he Opera-Comique: so, at least, runs the legend. Just when
or precisely how the famous and probably inevitable rupture occurred
between them, tradition does not make altogether clear. Maeterlinck is
alleged to have become incensed on account of certain excisions made by
Debussy in fitting the text of the play to music; then, it appears,
there was a quarrel over the choice of a singer for the performance, and
Maeterlinck published a letter of protest in which he declared that "the
_Pelleas_ of the Opera-Comique" was "a piece which had become entirely
foreign" to him, and that, as he was "deprived of all control over it,"
he could only hope "that its fall would be prompt and noisy." The matter
is important only as contributing to the history of Debussy's work, and
would scarcely reward detailed examination or discussion.

One would have said, in advance of the event, that Debussy, of all
composers, living or dead, was best fitted to write music for
Maeterlinck's beautiful and perturbing play. He was not only best
fitted, he was ideally fitted; in listening to this music one catches
oneself imagining that it and the drama issued from the same brain. It
is impossible to conceive of the play wedded to any other music, and it
is difficult, indeed, after knowing the work in its lyric form, to think
of it apart from its tonal commentary. For Debussy has caught and
re-uttered, with almost incredible similitude, the precise poetic accent
of the dramatist. He has found poignant and absolute analogies for its
veiled and obsessing loveliness, its ineffable sadness, the strange and
fate-burdened atmosphere in which it is steeped--these things have here
attained a new voice and tangibility.

In calling this a "revolutionary" score one is being simply and baldly
literal. To realize the justness of the epithet, one has only to
speculate upon what Wagner would have said, or what Richard Strauss may
think, of an opera (let us adhere, for convenience, to an accommodating
if inaccurate term) written for the voices, from beginning to end, in a
kind of recitative which is virtually a chant; an opera in which there
is no vocal melody whatsoever, and comparatively little symphonie
development of themes in the orchestra; in which an enigmatic and wholly
eccentric system of harmony is exploited; in which there are scarcely
more than a dozen _fortissimo_ passages in the course of five acts; in
which, for the greater part of the time, the orchestra