Acts IV and V of Pelleas et Mélisande - by Debussy

Posted by Timothy M. Ballard at 12:50 PM | Link to this post

The symbolist doctrine subscribes to the goal of saying the least to communicate the most.

IV i – A Room in the castle
Semiquavers from the hair scene (III,i) with foreboding harmonies. Pelléas and Mélisande agree to meet. Hauntingly, Pelléas sates that “it will be our last night!”

IV ii – Arkel enters looks forward to the return of Joy because of Mélisande, yet he pities her. She appears to him as if she is waiting on something dreadful. I believe the lost crown and the lost ring are of great significance – this is before Freud but highly Freudian.

Golaud enters angry with Mélisande – he examines his own sword (again highly Freudian) and notes that Mélisande has innocent eyes as if the “angels of heaven bathe there.)

Arkel “If I were God I would have pity on the hearts of men.”

IV iii – Yniold is playing and his gold ball is trapped and cannot be moved – this is symbolic of destiny and fate. A flock of sheep pass by and they are not going to the stable – Yniold asks, “where will they sleep tonight?” The sheep are destined for

IV iv The Final Scene

Is this Wagnerian…Is this Anti-Wagnerian – I suggest Wagnerian in orchestration and not vocally.
I believe it to be Wagnerian Symbolism taken to the extreme!

Pelléas declares his love…. “How beautiful it is here the dark”

Pelléas is then killed by his brother with his sword!


V – Arkel know it is over and the Mélisande will die.

Pelléas asks for a window to be opened so that she may see the sun set – she has chosen darkness and it will soon envelope her.

Golaud asks Mélisande if she loved Pelléas – her reply is “Mais oui!”
He asks if she was innocent – she affirms her innocence but Golaud doesn’t believe her and she dies.

All hope for the future is in Mélisande’s daughter!

Other Notes on Pelléas

Posted by Charles T. Downey at 4:25 PM | Link to this post

The premiere of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra-Comique was directed by Albert Carré and conducted by André Messager. Maurice Ravel, who was 27 years old, reportedly went to all 14 performances in the opera's first season. Debussy wanted the shortest possible musical interludes between scenes, which is what he published in the first vocal edition of the score in 1902. The stage of the Salle Favart, with its limited wing space, made scene changes time-consuming and required more music to cover them. Debussy added the longer interludes in the first season, revised their orchestration in the second season, and they appear in the full score that he published in 1904. Much of the opera's music was revised and altered throughout Debussy's life. He gave some thought to having Pelléas sung by a woman's voice, although he ended up making him first a baryton-martin, a high baritone with a light high range). In the 1919 version, Debussy recast the role for tenor. Debussy specifically wanted Yniold to be sung by a boy soprano but accepted a female singer for the role in the first production, a precedent which has been followed for the most part ever since.

Mélisande as Golaud's Prey. At the opening of the opera, Golaud has been hunting, but he has lost the prey that he believed he had fatally wounded. On the animal's tracks, he comes upon the girl by the well. The score directs Mélisande to sing her first lines presque sans voix (almost voiceless): "Ne me touchez pas, ne me touchez pas!" The mysterious crown that the girl has thrown in the well may have been given to her by Bluebeard, to whom she was possibly married. (There is some evidence to think that Maeterlinck conceived of her as the only one of Bluebeard's wives to have escaped alive. His play Ariane et Barbe-bleue from 1902 was set as an opera by Paul Dukas in 1907.) In any case, she does not allow Golaud to retrieve the crown from the water. Golaud insists on leading her away, even though he admits in the last line of the first scene, "je suis perdu aussi" (I'm lost, too).

In the second scene of Act IV, Golaud comes in with blood on his forehead, which Mélisande tries to wipe away. In an exact reversal of the opening scene, he insists that he does not want her to touch him and asks menacingly where his sword is. He plans to kill the beggars by the ocean, he says, but he sees that Mélisande is afraid of him. He insists that he is not going to kill her, which in the atmosphere of the opera, we know means that he is planning exactly that. Her innocent look infuriates him, and he becomes more and more agitated. In a horrible scene, he throws his wife around the room by her hair, the perverse reversal of Pelléas's tender playing with her hair hanging down the tower wall, which he witnessed. In Act IV, scene 4, at the lovers' last meeting, Pelléas is afraid to touch Mélisande, and she is breathing so hard that he describes her as a "hunted bird." After hearing much noise from the château, Golaud approaches, strikes down his half-brother, and heartlessly pursues his quarry, Mélisande, into the forest.

Vous/Tu in Maeterlinck's Text. In French, there are two ways of speaking to another person, the formal way of saying you (vous) and the personal way (tu). In general, one uses vous to an unknown adult in a situation in which you want to be respectful, and tu with family, close friends, and children. Using vous with anyone in the latter group is likely to be perceived as cold, and using tu with the former group is seen as rudely condescending. (This system has exceptions and in general is hopelessly complicated for a foreign speaker to understand flawlessly.) If we analyze the ways that Maeterlinck's characters use vous and tu in the play, it reveals some interesting points.

Of course, when Golaud and Mélisande meet in the opening scene, they address each other as vous. By Act II, scene 2, when they are married and Mélisande is tending Golaud in his bed, he calls her tu, but she still refers to him as Seigneur (Lord) and vous. This is how their verbal relationship remains throughtout the opera—in conflict as to their degree of intimacy—until the fourth act, when as he looks for his sword, Golaud coldly begins to call Mélisande vous. In the final scene, as she forgives Golaud, she begins to address him as tu, just before she dies. When Golaud writes to Pelléas in the second scene of Act I, in a letter read to Arkel by Geneviève, he uses tu. In the same scene, Arkel and Geneviève address Pelléas as tu (normal, for his grandfather and mother). In the following scene, however, Geneviève uses vous with Mélisande.

Pelléas and Mélisande, brother- and sister-in-law, call one another vous for the first part of the opera. In Act III, scene 1, where Pelléas plays with her hair as it hangs from the tower window, they both use tu, a sign that their intimacy is established at that point and is reciprocal. When Golaud surprises them, he now addresses his half-brother as vous, which is a sign of disapproval. Golaud continues to use tu with his wife. In the fourth scene of this act, the traditional relationship of powerful adult and weak child is established by Golaud's use of vous to his son, Yniold, and Yniold's use of tu. (For the most part, children today address their parents as tu.) At their final meeting (Act IV, scene 4), Pelléas continues to say tu while Mélisande switches to vous, in an attempt to distance her lover, but then returns to tu when he says that this will be their last time together. They express their love, with incredible softness, both using tu. In the final scene, Arkel and Golaud use tu with Mélisande, but Arkel addresses Golaud coldly as vous.

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.