The fact that "Pelleas" is the most eloquent of all Debussy's works and
his eternal sign does not, then, signify that he did not grow during the
remainder of his life. A complex of determinants made of his music-drama
the fullest expression of his genius, decreed that he should be living
most completely at the moment he composed it. The very fact that in it
Debussy was composing music for the theater made it certain that his
artistic sense would produce itself at its mightiest in the work. For it
entailed the statement of his opposition to Wagner. The fact that it was
music conjoined with speech made it certain that Debussy, so full of the
French classical genius, would through contact with the spoken word,
through study of its essential quality, be aided and compelled to a
complete realization of a fundamentally French idiom. And then
Maeterlinck's little play offered itself to his genius as a unique
auxiliary. 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.
This "vieille et triste legende de la foret" 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
Melisande's casement, Melisande'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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