Maurice Maeterlinck and the "Theater of the Unexpressed"

Posted by Charles T. Downey at 10:31 AM | Link to this post

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was born in Ghent, Belgium, to parents who were wealthy, French-speaking, and Catholic. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911: see his acceptance speech. A concise biography is available from Kirjasto, as well as Edward Thomas's biography, Maurice Maeterlinck, 2nd ed. (1911).

• The Life of the Bee (La Vie des Abeilles, 1901), translated by Alfred Sutro
  
• Other works by Maeterlinck from Online Books Page
  
• Ariane et Barbe-bleu (1902), set as an opera by Paul Dukas in 1907
  
• The Blue Bird (1908)

On the history of symbolism, see The Chronology of Symbolism and Art Nouveau. It is a style of literature which uses symbols to express ideas or emotions, in which ultimate meaning is often left intentionally ambiguous. French poets Stéphane Mallarmé and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam are usually considered its greatest practitioners. Maeterlinck met both of them during his advanced studied in Paris in 1885. Symbolism as a movement had peaked around 1890, around the time Mallarmé died, but Maeterlinck continued to write in his own version of the symbolist style for rest of his career. By 1896, Maeterlinck was living in Paris, and he later lived at Saint-Wandrille, an old Norman abbey, outside Rouen, that he had restored.

Maeterlinck wrote in The Treasure of the Humble (1916):

Indeed, it is not in the actions but in the words that are found the beauty and greatness of tragedies that are truly beautiful and great; and this not solely in the words that accompany and explain the action, for there must perforce be another dialogue besides the one which is superficially necessary. And indeed the only words that count in the play are those that at first seemed useless, for it is therein that the essence lies. Side by side with the necessary dialogue will you almost always find another dialogue that seems superfluous; but examine it carefully, and it will be borne home to you that this is the only one that the soul can listen to profoundly, for here alone is it the soul that is being addressed.

The silence and gloom of Belgium and Holland may have been the inspiration for the magical realm of Allemonde. The region had already fascinated French poets, for example as the place of "luxe, calme et volupté" in Baudelaire's poem Invitation au Voyage, in Les Fleurs du Mal. In his essay Le Silence, he wrote that what is left unsaid may be more important than what is said. Maeterlinck was nicknamed le grand taiseur (the great taciturn one), which reminds me of the line "Flamands taiseux et sages" (Flemish, taciturn, and good) in Jacques Brel's song Mon Enfance (My childhood); Brel was also Belgian. As Arkel says at the end of the play Pelléas et Mélisande: "L'âme humaine est très silencieuse . . . L'âme humaine aime à s'en aller seule . . ." (The human soul is very silent . . . The human soul live to go off alone . . .).

Maeterlinck's Pelléas play premiered in 1893. Debussy had already read the play before attending that premiere at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens and knew that he wanted to set it to music. That November, Debussy travelled to Ghent to meet with Maeterlinck to discuss his plans for a musical setting. Maeterlinck was supportive until his mistress, Georgette Leblanc, was not cast as Mélisande, and the role was given to Scottish singer Mary Garden. He then tried to stop the production with a legal injunction, which failed.