DEBUSSY'S
PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE
Claude Debussy (From the painting by Jacques Blanche)
A GUIDE TO THE OPERA
WITH MUSICAL EXAMPLES FROM THE SCORE
BY
LAWRENCE GILMAN
AUTHOR OF "PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC," "THE MUSIC OF TO-MORROW," "STORIES OF SYMPHONIC MUSIC," "EDWARD MACDOWELL" (IN "LIVING MASTERS OF MUSIC" SERIES) "STRAUSS' 'SALOME,'" ETC.
NEW YORK G. SCHIRMER 1907
TO THE MEMORY OF
GUSTAVE SCHIRMER
A MUSIC LOVER OF LIBERAL TASTE
AND SENSITIVE APPRECIATION
AND AN INFLUENTIAL FORCE
IN THE PROMOTION OF
THE FINER THINGS OF THE ART
TO WHICH HIS LIFE
WAS DEVOTED
CONTENTS
ITS ACTION: ACT I ACT II ACT III ACT IV ACT V
THE THEMES AND THEIR TREATMENT: ACT I ACT II ACT III ACT IV ACT V
DEBUSSY'S PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE
"It is not an ill thing to cross at times the marches of silence andsee the phantoms of life and death in a new way. It is not an ill thing,even if one meet only the fantasies of beauty."—FIONA MACLEOD.
I
DEBUSSY AND HIS ART
With the production at Paris in the spring of 1902 of Claude Debussy'sPelléas et Mélisande, based on the play of Maeterlinck, the history ofmusic turned a new and surprising page. "It is necessary," declared anacute French critic, M. Jean Marnold, writing shortly after the event,"to go back perhaps to Tristan to find in the opera house an event soimportant in certain respects for the evolution of musical art." Theassertion strikes one to-day, five years after, as, if anything,over-cautious. Pelléas et Mélisande exhibited not simply a new mannerof writing opera, but a new kind of music—a new way of