The Opera of Suggestion – on Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande

Mary Garden, who created the role of Mélisande at the 1902 premiere. Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

I. What Is Not Said

At a certain point in the fourth act, when Pelléas et Mélisande are finally alone by the fountain in the park and the castle gates have closed behind them, the orchestra builds. Pelléas breaks out in an almost ecstatic Tout est perdu, tout est sauvé!– all is lost, all is saved – and the strings rise under him in a pulsating movement. We know as listeners what operatic convention demands of Debussy now: that the orchestra should carry us into the love declaration itself, that the two voices should unite in fortissimo, that a thematic climax should give the love its mythic weight.

It does not come. Debussy lets the orchestra fall away – almost abruptly – just before the two lovers come together to say what has gone unsaid. Pelléas says, in a barely audible voice: Je t'aime. Mélisande answers, even lower, almost without tone in her voice: Je t'aime aussi. The orchestra is gone. Then Debussy lets it come briefly and fleetingly back, just as Pelléas comes out with his incredulous outburst: Oh! qu'as-tu dit, Mélisande!... On a brisé la glace avec des fers rougis!The orchestral climax that should have lain at the love declaration itself comes, then, only a few bars later – and with a quite different character from what convention demands. Not a triumphant union, but a brief, almost shocked recognition that something irreversible has happened. Then Golaud breaks in from the shadows and the opera turns toward its catastrophe.

I have sat with this moment many times. It is one of the places in the whole of operatic literature where I as a conductor most clearly feel I am standing before something I cannot quite make my own. Every conductor is trained to build, to shape, to lead toward culminations. Here I must do the exact opposite: when the orchestra has built up, I must let it fall away. I must let the silence come. The score tells me that I must trust that the unspoken is stronger than the spoken. And it is a trust that costs, every time afresh.

I am not going to pretend that I have cracked the code of this opera. Pelléas et Mélisande is one of the works I as a conductor have struggled most with to get under my skin – yes, to assimilate, to take into body and mind in the way I ordinarily work to take a work in. And I have gradually begun to think that there may be something fundamentally wrong with that very expectation in myself. This is not an opera that is to be owned. It is an opera that is to be given space. It resists the grip, deliberately, systematically, in every bar. It is possible, I now think, that my own difficulty in getting it under my skin is not a shortcoming in my preparation, but a response I share with the work itself – that the opera is quite simply built as something that is not to be owned.

This is what I want to write about here. Pelléas et Mélisande as the opera of suggestion – as an operatic work built on the principle that what is not said often says more than what is said, and that what cannot be grasped must be the deepest experience the whole thing is about. It is a radical move in an operatic-historical landscape that had been defined for forty years by Wagner's enormous declarations. And it is, in my view, the most courageous single work in operatic literature from the time around the turn of the century.

II. An Opera Against the Current

Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande had its premiere on 30 April 1902 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. The road there was unusually long. The composer had seen Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist play at its premiere in Paris as early as May 1893, when he was thirty years old, and had been immediately gripped. The same year he asked for permission to set the play as an opera, and was granted it. But the composition itself took him nearly ten years. He wrote, discarded, reworked, set the project aside and took it up again. He was a composer who did not trust his first instincts.

To understand how radical this work is, I think it is important that we remember where opera stood in Europe around the turn of the century. Wagner had been dead since 1883, but his influence had never been greater. Tristan und Isolde and the Ring cycle had defined what opera could be: long musical streams, leitmotifs that transformed themselves through the entire work, the orchestra as dramatic protagonist, acts that built themselves up toward long ecstatic climaxes. German opera had become a kind of standard measure, and French composers stood in a difficult position. Either one imitated Wagner – as many did, and with varying success – or one had to find a completely different way.

Debussy did the latter. He had made pilgrimages to Bayreuth in both 1888 and 1889, he knew Wagner's scores inside and out, and he admired Wagner's harmonic genius deeply. I think it is impossible to hear Debussy's harmonic language without hearing how much he had learned from, for example, Tristan. But precisely because he knew Wagner so well, he decided that French opera could not continue on Wagner's path without losing its own identity. He therefore sought something else, and found it first in the symbolists – Mallarmé, Verlaine, and above all Maeterlinck – with their aesthetic of suggestion, ambiguity, and the indirect.

Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande was perfect material. The play is set in a mythical kingdom that Maeterlinck calls Allemonde. The characters are princesses and princes, castles and towers, but the action is not epic; it is chamber-musical. Mélisande, a mysterious young woman found weeping by a forest spring, is brought to the castle by Prince Golaud, who has gone astray while hunting. She marries him. She meets his younger half-brother Pelléas. The two fall in love without saying it. Golaud becomes suspicious and finally kills Pelléas. Mélisande dies, perhaps of sorrow, perhaps after a difficult birth, perhaps of both – it is never quite clear.

It is a plot, but not an action in the Wagnerian sense. It is rather a series of scenes in which something unspoken grows between people, and thereby also grows between the characters on stage and the audience. The main point, for me, is never explicit; everything is implied, suggested, half-completed. Maeterlinck wrote the characters as if they were half-people, more than full dramatic subjects – they do not so much express themselves as they are expressed by the situation around them. Mélisande herself does not know where she comes from, or why she weeps by the spring. She answers evasively to most questions, and when she answers, her answers are more often questions in return.

Here, I think, is something central. Pelléas et Mélisande is an opera about people who do not let themselves be caught, neither by each other nor by the audience. Golaud's tragedy is that he wants to know – he wants Mélisande to tell him the truth about her relationship with Pelléas, he wants certainty, he wants to possess her in the form of knowledge. She cannot give him that. Not because she is hiding anything, but because she herself does not own that kind of certainty. She is, to borrow a term from a philosophy I find useful to have in peripheral view here, a Thou, not an It – something that can only be met, never grasped.

Debussy found in this a form that fitted his musical intuitions. He wrote an opera without traditional arias. The characters do not sing out; they speak musically, in a highly cultivated recitative style that always lies close to natural speech, but is never quite the same. The orchestra is large – full Romantic forces with doubled woodwinds, four horns, two harps – but almost always toned down. The most important musical moments are often the instrumental interludes between the scenes, where Debussy uses the orchestra alone to say what the characters do not say, or cannot say.

The premiere was controversial. Maeterlinck himself was outraged, because Debussy had chosen the Scottish-American soprano Mary Garden for the role of Mélisande instead of Maeterlinck's own lover, the singer Georgette Leblanc. Maeterlinck distributed an open letter to the press before the premiere and urged the audience to wish the opera a failure. It was a scandal. Nevertheless: critics, conductors, and a certain part of the audience immediately understood that something new had happened. Within a decade Pelléas became one of Europe's most frequently performed and most influential new operas. And it has since stood as a possibility – not a model, for no one has managed to do it after – but a possibility, a proof that opera can be something quite different from what Wagner had made of it.

III. Silence as Method

My reading of Pelléas et Mélisande – and it is a reading, not a truth – is that Debussy's great discovery here is to make restraint into an active musical strategy. What is not sung is as important as what is sung. What does not reach a conclusion is often more honest than what does.

What does this mean in practical terms? I think it means that Debussy never lets the music scale up into melodramatic format. The singers sing in a register that is close to spoken language – often quiet, always controlled, with rarely more than two or three bars continuously in what one might call "song" in the traditional sense. The orchestra does not comment on the text with added emotion; it creates atmospheres that surround the text. When something big happens – Mélisande loses her ring in the spring in Act Two, Pelléas dies in Act Four, Mélisande dies in Act Five – the musical response is often almost parodically discreet. A quiet chord. A brief melodic gesture. An oboe line that slowly descends in the register. And so on. As if Debussy wanted to say: the great moment is already inside you; I do not need to underline it.

It works because it creates space. Wagner gives us everything – every thought, every feeling, every gesture is there in the music, almost tyrannically unfolded. Debussy gives us the suggestion and lets us fill in the rest ourselves. It is a quite different contract between the work and the listener. If Wagner tells you what the characters feel, I think Debussy asks you to work it out yourself.

For me as a conductor this is a particular challenge, and it is personal for me in a way I rarely feel. It is tempting to "help" Debussy's score. To give the few truly expressive moments a little extra weight. To let an orchestral high point become a little more marked. To make the end of an act more clearly closed. All of these are impulses I have trained through a life in music and in the conductor's trade – to shape, to build, to lead forward. If I give in to these impulses here, I think I lose the whole work. Debussy's Pelléas only works if the conductor manages to hold back, to resist all the impulses that a traditional operatic conductor has internalised.

And this is for me the place where the essay meets something in myself as a conductor. I have always thought about my rehearsal-room work that I work my way into a piece – that I assimilate it, get it under my skin, bring it into my body. That is true, and it functions, for most of what I conduct. But with Pelléas I have gradually had to acknowledge that the impulse itself may be wrong. This is perhaps not a work that is to go under my skin. It is a work that must be allowed to exist in the space between me, the orchestra and the listener – as a guest I cannot and should not own, only give room to. I cannot assimilate Mélisande, any more than Golaud can. The ethics of the work are the same on the inside and the outside: the other is to be allowed to remain other.

It is, as I see it, one of the most courageous choices a conductor can make. It is easier to deliver drama; it is harder to deliver silence without making it dull. The conductor who manages the latter has found Debussy's words. And I suspect it is a task that never becomes "finished" – that one must find it anew each time, in each rehearsal, in each performance. Pelléas teaches me not to be finished.

IV. Four Moments That Open

Here I shall break with my own habit from the other essays and dwell on four moments instead of three. Pelléas is a large work, a long evening in the theatre, and it deserves an arc with more stops. The four I choose go through the opera in time: the opening, the tower scene in Act Three, Je t'aime aussi in Act Four, and Mélisande's death in Act Five. Each of them makes something specific clear to me about the work, and each represents something I as a conductor must learn anew each time.

The first is the opening scene. Pelléas et Mélisande opens without an overture. There is no orchestral preparation, no thematic exposition. We find ourselves immediately in a forest where Prince Golaud, having lost his way while hunting, discovers the young Mélisande weeping by a spring. The music that opens is transparent – flutes, clarinets, harp, muted strings. It is not a theme; it is a mood, a colour. Debussy writes in modal harmony that avoids clear functional direction. The chords glide through each other without pointing toward any definite place.

I hear this opening as a programmatic declaration. Debussy says to the listener from the first bar: we are not in Wagner's world. We are not in Verdi's world. We are in a place where the music does not insist, but suggests. A place where tonality is not a course we are to be led through, but a landscape we are to be allowed to wander in. And we must be willing to make the wandering without having the answers served to us along the way.

For the conductor the opening demands a certain kind of listening. It is the colours, not the lines, that must lead. Each individual instrumental entry must be exactly balanced. The transitions must be seamless – they must glide, not sound. And the tempo must be just that tempo which gives each flash of colour time to register with the listener without the whole losing its direction. If I use too much tempo, I lose the mood. If I use too little, it becomes slack. This is one of the scenes I have spent most time on in my preparations, and one of those where I most often feel that I have not quite hit the mark. The opening is one of Debussy's most subtle tests of the conductor's discipline.

The second is the scene at the tower in Act Three. Mélisande stands on the balcony of a tower with her long hair hanging down. Pelléas stands below. They speak, but it is what is not said that is the drama – it is from this scene clear that they both know what they feel, and that they both know that the other knows. Mélisande's hair falls down over Pelléas, and he winds it around himself as if they were embracing. It is one of the most sensual scenes in the whole of operatic literature, and at the same time one of the most restrained. No one kisses. No one says "I love you". Everything happens, and nothing happens, at the same time.

The music here is almost chamber-musical. The harp and muted strings dominate. There are no orchestral climaxes, only a sustained, low, burning intensity. For me as a conductor this is a scene that demands that I find a quite specific dynamic line: low throughout, but not flat. There must be warmth in the stillness, a pulsing undertone in the apparent calm. If it becomes too loud, we lose the magic. If it becomes too quiet, we lose the life. I have gradually come to think that this scene is one of the most difficult in the whole opera to conduct, precisely because it demands of me that I balance two things that intuitively pull in opposite directions – stillness and pulse, that is, movement.

It is also a scene that says something central about what the two lovers are together. They meet each other without asking each other anything. Pelléas does not try to get Mélisande to tell him anything – about her past, about Golaud, about what she feels. He simply is there, with her, in the immediate nearness. I find it remarkable on Debussy's part that he has written this as an acoustic scene without confrontation. The two lovers have already moved past the need for explanations. They are, perhaps only for a few minutes, in a meeting that does not try to grasp.

The third is what I opened the essay with: the Je t'aime aussi moment in Act Four. I return to it now, because it is impossible to write about this opera without giving it the place it deserves.

The orchestra has built itself up. Pelléas and Mélisande are finally alone in the park, by the same spring where the work began. All that the long opera has held back now seems to gather toward a single point. And then – at the very moment of culmination – the orchestra collapses to near silence. Pelléas says Je t'aime almost without musical support. Mélisande answers Je t'aime aussi even lower; "d'une voix très basse" Debussy writes in the score. It is not an articulated song-phrase; it is almost a breath that barely carries tone.

And then – this is what I find to be sheer genius – Debussy lets the orchestra come briefly back, only as a short, almost shocked exhalation. Pelléas says: Oh! qu'as-tu dit, Mélisande!... Je ne l'ai presque pas entendu... On a brisé la glace avec des fers rougis! (Oh, what was it you said, Mélisande! I almost did not hear it... The ice has been broken with red-hot iron!) It is a line that says everything about what it is finally to be allowed to say the unsaid. The ice is broken – but broken with red-hot iron, violently, with damage. Something irreversible has happened.

For me as a conductor this is the place where I must remind myself each time that less is more. The temptation to let the orchestra swell larger at the moment of transition, to give Je t'aime more weight, to make the love declaration sound like a love declaration – it is great. It is a resistance the conductor must learn here, more than a technique. All that is technical is really easy. What is hardest for me here is to dare to trust what Debussy has written.

The fourth is Mélisande's death in Act Five. After Golaud has killed Pelléas, Mélisande has entered an obscure state – she is perhaps ill, perhaps she has given birth to a child (it is never quite clear), perhaps she has simply ceased to be alive in the way others are alive. She lies in a bed. The servant women stand along the walls. Golaud asks her repeatedly about her love for Pelléas. She does not answer him clearly – her answers are as much refusals of the question as they are answers to it. Then she dies, almost imperceptibly.

Debussy lets this scene be almost without gesture. The music is quiet throughout the scene. When Mélisande dies, it is not a great orchestral climax; it is a deep silence in the orchestra, broken by a few chords in the strings that glide over into a chorus of the servant women singing a quiet lament. Then the curtain falls. This, in my opinion, is one of the most muted death scenes in the whole of operatic literature, and it is one of the most moving. Mélisande dies as she has lived: unfinished, suggested, half present.

I feel as a conductor here that I stand at the place the work has been preparing me for from the first bar. Mélisande remains Mélisande through the whole opera – she never lets herself be owned, never explained, never understood. She dies without giving Golaud what he wants, without giving the audience what an ordinary operatic plot would offer. She goes back where she came from, into the same mysterious obscurity that brought her to Allemonde. And my task as a conductor is to let it happen. Not to hold her to account. Not to close the scene. To let the chorus lament sound as it sounds – not as an ending, but as something that continues into the silence after the curtain has fallen.

V. Coda

Pelléas et Mélisande is a work that does not resemble other operas. It demands of the listener a different kind of attention – not to wait for the big moments, but to dwell in the small ones. It demands of the conductor a different kind of leadership – not to build toward climaxes, but to hold a finely tuned space. And it demands of the singers something that almost goes against their basic training: to sing as if whispering, not to project.

For me, Debussy's great breakthrough here is that he showed that opera could be something other than what Wagner had made of it. It is not a rejection of Wagner – Debussy admired Wagner deeply, and we can hear it in his harmonic language. It is an alternative path. An opera that whispers rather than shouts. That suggests rather than declares. That lets the listener do most of the work herself. That does not demonstrate, but invites.

It is an aesthetic attitude that has shaped much of twentieth-century music theatre. Every time a composer decides that the emotional truth lies in what is not said, and that the orchestra is to be prompter rather than narrator, we live in Debussy's legacy. But I think it is also an ethical attitude. Mélisande is allowed to remain unknown. Golaud does not get his answer. And that is perhaps the opera's own protest against all the forces in the world that want whole human beings turned into known objects. Mélisande remains one who can only be met, never grasped. That is, in the final analysis, Debussy's view of the human being, written in music.

For me as a conductor the task is to give myself over. The work does nothing to convince me. It takes its place on the stage and offers silence. My task is not to conquer it but to place myself alongside it. The day I think I have "understood" Pelléas et Mélisande is the day I have misunderstood it. So I keep working with it, each time afresh, without getting it under my skin – and I learn from it, each time afresh, that not everything beautiful is something one owns. Some of the most beautiful things are those one can only be near.