Photos 1904 Production Maurice Maeterlinck More from MPR Open Air: A month-long look at music inspired by "Pelleas and Melisande" The Metropolitan Opera performance of Debussy's "Pelleas and Melisande" Resources More about Maurice Maeterlinck Tools E-mail this page Print this page Sponsor

Celebrating "Pelleas and Melisande" through four different composers
by Bill Morelock, Minnesota Public Radio
February 1, 2005

In 1904 Sarah Bernhardt invited Mrs Patrick Campbell to repeat her 1898 success as Melisande in Maeterlinck's romance "Pelleas and Melisande," this time opposite Sarah herself as the male Pelleas. (Courtesy of PeoplePlayUK)

This month on "Open Air" we'll hear music that an enigmatic, hypnotizing play called "Pelleas and Melisande" coaxed out of four great composers. Classical Music host Bill Morelock examines why Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist manifesto fascinated composers as varied as Schoenberg, Sibelius, Faure, and Debussy.

St. Paul, Minn. — Literary movements are, in certain ways, like theoretical physics. They both operate mostly under the radar, undergoing subtle changes, describing rarified events too arcane for the likes of you and me to grasp or care about. But then, every once in awhile, a charismatic personality with a catchy equation (E=mc2), or a thermonuclear device, demands our attention.

Similarly, though we might not know a Symbolist poet from a cymbal crash, subtle vibrations from such an underground, like that surprisingly influential butterfly's wings in Beijing, create waves large enough to reach our ears, by way of the opera house, the concert hall, or (shameless plug) the classical music stations of Minnesota Public Radio each Tuesday night this month.

In the 1890's, just such a ferment was taking place in ferment's home: France. While almost no one was looking, the literary avant-garde switched from one way of reminding us how very puny indeed is human will and volition, to another. The messages remained the same. Only the messengers changed.

Naturalism had been beating us down for decades with a bleakness tailor-made for a post-Darwinian world. Stephen Crane's story "The Open Boat" is a fit representative of ten thousand cheery variations on the same theme. Big ocean, little boat. You do the math. Nature isn't malevolent but, as aware of our presence as we are of mosquitoes in winter, it just won't do us any favors.

Now, though, in the work of some drugged out, dropout, proto-beat poets like Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stephan Mallarme (led spiritually by their early 19th century guru Charles Baudelaire), Naturalism itself was beaten down, supplanted by something called Symbolism.

No one really knew what Symbolism was, and that was how the Symbolists liked it. Providing the clueless with a road map really wouldn't have been Symbolist.

Symbolism was about mere suggestion, the indirect gesture, the dream-like vision. Like all things hip in all ages, you either got it or you didn't. And since dream-like visions tend to be exempt from adhering to rules of structure, linearity and sense, it was easy not to get it.

The upshot, still, was that we human beings contend, vainly, with forces too large for us even to perceive, much less overcome. But instead of cold Nature, Symbolism looked at human matrices, hierarchies, chance meeting, near misses, timing; and once the games began, documented all the emotional wreckage and deadly crimes of passion.

In drama, a Belgian named Maurice Maeterlinck composed a symbolist manifesto for the stage. It premiered in Paris in May, 1893. In a misty ancient setting, a kingdom of shadows and memories called Allemonde, a fortyish prince named Golaud is out hunting the wild boar one day, as princes do, and gets lost. He stumbles across a frightened young woman by a spring. Melisande weeps, and recoils even from the touch of his hand. She, too, is a princess, though far from home and uncertain how she got there. Yet, in the wink of an eye, the two are married, before Melisande has met the man she's destined to love, Golaud's half-brother Pelleas. The cards are dealt with a few vague gestures (the plot-building materials: reverie and fog), and the love triangle guarantees a succession of jealousies, rhapsodies and, ultimately, tragedies.

Pelleas and Melisande fascinated composers. Maeterlinck and Symbolism were all the rage. Little wonder. Musical settings of literary texts usually involved the cutting of extraneous detail. Maeterlinck was kind enough to leave most everything out already. Symbolist tactics brought the phenomenal world, as described by words, and the visceral world, of which music was sovereign, closer than they'd ever been. Within a dozen years Gabriel Faure, Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg and Jean Sibelius would each give music to Pelleas and Melisande.

Faure was the first. He wrote his incidental music for the first British production, at the request of Mrs. Patrick Campbell, in June of 1898, five years after the Paris premiere. He had six weeks to complete the work and recycled some existing material. The famous Sicilienne was originally a piece for cello and piano.

Before Claude Debussy had ever heard of Maurice Maeterlinck, he described his perfect opera librettist: "A poet who half speaks things. Two related dreams. No country, no date . . . characters who do not discuss, submitting to life, destiny, etc." Maeterlinck was so completely the fulfillment of Debussy's dreams that he set the play's words exactly as written. He finished the score within two years, but delays born of the composer's doubts delayed the first performance at Paris' Opera-Comique until 1902.

Arnold Schoenberg didn't even know about Debussy's opera when he became interested in Pelleas and Melisande in 1901. He considered creating an opera himself, but intuition or good luck steered him towards a symphonic poem. Nevertheless, Schoenberg claimed to have "attempted to reproduce every detail in the music. The three main characters are reflected by three themes in the manner of Wagnerian leitmotifs."

Symbolist fever spread to Finland, too. A translation by one Bertel Gripenberg was staged in 1905. Jean Sibelius, busy and somewhat vexed with difficult problems in his Third Symphony, looked on a theater project as a refreshing break. He later created a grand, eight-movement concert suite from the incidental music.

Hope you'll enjoy following how a relatively obscure aesthetic movement in one field fuels another, more resonant artistic form. True, we can't promise a tableau quite so dramatic as a few artful scribblings in a Swiss patent office leading to an expanding universe and the Bomb. But, as always, connecting with this music through such rich details (lost princesses; lean plots) does hold out the possibility of imaginative expansions and explosions for all who listen.