employed is the
orchestra of Mozart,--surely, this is something new in modern
musico-dramatic art; surely, it requires some courage, or an
indifference amounting to courage, to write thus in a day when the
plangent and complex orchestra of the _Ring_ is considered inadequate,
and the 113 instrumentalists of _Salome_, like the trumpeters of an
elder time, are storming the operatic ramparts of two continents.

The radicalism of the music was fully appreciated at the time of the
first performances in Paris. To the dissenters, Debussy's musical
personages were mere "stammering phantoms," and he was regaled with the
age-worn charge of having "ignored melody altogether." Debussy has
defended his methods with point and directness. "I have been
reproached," he says, "because in my score the melodic phrase is always
in the orchestra, never in the voice. I tried, with all my strength and
all my sincerity, to identify my music with the poetical essence of the
drama. Before all things, I respected the characters, the lives of my
personages; I wished them to express themselves independently of me, of
themselves. I let them sing in me. I tried to listen to them and to
interpret them faithfully. I wished--intended, in fact--that the action
should never be arrested; that it should be continuous, uninterrupted. I
wished to dispense with parasitic musical phrases. When listening to a
work, the spectator is wont to experience two kinds of emotions which
are quite distinct: the musical emotion, on the one hand; the emotion of
the character [in the drama], on the other; generally they are felt
successively. I have tried to blend these two emotions, and make them
simultaneous. Melody is, if I may say so, almost anti-lyric, and
powerless to express the constant change of emotion or life. Melody is
suitable only for the song (_chanson_), which confirms a fixed
sentiment. I have never been willing that my music should hinder,
through technical exigencies, the changes of sentiment and passion felt
by my characters. It is effaced as soon as it is necessary that these
should have perfect liberty in their gestures as in their cries, in
their joy as in their sorrow." However much one may hesitate to
subscribe to Debussy's generalities, the final justification for his
procedure is in the fact that it is ideally suited to its especial
purpose,--the tonal utterance of Maeterlinck's rhymeless, metreless,
and broken phrases. To have set them in the sust