young Claude Debussy is an enthusiastic fan of Wagner, makes piano excerpts from Wagner’s musical dramas and performs them with singers again at the Grand Opera. For two years, the still unknown composer visits the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth where he listens to "Parsifal", "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" and "Tristan und Isolde". Long ago, Debussy dreamed of writing an opera, but he did not get a good story. And the form in which he wants to create the music is so unusual that after various attempts he almost quits. His searches in the field of pure tonal art have ignited his hatred of the classical development of the form. In music, Debussy traces the freedom that it contains more than any other art because it is the result of the mysterious connections between nature and imagination.

In May 189, he created "Afternoon of a Faun", thirty-year-old Claude Debussy was present at "Theatre de Bouff Parisien" in the Paris premiere of the "Pelléas et Mélisande" drama by Belgian poet Maurice Meterlink. Here is how the composer imparts his impressions from this deeply symbolic work: "Despite its unreal atmosphere, the drama of Pelléas contains much more humanity than so-called" documentary stories. "It seemed to me that it was great for what I wanted to create." Debussy gets in touch with Maeterlinck, and after getting his permission to write music on the drama, he starts work. The first editing of the opera was completed two years later, but Debussy re-started reworking and completing the score. It takes another decade to pass before his most significant work appears on the stage of the Parisian Opera Comic. The date is April 30, 1902. After the premiere, a critic writes that the composer "did not pass on the poetic essence of the drama," another accuses his score that "the melodic line is never in the voice, but always in the orchestra," the third one calls Debussy "an unsuspecting careerist" has violated the laws of the musical "world trinity": melody, harmony and rhythm, while the fourth states with complete confidence that the opera "Pelléas et Mélisande" is a "denial of all musical art". Despite these unfavorable reviews, success is great and Debussy himself says, "I'm not claiming to have found everything in Pelléas, but I tried to push a path that others could follow, expanding it through personal finds, and releasing the musical drama from the heavy coercion it has been living in for so long. "

"Pelléas et Mélisande"

Several years later, writer Romain Rolland, who lived from 1866 to 1944, a contemporary of Maeterlinck and Debussy, published in Berlin's Der Morgen magazine an article in which he tries to clarify the reasons for this special success. Rolland believes the premiere of "Pelléas et Mélisande" is one of the most important facts in the history of French music. The reasons for this are primarily Moral Nature. The opera has found expression in a mental form that is characteristic not only of France but also of part of the contemporary European cultural elite. The atmosphere in which the drama of Maeterlinck unfolds is a melancholic retreat of the will to live before fatality. Despite the illusions of the human pride, which thinks of a mistress, unknowable and insurmountable forces guide the end of the tragic comedy of life. One lives and dies without knowing why. "These fatalistic thoughts, which reflect the fatigue of an intellectual aristocracy of Europe, were greatly surrendered in Debussy's music, adding to their own poetry and sensual charm, the intoxication that makes their infection more insurmountable. "Pelléas et Mélisande's music attracts the soul to the shriek of a lusty unity," notes Rolland. But the success of the opera is also due to aesthetic, which has a specific French character. The victory of "Pelléas et Mélisande" marks a legitimate, natural, even life-defying French genius against foreign art, above all against Wagner's music and against his clumsy followers in France. Romain Rolland thinks that the Wagner drama does not correspond to the French spirit: neither by its artistic taste, nor by its perception of the theater, nor by its musical temperament. The Wagner's ideal is above all an ideal of power. Wagner's sensual and intellectual enthusiasm, his mystical passion for sensual delights, is poured into a fiery torrent that sweats and burns everything on his way. And French art, continues Rolland, is more inclined to measure and the veracity of expression than to wealth and power. That is why the revolt of the French spirit in the name of the naturalness and the taste of all exaggerations and extremes of passion - real or false - is completely understood. Debussy's musical drama "Pelléas et Mélisande" is a manifestation of this rebellion. The passions are half-spoken. Only the inconspicuous vibrations of the melodic line convey the love that grows in the hearts. From a scenic point of view, "Pelléas et Mélisande" also opposes the ideals of Bayreuth. The vast, almost disproportionate proportions of Wagner's drama, its dense structure, the tension of the will that these giant works hold from the beginning to the end, their ideology, which is often revealed at the expense of action and even of passion, are also very distant to the French taste for clear, logical and sober things. The small paintings of Pelléas et Mélisande, short, well-outlined, each marking a new stage in drama development, without any particular emphasis, have a completely different structure from that of the Wagner theater.

Claude Debussy plays piano

To all these reasons for Debussy's success are added purely musical considerations whose value is even more significant. This is how Romain Rolan justifies his observation that "Peleas and Melissa" has reformed the dramatic music of France: "Pelléas et Mélisande Symphonic Tissue is very different from Wagner's drama." Wagner is an ever-evolving organism, a system of intertwined phrases whose powerful oak-like growth drives branches in all directions. If we want to use a different comparison, it is a picture that is no doubt painted with a brush stroke but wishes to create an impression on it and, despite the retouches and the overlay of new paints with which it is overloaded, acts as something completely , as an indestructible alloy, which is almost unimportant On the contrary, Debussy's system is a kind of classical Impressionism - exquisite, harmonious and softened. It uses musical paintings, each of which corresponds to a swift and nuanced moment of the soul, and the paintings themselves are created by small, brilliant, exquisite, and gentle coloring, which is more akin to Mussorgsky's art than to Wagner's art, despite two or three versions of Parsifal that do not affect the essence of the work. In Pelléas et Mélisande, there are no permanent leitmotifs from the beginning to the end of the drama, topics that have the desire to convey to the music individual characters and characters, but only phrases expressing changing feelings and altering themselves with them . Moreover, Debussy's harmony is not, as in Wagner and in the entire German school one to say, a chain of harmonies strictly subordinated to the despotic logic of the counterpoint; it is the harmony that contains the beginning and purpose in itself. As it tries to convey only a momentary impression, without dealing with what needs to be done further, it is free of care, it tastes of the charm of the moment without hurry. In the garden of chords, it takes the best of them; because the veracity of the expression is only the second law governing its choice: the first law is TO GIVE. Here, Debussy's art is also an interpreter of the aesthetic sensuality of his race, which seeks pleasure in art and prevents ugliness easily even when it is justified by the demands of drama and truth. Mozart thought in the same way: "Music," he says, "even in the most terrible situation, should never annoy the ear, and then it must be fascinated and always be music." As to Debussy's harmonious language, its originality does not consist, as his improbable admirers, in the discovery of new chords, but in the new way in which he uses them. There are no Debussy-style features that can not be found isolated in many of the masters before him - Chopin, Liszt, Shabrie, Richard Strauss. But it is no less true that Debussy is always his and that "Pelléas et Mélisande", the country of the nonaccord, has a poetic atmosphere that does not resemble the atmosphere of any musical drama before it.

Ultimately, the orchestra is deliberately limited, relieved, divided; Debussy feeds aristocratic contempt for the orgies of sounds that Wagner's art has been accustomed to. He is refrained and purified as a beautiful classical phrase from the late seventeenth century. "Nothing too" - this is the artist's slogan. Instead of blending the timbre to gain mass effects, it separates their individualities from one another or combines them gently without altering their own nature. Like the Impressionist artists of that time, he painted in pure colors but with exquisite restraint that repels every rudeness like ugliness. " Romain Rolland thinks that Claude Debussy could hardly have had such a clear view of his musically-dramatic reform as his followers are developing: this reform is rather instinctive. This is precisely its power. It responds to a deep and unconscious need of the French spirit. Therefore, the writer concludes, the historical significance of Pelléas et Mélisande surpasses its artistic value. Debussy - this lusty, casual yet determined personality, whose dreams are always visionary and sophisticated, has along with all his talents a quality that is not so close to almost any other great musician, except maybe in Mozart: this is the genius for taste.

Image source: 1, 2