DEBUSSY AND HIS ART


With the production at Paris in the spring of 1902 of Claude Debussy's
_Pelléas et Mélisande_, 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. _Pelléas et Mélisande_ exhibited not simply a new manner
of writing opera, but a new kind of music--a new way of evolving and
combining tones, a new order of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic
structure. The style of it was absolutely new and absolutely
distinctive: the thing had never been done before, save, in a lesser
degree, by Debussy himself in his then little known earlier work. Prior
to the appearance of _Pelléas et Mélisande_, he had put forth, without
appreciably disturbing the musical waters, all of the extraordinary and
individual music with which his fame is now associated, except the three
orchestral "sketches," _La Mer_ (composed in 1903-1905 and published in
the latter year), the piano pieces _Estampes_ (1903), and _Images,
Masques, l'Île joyeuse_ (1905), and a few songs. Certain audiences in
Paris had heard, nine years before, his setting of Rossetti's "Blessed
Damozel" (_La Demoiselle Élue_), a "lyric poem" for two solo voices,
female chorus, and orchestra; in the same year (1893) his string quartet
was played by Ysaÿe and his associates; in 1894 his _Prélude à
l'Après-midi d'un Faune_ was produced at a concert of the National
Society of Music; the first two Nocturnes for orchestra, _Nuages_ and
_Fêtes_, were played at a Lamoureux concert in 1900; the third,