The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Claude Debussy · a drame lyrique in five acts and fifteen scenes, to Maurice Maeterlinck’s play of 1892, set in the playwright’s own French prose, cut but not rewritten · eight sung roles and a chorus of sailors off stage · about two and a half to two and three-quarter hours in performance
Mode
Drame lyrique; a prose play set nearly whole and through-composed, with the orchestra kept under the voice and let out only in the interludes between scenes
Mythos
A stranger from nowhere brought into a dying house, and death following her; a husband who is the lover’s brother, the shape of Paolo and Francesca and of Tristan; a crown, a ring, a well, a tower, hair
Phase
Fifteen scenes, each placed by its light; from a theme on D in open fifths to a close in C♯ major, a semitone below, pianissimo
Presentation
Concert music; an opera in five acts setting Maeterlinck’s French prose, with no numbers, no ensemble and no duet, and a chorus of sailors heard off stage in Act I
Register
From a child’s chatter on his father’s knee and a dying woman’s half-sentences to one fortissimo at the end of Act IV; a “Je t’aime” said into silence
Scale
One family across three generations and a fourth born in the last scene; one castle, a forest, a well, the sea; about two and a half hours
Governing Proposition
A man lost hunting finds a girl weeping by a spring who will not say who she is or who has hurt her, marries her, and brings her into a dark house where she loves his younger half-brother; he demands the truth from her at a well, through his child’s eyes at a window, by the hair and at her deathbed, kills his brother at a fountain, and never gets it. The wager of the work is that persons are opaque, first of all to themselves, and that a music kept under the voice for two and a half hours can know what the people on stage cannot say, and fall silent at the one moment they say it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work begins in the low strings, on D, with a slow modal theme in open fifths, the music its commentators call the forest, or fate. It is answered by Golaud’s figure, in whole tones, which will follow him through the work, and by Mélisande’s, given to the oboe. The three persons of the drama are on the first page before a word is sung, and the page neither strives nor suspends: no dominant pulls it forward, no cadence is withheld from it, and the chords move in parallel. Where Tristan opens with a phrase that cannot finish, this opens with one that has no need to. Then a forest, and a man who has lost his way hunting. His first words are “Je ne pourrai plus sortir de cette forêt.”
“I shall never get out of this forest.” The orchestra has already said so.
He finds a girl weeping by a spring. “Ne me touchez pas! ne me touchez pas!”
“Don’t touch me! don’t touch me!” He asks why she is crying, and who has hurt her: “Tous! tous!”
“Everyone! everyone!” She has run away. Something shines at the bottom of the water, a crown, “C’est la couronne qu’il m’a donnée”
“It’s the crown he gave me”, and she will not have it back. He gives his name and his descent, Prince Golaud, grandson of Arkel, the old king of Allemonde; she gives her name and nothing else, and looks at him: “Oh! vous avez déjà les cheveux gris.”
“Oh! you already have grey hair.” She is beginning to be cold. He takes her with him. The voice is syllabic and narrow, on repeated notes, at the pace of French, and the orchestra stays under it. Golaud’s whole part begins here, as a question she does not answer.
The second scene is six months on, in a room in the castle. Geneviève reads to Arkel what Golaud has written: that he has married the girl, that he knows no more of her than on the day he found her, and that a lamp is to be lit on the tower if his house will receive them. Arkel says that perhaps no useless events happen, and that we see only the reverse side of destinies. The third scene is before the castle at evening, with the sea in view, which Geneviève, forty years in the house, says it rarely is: “Il y a des endroits où l’on ne voit jamais le soleil.”
“There are places where one never sees the sun.” Sailors are heard off stage, “Hisse hoé!”, as the ship that brought her puts out. Pelléas, Golaud’s young half-brother, says he may leave tomorrow. The act ends on her question: “Oh!... pourquoi partez-vous?”
“Oh!... why are you leaving?”
Movement II
Act II opens at noon, at a fountain in the park, “la fontaine des aveugles”, the blind men’s spring. Mélisande plays with her wedding ring over the water, and at the stroke of twelve it is gone, into a well with no bottom. What will she tell Golaud? Pelléas answers: “La vérité... la vérité...”
“The truth... the truth...” The second scene is a sickroom: at the stroke of noon, Golaud’s horse threw him. She says what she will say again two acts later: “Je ne suis pas heureuse.”
“I am not happy.” Then he sees her hands. “Où est l’anneau que je t’avais donné?”
“Where is the ring I gave you?” She lies: a cave by the sea. He sends her to find it that night, and names her guide: “Pelléas ira avec toi.”
“Pelléas will go with you.” The third scene is the cave by moonlight, three beggars asleep in the famine, and the two retreat; nothing happens there that the sickroom has not already made happen.
That is the work’s method, and it is a chain. The ring falls at noon and the horse falls at noon; the lost ring sends her to the cave with the one man she should not go with; the errand will lead to the tower, the tower to Golaud’s laugh, the laugh to the vaults and the warning, the warning to the child lifted to the window, the window to the fourth act. Each cause is small, each person acts for a reason that is not the real one, and no one on stage sees the shape. Maeterlinck’s play of 1892, five acts and nineteen scenes, is set in its own prose. Debussy cut four scenes, the servants washing the threshold, Pelléas asking leave to go to a dying friend, a spinning scene, the servants again before the deathbed, and rewrote nothing: no verse was added, no aria text, no ensemble. The repetitions and half-sentences, which drew laughter in 1902, are kept and set as they stand.
The inheritance is Wagner. Debussy went to Bayreuth in 1888 and 1889, and Tristan and Parsifal are everywhere in what he kept: the continuous act, the orchestra under every word, the recurring motifs, the legendary subject, and Tristan’s own situation. He turned the apparatus against its own rhetoric. In October 1893 he wrote to Chausson that he had torn up his first draft of the love scene because the ghost of old Klingsor, which is to say Wagner, kept appearing at the turn of a bar. What he made instead has no duet in a love story, no voice that sings what it feels, no harmony that strains toward a resolution it withholds; the chords move in parallel, modal and whole-tone, and nothing strives. The orchestra is kept under the voice and given its full weight only when no one is singing, in the interludes between scenes, where it says what the scene before it could not.
Movement III
Act III is night, at a window in a tower. Mélisande sings alone, unaccompanied, combing her hair: “Mes longs cheveux descendent jusqu’au seuil de la tour.”
“My long hair falls to the foot of the tower.” Pelléas comes along the path below. She tells him she was born on a Sunday, a Sunday at noon. He asks who is there: “Moi, moi et moi!”
“Me, me and me!” She leans out, and her hair falls over him, the whole length of it, and for the one stretch of open lyricism in three acts the strings and the two harps are let rise. “Je les tiens dans les mains, je les tiens dans la bouche.”
“I hold them in my hands, I hold them in my mouth.” Doves fly out of the tower into the dark. Then Golaud is on the path. “Vous êtes des enfants... Quels enfants! Quels enfants!”
“You are children... What children! What children!” And he laughs.
The next scene is the vaults under the castle, where Golaud takes his brother down. The music is whole-tone darkness, horns and low winds; there is stagnant water, and Golaud holds Pelléas by the arm over it. “Sentez-vous l’odeur de mort qui monte?”
“Do you smell the death rising?” Then they come up, and the scene changes without a break to a terrace at noon, with the sea and the bells. “Ah! je respire enfin!”
“Ah! at last I breathe!” Children are going down to bathe. Golaud, in the open air, tells his brother that he is to avoid her, without making a show of it, and that she may soon be a mother. The warning is given as quietly as the arm was held.
The fourth scene is before the castle at dusk, and Golaud has his small son on his knee. Yniold calls him “petit père”, little father. The father asks about his stepmother and his uncle: whether they are often together, what they say, whether they ever kiss. “Une fois... une fois qu’il pleuvait.”
“Once... once when it was raining.” The boy complains that the beard pricks him. A light goes on in the window above, and Golaud lifts the child to it, to say what he sees, and what the child sees is nothing he can understand. He is frightened and wants to come down, and the act ends on the father dragging the terrified child away. Nothing has been raised above a murmur, and it is the most frightening scene in the work.
Movement IV
Act IV begins in a room in the castle, by day. Pelléas is freed to travel and asks Mélisande for one last meeting, that evening, at the fountain in the park. Arkel speaks to her of youth in a house of the old. Then Golaud enters with blood on his forehead, asking for his sword. Of her eyes: “Fermez-les! Fermez-les! ou je vais les fermer pour longtemps!”
“Close them! Close them! or I will close them for a long time!” He takes her by the hair and drags her across the room, on her knees, crying “Absalon! Absalon!” He stops as suddenly as he began, and says he will wait on chance. When he has gone she says that he no longer loves her, and that she is not happy. Arkel answers her: “Si j’étais Dieu, j’aurais pitié du cœur des hommes.”
“If I were God, I would have pity on the hearts of men.”
The third scene is Yniold alone at the fountain, trying to lift a stone to reach a golden ball that has rolled under it. “Oh! cette pierre est lourde!”
“Oh! this stone is heavy!” He cannot. A flock of sheep goes by with a shepherd, bleating, and then falls silent all at once. The boy asks why the sheep have stopped speaking, and is told: “Parce que ce n’est pas le chemin de l’étable.”
“Because this is not the way to the fold.” It is the one scene in the work in which what is about to happen is seen from outside the house, by someone who cannot understand it, and it is the scene the theatre most often cuts, for the boy’s voice and for its colour. The form needs it; the stage can lose it.
The last scene is the fountain at night. Pelléas is alone: “J’ai joué en rêve autour des pièges de la destinée.”
“I have played in a dream around the snares of destiny.” She comes; he draws her out of the moonlight into the shadow of the trees. Then the orchestra stops. “Je t’aime.” “Je t’aime aussi.” There is no music under the one plain statement in the work, as if the orchestra, which has known everything, has nothing to add. The castle gates are heard closing behind them. “Il est trop tard, il est trop tard!” “Tant mieux! tant mieux!” “Tout est perdu, tout est sauvé!”
“It is too late, too late!” “So much the better!” “All is lost, all is saved!” Golaud is behind a tree. “Toutes les étoiles tombent!”
“All the stars are falling!” Golaud strikes his brother down, and for the first time in the evening the full orchestra is let go. Mélisande flees through the wood with Golaud after her, in silence.
Movement V
Act V is a bedroom in the castle at sunset. Mélisande has been delivered of a daughter, and is dying of a wound a bird would have survived. Golaud blames himself: “J’ai tué sans raison!”
“I have killed without reason!” They had kissed, he says, like little children. She wakes and does not know what she is saying or what she knows. He asks her forgiveness, and she asks what there is to forgive. Then the question his whole part has been: “As-tu aimé Pelléas?”
“Did you love Pelléas?” “Mais oui, je l’ai aimé. Où est-il?”
“But yes, I loved him. Where is he?” Were they guilty? “Non, non, nous n’avons pas été coupables. Pourquoi demandez-vous cela?”
“No, no, we were not guilty. Why do you ask that?” Every answer is true, and none is what he asked, and he cries “La vérité! la vérité!” at a dying woman who has none to give.
They bring her the child, and she pities it. The servants of the castle come into the room unbidden and stand along the wall, and at a moment no one on stage has marked they kneel, all at once; the doctor says they are right. Golaud cries that it is not his fault, and Arkel leads him away: the human soul likes to go away alone, “L’âme humaine aime à s’en aller seule”, and she must not be disturbed. Of the dead woman he says: “C’était un pauvre petit être mystérieux comme tout le monde.”
“She was a poor little mysterious being, like everyone.” Like everyone is the claim of the work, and the last line passes it to the newborn: “C’est au tour de la pauvre petite.”
“It is the poor little one’s turn.” The orchestra closes in C♯ major, pianissimo, a semitone below the D on which it began, neither a return nor a rising into light.
Maeterlinck’s play was published in 1892 and staged in Paris by Lugné-Poe in 1893. Debussy began that autumn with the love scene, destroyed his first draft and wrote it again; the whole was drafted by 1895 and orchestrated in 1901 and 1902, and the interludes were lengthened in rehearsal to cover the scene changes. Maeterlinck disowned the production in an open letter to Le Figaro that April and wished it a prompt failure; the public dress rehearsal was laughed at. The first performance was at the Salle Favart on 30 April 1902, André Messager conducting, Albert Carré directing, with Mary Garden as Mélisande and Jean Périer as Pelléas. Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue (1907), Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole (1911), Stravinsky’s Rossignol (1914) and Berg’s Wozzeck (1925) stand on it. Désormière recorded it in Paris in 1941; Boulez staged it in 1969 and, with Peter Stein, in 1992. Debussy finished no other opera. What the work shows has outlasted the symbolism it came from: people opaque to themselves, a demand for the truth that gets no answer, and a music that knows what they cannot say and falls silent when they say it.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test was applied once by the composer: four of the play’s nineteen scenes are gone, the servants’ two, Pelléas’s leave to go, the spinning scene, each a commentary, a delay or a doubled situation. What remains is a chain in which each small thing causes the next: the ring falls at noon, the horse falls at noon, the lost ring sends her to the cave with Pelléas, the hair brings Golaud’s laugh, the laugh the vaults and the warning, the warning the child at the window, the window Act IV. The orchestra plays for the words or stops. The test still finds give: the sheep scene, essential and separable, which houses cut; interludes whose length the stage set; the cave, a tableau. On the music alone, two tenths higher.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: persons are opaque, first of all to themselves, and the demand that they tell the truth about themselves is a violence that gets no answer. “Je ne sais pas ce que je dis... Je ne sais pas ce que je sais...”
“I don’t know what I’m saying... I don’t know what I know.” Golaud’s whole part is the demand, and at the deathbed each of her true answers is not what he asked. The second disclosure is harm without guilt: “J’ai tué sans raison!”
“I have killed without reason!” and “It is not my fault!” are both true. Arkel’s verdict over the body: a poor little mysterious being, like everyone. Held below the top because the disclosure is made by withholding, and the social world shown is a family and a famine glimpsed.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Beauty is nearly continuous; height in the stronger sense comes less often than in Tristan or the Ninth, by design. The summits: the first interlude, the forest theme given to the full orchestra; the tower, where the hair falls and strings and harps are let rise for the one stretch of open lyricism in three acts; the vaults, terror made of whole-tone darkness; the terrace after them, “Ah! je respire enfin!”
“Ah! at last I breathe!”; the “Je t’aime” in silence; the gates and the murder; and the whole of Act V, elevation at a whisper. Terror is as present as beauty: the child at the window, the hair in Golaud’s fist. Held here because the work refuses grandeur for two and a half hours, and its elevation is of two colours, hushed beauty and sudden dread.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The furniture is a fairytale’s: a maiden found weeping by water, a crown she will not have back, a ring dropped into a well at noon, hair let down from a tower, an old king in a dark castle, sheep led away from the fold, a daughter born to take her mother’s turn. Maeterlinck sets these out and explains none of them. What bears the load is the shape: a stranger from nowhere comes into a dying house and death follows her, and the husband is the brother of the man she will love, the shape of Paolo and Francesca and of Tristan. Debussy builds it in sound, three motifs on the first page and the forest’s return in the last scene. Held below Don Giovanni and Tristan because a share of the structure is atmosphere, not construction.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is Wagner, Tristan and Parsifal above all, and behind it the French lyric stage of Gounod and Massenet. Debussy keeps Wagner’s apparatus, the continuous act, the orchestra under every word, the motifs, Tristan’s own situation, and reverses its rhetoric. Where Tristan says everything, this says “Je t’aime” once, with the orchestra silent; where Wagner’s harmony suspends resolution, Debussy’s removes the need for it; where the Wagnerian voice sings, this voice speaks on pitch; no numbers, no ensemble, no duet, one fortissimo in two and a half hours. The stake was total: nine years, a laughed-at rehearsal, the playwright’s public curse, and a method that produced no second opera, not even by its author. Held below Tristan and the Rite by its road, Mussorgsky, Maeterlinck and Debussy’s own songs, and because the turn is in part a withdrawal.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, which is the gap between what people say and what the music knows. As the play it exists and is less: the not-knowing becomes mannerism without an orchestra that knows. As Wagner it is Tristan, and the opacity is gone. The voices never sing together, in a love story; each person is alone in the music as Arkel says the soul is, “L’âme humaine aime à s’en aller seule”
“The human soul likes to go away alone.” The orchestra carries what a scene withheld into the interlude after it, and at the one plain statement, “Je t’aime,” “Je t’aime aussi,” it stops. Held off the top where the stage shaped the form: the interludes have the length Carré’s sets required, and the scene the form needs is the scene the theatre can lose.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Evidence, not promise: 124 years of return. The Pelléastres of 1902; Messiaen, who taught the score for decades; Jankélévitch (1949); Boulez’s essays and his two stagings (1969, 1992); Holloway’s Debussy and Wagner (1979); Grayson on the genesis (1986); the Cambridge handbook (1989); productions as far apart as Stein’s realism, Wilson’s frozen gestures and the domestic readings of Mitchell and Tcherniakov (2016). The work stays open on its own questions: who Mélisande is; whether she lies or does not know; whether the lovers were, in Golaud’s word, coupables; whether Golaud is a brute or the one person who wants to know anything; whether the ending is pity or indictment. Performance is unsettled too: tenor or baritone, boy or woman, the sheep scene in or out. Below Tristan and Don Giovanni, whose literatures are larger and older.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work reorganised what an opera could be made of, a prose play, speech-rhythm, an orchestra withheld, and every later opera that trusts the audience to hear what is not sung stands on it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is immediate and named. Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue (1907) and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), both on Maeterlinck; Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole; Stravinsky’s Rossignol; Berg’s Wozzeck; Messiaen, Boulez and Dutilleux, who name it the root of the French century; and a harmony of parallel chords that went into French music and past it. Discounted because the method made no school, Debussy did not repeat it, and much of what music took from him it took from La Mer and the piano.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Survival is demonstrated, with no discount for age: in the repertory of the Opéra-Comique from 1902 without a break, abroad within a few years and at every major house since; recorded complete since 1941, under occupation, and continuously after. It has outlived symbolism, which is dead; the play, which is rarely staged and is now carried by the opera; and modernism’s dismissal of Debussy as atmosphere, which Boulez reversed. It has absorbed stagings as opposite as Wilson’s and Tcherniakov’s. The surface fixed to its moment: the symbolist diction, “petit père” and the repeated half-sentences, which drew laughter in 1902; the fairytale décor the text requires; a casting need for a boy’s voice; and a quietness that empties houses unless the staging is strong, a connoisseur’s opera rather than a staple. 124 years, continuous, with a frequency cost that is real.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The making bears weight throughout: a prosody that sets French to pitch syllable by syllable at the pace of speech, with the orchestra always under the voice; an orchestration of divided strings, the oboe for Mélisande, two harps for the hair, with its effects got at piano, so that the one fortissimo lands like a blow; a harmony modal, whole-tone and parallel, the Wagnerian dominant all but banished, held by a frame from D to C♯; motifs transformed rather than announced; four scenes cut and nothing rewritten. The costs are in the text and at its edge: repetitions that can turn to mannerism, “Je ne suis pas heureuse”
“I am not happy” across two acts; a near-monotone in the voice; a baryton-Martin each age supplies rarely; interludes that are, in origin, carpentry. On the music alone, two tenths higher.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Yniold’s chatter on his father’s knee, “une fois... une fois qu’il pleuvait”
“once... once when it was raining”, and the sword at the fountain. One law governs them: violence is spoken quietly or done in the dark, and the music knows more than anyone on stage. It holds from the first line, a man lost in a forest the orchestra has already said he will not leave, to the last scene, a death marked by servants kneeling without a word. The D of the opening and the C♯ of the close are one argument. The strains: the interludes play out at a weight the scenes refuse; the sheep scene is in another colour. The range is one family, one castle, no comedy but a child’s, no crowd, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The orders held, and integrated: consciousness, in the negative, people who do not know what they know; the family across three generations and a fourth born in the last scene; eros and death, unspoken; childhood and old age, each given a voice the lovers lack; the natural order as the drama’s language, forest, sea, well, light; the sacred, in Arkel’s conditional, “Si j’étais Dieu, j’aurais pitié du cœur des hommes”
“If I were God, I would have pity on the hearts of men”; the social world glimpsed, a famine, three beggars asleep in a cave, a shepherd whose sheep are not going to the fold. What holds the axis here is that the social orders are glimpsed, not carried: the state is a name, Allemonde; labour, history and the city are absent; everything routes through one house.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Made at 9.5, with The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 9.4. A form in which the music’s knowing and the voice’s not-knowing are one thing, and the orchestra stops at the one plain statement; a prosody, an orchestration and a harmony that get their effects at piano; a reversal of Wagner’s rhetoric inside Wagner’s apparatus, made at a cost on record; and 124 years of return still unsettled on who Mélisande is and what the ending means.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.9: the family, eros and death, childhood and age, the natural order and the sacred are held and integrated, but the famine and the beggars are glimpsed from the castle and not entered, the state is a name, labour, history and the city are absent, and everything routes through one house. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.8, held by the sheep scene, essential and separable, by interludes whose length the stage set, and by the cave.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.5, The Made at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.4, Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.2, The Unconcealment at 9.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.8, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · the score of Pelléas et Mélisande, with Maeterlinck’s play as Debussy cut it, which is the libretto and part of the unit, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, libretto, recording or text was in hand, and data/texts holds nothing for this work or for Maeterlinck. The work is scored complete, in five acts and fifteen scenes, with the interludes as published and the Yniold scene of Act IV included, in the one version Debussy left; the cuts of the performing tradition are evidence under necessity, not the object, and the other settings of the play, by Fauré, Schoenberg and Sibelius, are other works and are not scored. Words and music are scored together, on Maeterlinck’s French as Debussy set it. French is quoted only where the desk is certain of the words, and only the best known of them; where it is not certain, the sense is given in paraphrase; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and is not charged to the work. The scene counts of play and opera, the key frame by semitone and the aggregate were checked by script. Figures that could not be verified, among them bar numbers, the orchestra in detail, the 1902 cast beyond Garden, Périer and Messager and the running time as a measurement, are not given; the running time is a range across the recorded tradition. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.