I had gone to Guanajuato to visit a painter friend. I would not say that she went native but being a bad flier I had repeatedly put off my visit. By the time I got there she was well absorbed into the expatriate artists' community and we could not relate to each other. She was always laid back and now even more so, being satisfied to display her work in group showings inside a makeshift barn gallery with the rest of the little community whose ambition had been baked out of them by the ever present sun.
I liked and even envied to a certain degree the camaraderie but it seemed as if everyone's artistic growth was stunted, sodden under countless pitchers and sangria. All the paintings sort of looked like each other's too, acrylic incest. Very quickly I became bored.
There needed to be an even mix, some components of angst or aggression to
prompt new growth. I went to what passed for "downtown" which was a
fountain that had seen better days surrounded by a few bars, a cafe and hotel,
most of these things being owned by the same family, the patriarch who had
emigrated here from
More and more I avoided spending time in what they called the community or commune but what I secretly referred to in my correspondence with friends as the compound.
I stayed at the corner table of the cafe, half of which was under the awning the other half in the sun, so that I could get some heat but then retreat when it became too much.
I spent all day there, drinking and shooting the breeze with Ambrose Bierce. We drank tequila alternating between that and the strong coffee which went perfectly with the little cheroots he always had his jacket pocket stuffed with.
We would be the last to leave, nightly, I saw him wander towards the hotel, he insisted on going alone and I always offered to accompany him anyways. The cafe gave me one of their flaming torches to find my way home with, it being understood that I would bring it back to be re-soaked in kerosene the next day.
I stopped painting, preferring to just sketch and write. Ambrose and I would swap notebooks to read when we met up the next day. He would let his cheroot hang out of the far corner of his mouth pointed sharply down, using an index finger to turn the page "Some good lines kid."
He told me about a dream he kept having. He is at the marketplace and feels like he is being watched. It makes him uneasy so he cuts down a side street to find himself behind all the buildings. Three men whose features are hidden by the mask like shadows of their hats' brims appear at the end of this alley. He starts to run but still feels them. Looking behind him to see how close they are, he trips over a rock. His book bag falls open and loose pages of a story take wing. They seem to fall in slow motion with the twirling as can be found in the descent of a snow flake.
One page hits him in the back of the head. He turns but it is sort of stuck either to his head or in mid air so that when he turns he sees the sharp white background with black ink of his writing which he is too close to decipher. The piece of paper grows, so now it is a wall against which he is stuck. The words all start to pulse and expand, the black ink spreading, blossoming outwards so that the white of the paper wall is being eclipsed. He tries to see something, anything but now there is only black and the sensation of falling.
This dream wakes him up with a start. Covered in sweat, he only feels better over breakfast at the cafe the next morning. Yet, as bad as it is, over the course of our time together he has gained the insight that this dream is part of him and has come to uneasily accept it the way one would one's height or eye color.
I began to have my own nightmares although they were worse in not being as linear as his. I knew it was time to leave, I announced it suddenly like pulling a loose tooth. My friend seemed indifferent, I think I had gotten on her nerves or embarrassed her. Ambrose and I said goodbye my last night but next morning my friend was being pissy about someone giving me a ride to the airport, so I had to catch the bus, the stop being by the cafe.
While waiting, I looked to our usual table but it remained empty.
I was happy to be home but found an odd side effect of my trip. As I looked
at favorite statues in the
I wanted to recreate the vertigo displacement, the spacey feeling of sun, too much coffee and tobacco had brought on during my trip but in my home environs to see what the flavor would taste like here.
Too often now even people with more of an intellectual bent prefer to find things, whether be it a book, piece of music or artist, whose inner secrets they can glean upon a first experience with it.
The reward of a good piece of art is that one can revisit it again and again, even more so if it possesses a certain degree of density which prevents it from being quickly decipherable.
Pelleas et Melisande by Claude Debussy (1862-1918) calls for repeated visits from its devotees, offering different emotional and intellectual rewards with each new visit.
The opera premiered in 1902 after being worked on by the composer for a decade. Although he did several other operatic sketches left in various stages of completion, it is Debussy's only finished opera.
Debussy's oeuvre can be broken up into three phases with Pelleas falling into and signifying the middle stage.
The libretto was written by and based off of a play from 1892 by Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949). Overall Debussy was an impressionistic composer with this opera standing as the greatest if not only representation of the genre of opera. Personally Debussy hated the term "impressionistic" as did the group of painters for whom the moniker was coined.
The painters never having liked the term either, usually referring to themselves as "The Intransigents" or "Pleine Air Painters". The term came from two main sources, a exhibit catalog from 1867 by Edouard Manet (1832-1883) where he explains his artistic mission was not to reproduce but to "render his impression" of the sensations of nature and from a Claude Monet painting "Impression: Soleil Levant" and a write up by critic Louis Leroy (1874). Appropriated by the hostile press and an uncomprehending general public, the term "impressionists" was a largely pejorative term in their life time which very likely is why Debussy fought so hard against the categorization which threw his lot in with the painters.
Despite being an apt description, it somewhat obscures from Debussy's even bigger influences which was literature. Aside from occasionally writing his own poems and chanson lyrics, Debussy was good friends with and active among the circle of poets known as the symbolists. The literary equivalent of their painterly counter parts.
Unlike the romantic era composers, Debussy's music was not meant to be programmatic but to both mirror and sort of bolster the literature from which it was inspired. The 1894 piece "L'Apres midi d'unFaune" based off of a poem by his friend Stephen Mallarme (1842-1898) is a prime example of this.
All genius has that lightening in the bottle aspect to it which no amount of biographical research can find the clues to. That magic aside, Debussy's artistic evolution can be seen as a logical conclusion to the diverse components that went into it. Each of the three phases of his career added new source material to use in the creation of his works.
Debussy came from merchant class parents, his father being a shop keeper and his mother being a seamstress. He was encouraged in music and showed himself to be a prodigy at the piano. His innate abilities allowed him to attend the Paris Conservatory while only eleven years old.
During his initial studies he encountered Nadezhda Von Meck (1831-1894) who
was most well known as confident and patron of Pytor Tchaikovsky (1840-1893).
During two years of living in
Because Russian classical equally draws from modes and structure of ethnic music and polyphony it often even once evolved passed it origins was tinged with a sort of exoticism different from what was going on else where.
His composition L'Enfant Prodigue (1884) won him the career building Prix de
Rome. Part of the prize was two years study in
Once done with his
Returning to
Inspired by ethnic music Debussy began to incorporate exotic scales and modes into his work. Interacting with his peers also made him seek to embrace a sort of shorter streamlined compositional style, shedding the huge orchestras and occasionally overly long performance running time which had very much become a hallmark of the preceding Romantic Era composer's creed.
His first mature artistic phase work which gained him recognition where the Quartet in G and 'L Apres Midi d'Un Faune (1893). The quartet was the last piece to be done with any Teutonic/traditional influence left but it already points towards what Debussy was to become, sensuous master of coloration.
Up until Debussy's opera there had been the occasional new effects added which could be employed in operatic compositions but Pelleas was the first whole sale radical change since Christoph Gluck (1714-1787) ended the Italian Grande Opera tradition in favor of a more naturalized approach for singing and stage movement.
Almost all opera calls for a certain amount of suspension of belief (wives dressing like coachmen and not being recognized by their husbands et al). This one is not different although most of the leaps of logic involved unfolds more like a fairy tale than a play with the characters actions locked into specific things to move the plot forward.
It is a challenging opera in that there are no set arias, no large chorus or ensemble numbers. Debussy sought with the cadence of the singers to catch the natural patterns of speech which gives the opera the effect of symbiosis, the music needing the voice and vice versa. Unlike a longer opera by Wagner, you could not break this opera up into performance suite like bites and have it retain its tension or logic. Pelleas also forgoes having any character inserted if even only briefly to offer up a moment of levity to keep the less urbane in the audience interested.
The action is all within the
The libretto mixes elements of German fairy tale (Rapunzel 1812) and a sort of valentine to the fin de siecle artists' romance with Thanatos.
There is a small list of main characters, the royal family of Allemonde consisting of King Arkel and wife Genevieve, and their grandsons Golaud and Pelleas. There seems to be nothing to their kingdom aside from a castle surrounded by dense forest and a body of water and some wells. From the start there is a pervading melange of desolation and claustrophobia. The darkness of the forest lends itself to both these moods while the fact that no kingdom proper with its subjects is ever really shown or alluded to. Even though he is ill at the opera's start one never gets glimpse of any royal duties needing to be performed. Making brief appearances throughout the opera are a physician, porter, servants and beggars. For the most part though, the royal family is left to their thoughts and faults.
Also adding to the piece's tension is the odd family dynamic. The two "main" characters are the king's grandsons, not sons. Golaud and Pelleas are only half brothers to each other and Goluad also has a son, Yniold. Dead spouses and parents are not really directly referred to. It is as if there is a curse on the place although no one seems to mind living there except Pelleas whose urge to leave more and more seems the wanderlust of immaturity. When she is eventually situated, Melisande too feels the weight of the forest's dark canopy making her want to leave too.
The very start of the opera musically begins with slow bubbling up of reeds and brass section. The music comes before the singing yet there is a distinctive mix of nature in darkness and a sort of plaintive voice to what the orchestra is playing.
While lost on a hunting expedition, Golaud finds Melisande in forest of his family's kingdom, laying by a stream. She had been wearing a crown which has fallen into the water. Water is a reoccurring motif throughout the opera, fluidic properties always going nicely with dream like reveries dark and light.
It is never revealed where she had come from or why she had been wearing a crown. Depending upon one's interpretation of the opera as a whole, her disregard for retrieving the crown has one of several meanings.
The music has a constant dark undulation which is broken up by moments of delicate or lush beauty, like the brightly colored flower which grows in a dark forest at base of a huge tree because that's where a thin shaft of sun light falls.
There is a spacey air subtly emphasized by all the unknowns, where this woman came from, why is she upset? There is an inability between the two to communicate, and although he can give her no comfort, inexplicably Golaud takes her with him.
What is interesting is she seems to neither be the femme fatale nor the maiden in distress waiting to be saved. One gets the feeling that is Golaud had not come by she very well may just have lain there indefinitely.
The initial introduction of the singing in the first scene is largely slow, as if the two characters are talking not to each other but in a pensive moment, themselves. The coloration of the orchestra adds a third voice equally to the dialogue which would traditionally be more in the background.
Genevieve shows Melisande the castle which she does not like from the start, largely from the oppressive darkness, the castle being almost like a secret she will now be forced to keep. The sound of a ship pulling away gets Melisande's attention and it is upon this leaving of other people she initially encounters Pelleas, also drawn by the sound of departure.
Journeying out to look around the grounds, Pelleas takes his sister in law to the well of the blind which is said to restore sight to the blind. It is here that the couple feels their eyes have been opened too, realizing they have feelings for each other. There is no duet of joy or new found passion during this scene. Mirroring Melsinade's predicament from her initial appearance, she has now dropped the wedding ring given by Golaud into the well. To emphasize the wreckage of the couple or maybe formation of this burgeoning new couple, at the same time as the ring was lost Golaud had an accident while out riding. As she is nursing him back to health he right away notices the ring missing. She lies, saying that she lost it in a grotto and that she will go out to find it.
Pelleas is sent to accompany her in the search.
The music takes a fairly unique path, rather than create drama with a gradual dark swells or have the familiar melody darkly warp and bubble with elements of discordance, tension is created and constantly maintained by an ever fluctuating sense of mood, foreboding, fragile beauty, even within the span of one act.
At night Pelleas is combing her hair in a tower, shades of Rupunzel. The music (act 3 scene 1) starts off with the lone voice of soprano. The cadence of the voice harkens subtly to Debussy's Russian influences, Russian liturgical and polyphony traditions. When the orchestra joins in, at first it is flute and plucked harp, softly in brief repetition of a fluttering pattern. When the rest of the orchestra joins in right before Pelleas (baritone) it is a dark cello based pulse which from which unfurls lush strings and reeds.
Pelleas and Melisande start playing a game where he lets her long unbraided hair fall over him. During this game briefly enters a pattern of flutes and bassoons with a sprite like pattern.
Golaud catches them at their game, thinking it childish. Debussy's second wife Rosalie Texier whom he had nic named Lilly-Lilo possessed a youthful vitality which had made him initially fall for her hard. Eventually though he found that there was an intellectual incompatibility stemming from her immaturity which made him leave her. In some respects, aspects of one of modern opera's greatest enigmas seem inspired by her.
Some interpretations of the opera have Golaud standing for reason. No matter who stands for what, there is not clear cut line of demarcation between protagonists and antagonist.
To some extent Golaud would seem to be the cuckold but a lot of sympathy for him is expended by things like making his child who seems in general terrified of him, spy on the couple and by taking his brother down to the grotto to threaten him with death if he continues to see his now pregnant wife.
This is an opera of many layers and great drama all of which is achieved in a complex but completely organic way. There is sometimes an urge, especially with classical music, when exploring, to go with a budget edition of a work. I understand the logic of it but more often than not this creates the chance of having an obscure eastern European symphony doing ill tempoed versions of a piece. To be sure too, this is hi fidelity music, such delicate balance and layering is not easy to achieve and worth paying the extra fifteen dollars to experience.
Pelleas with the kingdom's oppressive darkness, a famine mentioned by a beggar during the grotto ring search and death threat from his step brother decides to clear out. As he tells Melisande of his departure his nephew is forced to spy upon the couple who are doing nothing but sitting on a bench. The vocals during the news of his leaving is no more melancholy than the over all dreariness found else where. This helps maintain the overall delicate balance. Pelleas asks Melisande to meet him in the park for their final farewell.
Oddly, she openly shows her sadness at his leaving and it is King Arkel who comforts her. Golaud is now open too about his jealousy and there is a harder edged darkness peppered throughout the music, more so than that which has been the musical representation so far of all the foreboding darkness. Now it is tinged ever so slightly with the physical menace too.
There is no clear line of demarcation as far as what we are witnessing, inner or outer landscape as represented by the music, this helps in making the listener/audience not feel as far removed from the world in which the characters exist. Moody richness of the music aside, this is probably one of the opera's other major achievements.
Golaud kills Pelleas as he professes out loud his feelings for Melisande as they meet so he can say his goodbye.
Melisande gives birth prematurely as Golaud explains his actions to the king. We do not know what the king feels aside from satisfaction the family line will go on even as Melisande slips away in to death.
Even at the opera's end, there is no "ta-da" sonic swell to sort of let people know it is over. While there are plenty of composers who wrote both, from the classical era on, they are often described as "Symphonic" or "Operatic". Debussy only wrote the one, but its an amazing animal, an impossible creature powerful beyond its uniqueness in the composer's body of work. That aside, Debussy was a composer of color and texture it did not matter what the canvas was on which he practiced his magic.
If I find myself in