Project Gutenberg's Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande, by Lawrence Gilman

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Title: Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande
A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score

Author: Lawrence Gilman

Release Date: August 8, 2005 [EBook #16488]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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DEBUSSY'S PELLEAS ET MELISANDE

[Illustration: _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

I. DEBUSSY AND HIS ART

II. THE PLAY
ITS QUALITIES
ITS ACTION

III. THE MUSIC
A REVOLUTIONARY SCORE
THE THEMES AND THEIR TREATMENT

DEBUSSY'S PELLEAS ET MELISANDE

"It is not an ill thing to cross at times the marches of silence and
see 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's
_Pelleas et Melisande_, based on the play of Maeterlinck, the history of
music turned a new and surprising page. "It is necessary," declared an
acute French critic, M. Jean Marnold, writing shortly after the event,
"to go back perhaps to _Tristan_ to find in the opera house an event so
important in certain respects for the evolution of musical art." The
assertion strikes one to-day, five years after, as, if anything,
over-cautious. _Pelleas et Melisande_ exhibited not simply a new manner
of writing opera, but a new kind of music-