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Radical Modernism and the Failure of Style: Philosophical Reflections on Maeterlinck-
Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande

Author(s): Lydia Goehr
Source: Representations , Vol. 74, No. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 55-82
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2001.74.1.55
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LY D I A G O E H R
Radical Modernism and the Failure

of Style: Philosophical Re ections on
Maeterlinck-Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande
Look at the most ordinary of men, at a time when a little beauty has contrived to steal
into their darkness.
—Maurice Maeterlinck 1
Plot-summar y: Golaud, grandson of King Arkel of destitute Allemonde, has lost his way
hunting in a forest. He sees Mélisande crying beside a pool of water. Afraid and
avoiding questions, she tells him she comes from a place to which she does not wish to
return. He oVers to retrieve her crown, which he sees lying in the water; she forbids him.
Married, they return to his family castle. Mélisande meets Golaud’s half-brother,
Pelléas, who is about to visit a dying friend but is delayed because his father is ill.
Pelléas and Mélisande meet at the Fountain of the Blind. At midday she lets her
wedding ring drop into the water. At the same time Golaud falls from his horse. Injured,
he returns to the castle. He is upset by the loss of Mélisande’s ring. Ignoring Pelléas’s
advice to tell the truth, she says she lost it in the sea vaults. Golaud sends her and
Pelléas to look for it. Later, Mélisande sits by a window in the castle tower. Pelléas
arrives and entangles himself in her hair, which cascades down the wall. Golaud arrives
and warns them against these ‘‘childish games.’’ He warns Pelléas to stay away from
Mélisande and sug gests she might be with child. He uses Yniold, his son from his rst
marriage, to spy on the lovers, but Yniold does not answer his questions the way Golaud
wants him to. He says Pelléas and Mélisande are standing silently, staring into the
light. Pelléas’s father recovers his health, which allows Pelléas now to leave. Arkel tells
Mélisande he hopes she will bring happiness to the castle. Golaud enters the room and
shows his fury toward Mélisande. Pelléas and Mélisande meet to say farewell. They
openly declare their love. Golaud arrives, kills Pelléas, and wounds Mélisande. She dies
shortly thereafter (not from the wound) and after having given birth. Calm, forgiving,
but still stubborn, she does not appease Golaud’s jealous torment.
I b egi n wi th mél is and e’s s on g that opens act 3, the tower scene
just before Pelléas arrives.
Mes longs cheveux descendent / jusqu’au seuil de la tour; / mes cheveux vous attendent /
tout le long de la tour, / et tout le long du jour, / et tout le long du jour. / Saint Daniel et
Saint Michel, / Saint Michel et Saint Raphaël, / je suis née un dimanche, / un dimanche
à midi.2
Re p r e s e n tat i o n s 74 · Spring 2001 q t h e r e g e n t s o f t h e u n i ve r s i t y o f c a l i f o r n i a

i s s n 0734-6018 pages 55–82. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission
to reprint to Rights and Permissions, University of California Press,
Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. 55

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Pelléas et Mélisande is about Mélisande’s beauty, how it draws those around her into
a destiny she declares is far stronger than she is. Her beauty takes Golaud and Pel-
léas by surprise. Golaud sings on meeting her: ‘‘N’ayez pas peur. Je ne vous ferai
pas. . . . Oh, vous êtes belle’’ (1.1). Pelléas sings as Mélisande reaches the fountain:
‘‘Oh! Oh! Prenez garde! Mélisande! Mélisande! Oh! votre chevelure!’’ (2.1), and
later in their declaration of love: ‘‘Oh! tes mains sont petites! Je ne savais pas que
tu étais si belle’’ (4.4). Only Arkel articulates the danger of the beauty when he
remarks on Mélisande’s ‘‘strange, puzzled look,’’ ‘‘of someone constantly awaiting
disaster, in the sunshine, in a beautiful garden. I can’t explain,’’ he says, ‘‘but I was
afraid to see you thus, for you are too young and beautiful to live almost day and
night under the shadow of death.’’ But Arkel is optimistic: Everything is ‘‘going to
change. At my age . . . I’ve gained a sort of faith in the delity of events, and I have
always seen how the young and beautiful create young, beautiful and happy events
around them. So now it is you who are going to open the door upon the new era
that I foresee’’ (4.2).
Arkel’s optimism proves futile but unrelenting. Drawn himself to her beauty,
he sees how his family is shattered as its control is taken away. Mélisande’s beautiful
hair, about which she sings in her most striking moment of solitude, symbolically
trans gures the bonds of the prior familial relations—the control, Freud might say,
of three caskets. Golaud murders his half-brother: ‘‘I did it in spite of myself ’’ and
‘‘without reason’’ (5). Arkel realizes that even if he has understood the power of
destiny, he has not been able to keep his house in order. Yet even after Mélisande’s
death he transfers his hope to her child.
Mélisande’s complex mood—her childlike fear and bewilderment, sadness,
care, and enticing irtatiousness—seems to render her responsible for the entire
tragic action of the work. Yet she is also innocent. She absorbs the legendary double
nature of la femme inconnue, of aggressor and victim.3 Drawing further on the mythic
use of the feminine, her beauty, characterized by melos and melodie (terms to which
her name has been connected), symbolizes destiny’s fatalistic and nihilistic force,
or even the ‘‘purely musical’’ expression of the World Will.4 What is left over after
the Will has taken its destructive course in the German sounding Allemonde? For
the lovers it is ‘‘la vérité’’ experienced but not articulated: their Liebestod rejects a
world in which they had no time or place. For Golaud ‘‘la vérité’’ remains unknown
and unexperienced: ‘‘la vérité, la vérité,’’ he asks Mélisande urgently as she dies;
‘‘la vérité, la vérité,’’ she repeats calmly but gives nothing away. His truth is not
hers. He is the sad gure. His questions are the wrong ones: they belong to the world
of the jealous man.
Mélisande’s beauty resonates with ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard
Wagner, musically and textually heard in Tristan and Parsifal. There is resonance
also of Paolo and Francesca, perhaps of all ill-fated lovers (beauty and love linked
to death). Yet Mélisande’s beauty means more. It symbolizes the sort of seductive
56 Re p r e s e n tat i o n s

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beauty we experience in other modernist music-dramas, say, in Maeterlinck and
Paul Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue or in Béla Balázs and Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s
Castle, a drama about the dangers of pushing too deeply with too many questions
into a person’s soul. Or think of the resemblance to Wozzeck, of which Alban Berg
wrote: ‘‘It is not only the destiny of this poor man, but also the unheard-of-mood
of the individual scenes. . . . You will nd something similar in . . . Pelléas!’’5 Or
think of Arnold Schönberg’s Erwartung, where the woman’s futile questioning to a
dead lover provides no solace. Or, nally, of Moses and Aron, where the Idea (the
True, the Good, the Beautiful) that cannot be expressed divides human beings into
those who seek it nonetheless and those who are seduced by the charm and immedi-
acy of its apparent image.
Generally I am intrigued by the pervasive questioning in the libretti of all these
operas, but here I want to propose that Mélisande’s beauty may well serve as a
general symbol in and of the modernist music-drama, where the symbol, by de ni-
tion, shows something more than it can tell. ‘‘The term [symbol],’’ we are told, ‘‘re-
fers most speci cally to a manner of representation in which what is shown ( . . .
something material) means, by virtue of association, something more or something
else ( . . . something immaterial).’’6 Mélisande’s beauty symbolizes the ‘‘something
more’’ that remains when we put the action and the questions behind us—the resi-
due and melancholic lament of beauty. It is a disconcerting beauty epitomizing a
negative aesthetic prevalent within modernism, negative not just because beauty is
linked to death, but more because the beautiful expression tracing itself through
the artwork has the eVect of negating or trans guring the ordinary meanings we
attach to signs. This negation is otherwise captured by saying that art’s expression
is inexpressible relative to rational (ordinary) expression. Paul Valéry once wrote,
‘‘The beautiful’’ implies eVects of unsayability, indescribability, ineVability. And the word
itself says nothing. . . .
If we want to produce an eVect of this kind by means of that which speaks, i.e., through
language, . . . then language is being used for producing what strikes dumb, and expresses
dumbness.
Beauty means inexpressibility (and a desire to experience this eVect.) Therefore the
only possible de nition of the term is a description of the conditions needed for producing
this state of being unable to express. . . .
Inexpressibility means, not that no expressions exist, but that all expressions are incapa-
ble of describing what gives rise to them. . . .
IneVability: ‘‘words fail us.’’ . . . beauty is negation, plus the thirst caused by that which
nds expression in this impotence. . . .
All that’s perfected, too complete, gives us a feeling of our inability to modify it.7
So the beautiful stops us in our tracks. It sometimes leaves us uncontrolled,
unnerved, even when, and perhaps even because, we experience it with intense
pleasure. For we do not like to be struck dumb, and this I think is what Pelléas does.
It renders us mute as Mélisande is symbolically mute. The muteness registers an
Radical Modernism and the Failure of Style 57

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aesthetic response to the work that eludes our understanding. For Valéry, this is the
point: the aesthetic strikes us dumb as it resists our attempts to conceptualize it. But
where does this limitation leave the critics who wish to speak, to have their ques-
tions, as Golaud wishes to have his questions, answered?
A curious trope permeates the critical reception of this work from its beginning
a century ago. Many commentaries try to balance the judgment that Claude De-
bussy’s Pelléas is a masterpiece (their term) with the feeling that it somehow fails (also
their term) to work. The thought of failure started even before the rst performance
in 1902. Maeterlinck, author of the original play, publicly announced his wish that
Debussy’s work be an ‘‘immediate and utter failure.’’ His own Pelléas had met with
a mixed reception, but his motivation here was triggered by his annoyance that
Debussy had chosen Mary Garden (and not Maeterlinck’s own girlfriend) to sing
Mélisande. He waited until Debussy’s death to admit his error. But his original wish
had a strange prophetic quality: it allowed failure to become a key word of choice
in the work’s reception.
W. H. Auden did not help when he reportedly proclaimed Pelléas ‘‘one of the
great anti-operas.’’8 But, bending a phrase of Renato Poggioli, he might have pro-
claimed it a ‘‘failed masterpiece.’’9 I nd this last phrase intriguing. I would not use
it to say Pelléas is nearly a masterpiece but not quite, or that it is a masterpiece
with a aw in it. I would and will use it rhetorically to capture the critics’ confusing
impression that despite Debussy’s Pelléas’s absolutely being a masterpiece, it some-
how doesn’t succeed.
But upon what terms? Certainly the failure could not be banal as, say, when
the original orchestra declared the score ‘‘unplayable, outrageous, and doomed to
failure.’’10 Or when listeners complained of Pelléas’s monotony and ‘‘celestial bore-
dom’’; its abstract, vague, gray, and somnambulistic quality; or that the characters
do not communicate, that they do not know each other, not even themselves, that
they are distracted, absent, silent, passive, frigid, catatonic, and unmotivated.11 Or
when they complained of the needless and obsessive repetition of words, of the lack
of logic, of the failure of the music to convey the work’s ‘‘poetic essence,’’ of the
music’s detachment from the libretto, of the plot and the music being too sparse.12
No. The ‘‘failed masterpiece’’ connotes something deeper, or so I shall argue, that
Pelléas fails as opera precisely insofar as it succeeds, as Auden said, as anti-opera, or
more positively put, as a modernist and symbolist music-drama. But to which ‘‘op-
era’’ is Pelléas so ‘‘anti’’? The answer is: Wagner’s Tristan.
My essay is about just this, how Pelléas gives conceptual substance to the shift
from ‘‘opera’’ to ‘‘anti-opera.’’ I shall describe how some very speci c traits associ-
ated with Wagner’s Tristan were reconceived to become associated with Debussy’s
antithetical Pelléas. I shall describe this reconception as a move, musically, from
exter nal symphonism to external diminution and, dramatically, from maximal theater to
minimal theater. I shall connect these two moves via the symbolist concept of musical-

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ity. Following this, I shall recommend that we interpret Pelléas as raising a typically
modernist worry about representation articulated as the problem or necessary fail-
ure of style. I shall argue that we can only understand the necessary failure of Pelléas
if we acknowledge, as too many commentators have not, Maeterlinck’s mediating
role between Wagner and Debussy. For, quite simply, his symbolist play presented
itself as an antithesis to Wagner’s theatrical Gesamtkunstwerk before Debussy set it
to music. In this antithesis to theater, we’ll nd precisely the sort of ‘‘failure’’ that
re ects modernist suspicions about representation and exteriority in relation to
which the symbolists, again, before Debussy, saw Wagner to be the most signi cant
oVender. Overall, the aim of this essay is to locate the symbolist terms by which to
transform the proclamation of failure judged against the purportedly ‘‘operatic’’ or
‘‘overly theatrical’’ standard of Tristan into a deliberate and successful principle of
style for Debussy’s modernist music-drama.
My argument partially counters an argument Theodor Adorno once oVered

in an appendix to his Aesthetic Theory. Adorno did not discuss Debussy at great
length, but saw in him the taint of the regressive tendencies of modernism he found
also in Igor Stravinsky. He once described Debussy (though he was not thinking
here speci cally about Pelléas) as the preeminent master of missed modernist oppor-
tunities. I am not convinced by Adorno’s particular judgment of Pelléas. But I agree
with how he situates the work rmly within the scope of modernism. For I think
Debussy’s Pelléas is a modernist drama par excellence (and should be linked much
more closely, say, to Bluebeard and Wozzeck than merely to some vague idea about
post-Wagnerian impressionist decadence).
Adorno speaks of Pelléas as ‘‘highly stylized’’ or as constantly in pursuit of style.
He complains less about its ‘‘supposed thin-bloodedness,’’ ‘‘monotony,’’ or ‘‘cheap
and banal’’ contrasts and more about its lack of uni ed form. Generally, he opposes
works that dynamically unfold according to the immanent and formal development
of musical material to those, like Pélleas, whose forms he thinks are determined by
extraneous considerations of style or usefulness. The latter focus not on establishing
internal relations of parts to whole but on achieving isolated eVects. Judged as
‘‘tasteful,’’ their style creates the appearance of expression but lacks the structural
integrity to sustain genuine expression.
Adorno links this failure of style with social regression. In Pelléas, he writes, its
problems of style—its impoverishment of technique, its meager homophony, and
its gray orchestration—suggest ‘‘problems in the relation of art and culture,’’ for
any ‘‘classi catory schema that subsumes art as a branch of culture is inadequate.’’
‘‘Incontestably,’’ he concludes, ‘‘Pelléas is culture without any desire to denounce it’’
because its ‘‘speechlessly mythical hermeticism’’ neglects what ‘‘the subject seeks.’’
‘‘Artworks require transcendence of culture if they are to satisfy culture’’ and when,
presumably, they do not neglect what the subject seeks. This, he says, ‘‘is a powerful
motivation of radical modernism.’’13

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I shall also focus on the problem of style, speci cally in relation to the symbolist
tension between style and Idea. But I’ll seek the possibility of Pelléas’s structural
integrity in a place Adorno does not look—in Maeterlinck’s play. Adorno ignores
the organization of form larger than that immediately apparent in Debussy’s music,
a form determined by Maeterlinck’s own theatrical and dramatic innovations.
Given these innovations, I think Debussy’s Pelléas sustains its expressivity not by
achieving a romantic synthesis of style and Idea, but in leaving this relation frac-
tured. I read Pelléas’s failure of style not, then, as a failure, but as a necessary failure,
something to which Adorno, for other radical modern works, would not have ob-
jected. In this necessary failure, I nd the space for a formal expressivity, or the
appropriate space for subjectivity, and thus the grounds to deny Adorno’s assess-
ment of Debussy’s Pelléas as ‘‘incontestably’’ conforming to external taste.
That I interpret Pelléas diVerently from Adorno should not necessarily lead me
to a diVerent judgment, though I think it does. Here we enter that tricky but desir-
able gap that allows our cognitive understanding of a work not always to concur
with our sensuous experience of it. Does knowing, for example, that Pelléas’s gray-
ness or atness is its theatrical, symbolist, and very French intent stop us thereafter
from experiencing it disappointingly as gray or at? There is no rule, for even if
our aesthetic experience is cognitively aVected, it is not exhausted by such cogni-
tion. This lack of exhaustion lies at the heart of much modernist aesthetic theory.
Recall Valéry’s words on the impotence of explanation. This impotence is closely
allied to the symbolist and increasingly modernist project about the necessary fail-
ure of representation (and articulation), a project within which, again, I think Pel-
léas nds its proper place.
Within Debussy’s Pelléas, Maeterlinck’s drama was no mere libretto. One might
say that (almost) everything was already conceptually determined when Debussy
chose Maeterlinck’s work on which to base his own. Consider what Maeterlinck
wrote in ‘‘one of the rst manifestos of theatrical symbolism’’14 about the idea of a
masterpiece in 1890, two years before the publication of his own Pelléas:
The stage [La scène] is where masterpieces [les chefs-d’oeuvre] die, because the presenta-
tion of a masterpiece by accidental and human means is a contradiction. All masterpieces are
symbols, and the symbol never withstands the active presence of man. The forces of the
symbol cautiously diverge from those of the man who struggles with them. . . . imagine the
actor advancing to the very core of the symbol. Immediately an extraordinary polarization
manifests itself in relation to the passivity of the poem. For the actor the rays no longer
diverge but converge; the accident has destroyed the symbol, and the masterpiece has essen-
tially died during this manifestation [présence] and its aftermath [ses traces]. 15
Maeterlinck’s worry that representation destroys the essence or ‘‘hidden real-
ity’’ of the symbol had a long theological heritage identi ed through the pervasive
suspicion of the image. Yet not everyone proposed, as he then did, that one should
thoroughly detheatricalize theater by eliminating ‘‘the living being from the stage.’’

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With what should we replace him? Maeterlinck wasn’t sure, but ‘‘man’s absence’’
or complete depersonalization he said was ‘‘essential.’’ Perhaps we should watch
persons who are lifeless or dead or who move across the stage without a destiny. Or
perhaps we should replace them with ‘‘shadows,’’ ‘‘re ections,’’ or ‘‘projections of
symbolic form.’’ (The early cinematographic suggestiveness is clear. He was also
interested in puppet plays.) But how should we listen to or watch symbolic form?
‘‘Cautiously,’’ and, as at the rst performance, behind a gauze curtain, for theater
is an ‘‘evasive’’ art that never ‘‘speaks face-to-face.’’16
Returning to Debussy, I think he assumed the task of transforming Maeter-
linck’s play into a music-drama that would not, by operatic or false, artistic means,
make present what should be left absent or represent what should be left suggested.
It was this task, I am suggesting, more than musical-compositional reasons alone,
that enabled him to pit the symbolist aesthetic for music drama in theatrical opposi-
tion to Wagner’s purportedly ‘‘operatic’’ legacy.
Debussy thought the task suited him well. Maeterlinck’s Pelléas was one way he
worked out his disillusionment with Wagner. According to Oscar Thompson, his
disillusionment increased after seeing an over-theatricalized Tristan in Bayreuth in
1889, and then again after reading the new French translation of Friedrich Nietz-
sche’s Der Fall Wagner in 1892, a reading that would have coincided with his starting
work on Pelléas.17 I have seen no other mention of Debussy’s reading Nietzsche, but
the connection is plausible. For when in Der Fall Nietzsche said it was ‘‘easier to be
gigantic than to be beautiful,’’ or spoke of ‘‘the lie of the great style,’’ he could have
been describing Debussy’s musical remove from Wagner: a French or Bizetian move
toward what he called a ‘‘great miniaturism’’—diminution, lightness, sweet si-
lences, clarity.18 (Of course, Nietzsche was speaking solely about Wagner.) Or when,
in The Dawn of Day (1881) Nietzsche spurned actors who focus so much on ‘‘any-
thing exterior’’—‘‘intonation, attitude, stage, scenery, and public’’—that they fail
ever to reach the ‘‘Wesen’’ of their character, he paved the way to Maeterlinck’s
stronger conclusions about the necessary failure of interior drama on the stage.19
Many critics think the anti-Wagnerian task defeated Debussy. Bernard Wil-
liams has remarked that though Pelléas is ‘‘among the great masterpieces of the
operatic stage . . . it may well be the hardest to present.’’20 Joseph Kerman thinks
the task had already defeated Maeterlinck: ‘‘The pointlessness of action is a para-
doxical theme for dramatic treatment, to say the least. It defeated Maeterlinck, but
not before he had worked furiously to create the illusion of purposelessness on every
level within a secretly purposeful dramatic frame.’’21 Note how the critics focus on
the theater, and they are right to be worried. But remember, the symbolists them-
selves appealed to these extreme diYculties of presentation and purpose precisely
to support their own theatrical reforms. In what sense then were they defeated?
Many critics over the years have thought Wagner defeated them. The symbolists
thought otherwise. Like (the later) Nietzsche, they articulated their own reforms,
their ‘‘impossible’’ staging conditions of absence, negation, or pure luminosity, as

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critical developments past Wagner’s innovations at Bayreuth. Claiming to be unlike
Wagner, they sought neither to overtheatricalize the theater nor to place the theater
into a decadent condition of excess. Apparently the critics thought it easier to re-
move the excess than the metaphysically dubious decadence.
Pelléas was the only music-drama Debussy completed. He tried and thought of
others, including, in 1909, (re)composing Tristan.22 Throughout the decade-long
composition of Pelléas, he tormented himself over Wagner’s legacy. He was as pas-
sionately against his in uence (tearing up an early version of the score on the
grounds that it was already all in Wagner) as he was passionate in embracing it,
‘‘plus ardents’’ et ‘‘plus combatifs,’’ as Maurice Emmanuel remarked.23 Debussy
often distinguished himself from Wagner by speaking of an aesthetic ‘‘puri ed’’ of
German metaphysics, a purely French return to the simplicity of feelings.24 But his
return had a double character, as direct line from composer to composer and as
mediated by the symbolist aesthetic.
To see this double character, let me rst suggest some ways that Pelléas develops
Tristan’s modernist potential as music drama. Carolyn Abbate has said that Pelléas
provides a ‘‘hidden commentary’’ on Tristan.25 Exactly, but I think the commentary
is not hidden. I think Pelléas refuses Tristan’s external, totalizing, or symphonic con-
dition of musical arti ce (the architectonic condition of the externalized Gesamt-
kunstwerk) but embraces Tristan’s so-called inexpressible expression of interior musi-
cality. In both works, at least to comprehend their self-conception, one must
distinguish their interior drama from their exterior theatricality. Then one may say
that though they diVer regarding the latter they share the former.
A commitment to interior drama dictates that the work’s signi cance be con-
veyed through the musicality of the human voice. Paul Bekker once remarked that
in Tristan it is the sounds rather than the people who walk upon the stage. Maeter-
linck would have liked this idea, though he would have added: not people, but not
sounds either, rather shadows of sound that convey the drama’s interior or silent
musicality. Debussy also allowed musicality to lie in the shadows, and did so by
moving musically from exterior to interior, from external symphonism to orchestral
diminution. Why did he do this? In order, as I shall explain, precisely to give way
to the dramatic power of the voice.
It’s been said of Tristan that it exhibits two concepts of musicality, one having
to do with sounds, the other with expression. The purely or specically musical refers
empirically to the symphonic art of tone—sometimes this is called absolute music;
the absolutely musical refers to something broader and more metaphysical. Capturing
text, drama, and sound, the absolutely musical is intended to capture the synaes-
thetic wholeness of Wagner’s music-drama, a wholeness that lies beyond the empiri-
cal world, in the so-described ‘‘transcendent’’ movement of subjective expressivity.
Recall my earlier reference to the ‘‘something more’’ signi ed by the symbol. Nietz-
sche described the ‘‘something more’’ when he wrote that Wagner ‘‘repeated a sin-

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gle proposition all his life long: that his music did not mean mere music. But more.
But in nitely more.—‘Not mere music’—no musician would say that.’’26
If Tristan exhibits the absolutely musical it does so through its Handlung (action),
which receives its signi cance entirely from the interior, erotic drive of and between
the lovers. Wagner says this drive resists psychological description or worldly expla-
nation and rests entirely upon the secret ‘‘inner movements of the soul.’’ From the
work’s outer form, he adds, all nonessential detail is thus removed. The libretto is
reduced to essence. There are no unnecessary repetitions and no arti cial (super-
uous) words. The words articulate only what is already in the music and complete
the ‘‘metaphysical lament.’’ The relation between music and word moves back and
forth: the poet’s (outer) idea is inspired by, but gives determinacy to, the composer’s
(inner) vision. Yet this movement serves only as the means for which metaphysical
drama is the end. As is well known, by reconceiving the means and ends, Wagner
claims himself to trans gure traditional opera into music-drama. However, rightly
or wrongly, Debussy rmly believes the trans guration requires another step.27
Tristan also oVers an analogy between the erotic drive of love and the aesthetic
experience of ecstatic listening. As with their erotic involvement, so comparably are
we supposed to engage with Tristan as lovers. Wagner makes no mere ontological
point when he says that the musical work exists only in the moment of performance
and takes on visible form. His point is about expression: the work’s absolutely musi-
cal intent is consummated only when presented ‘‘fully to the senses.’’ So, as our
listening begins, we like the lovers are drawn in sympathy into a synaesthetic confu-
sion of our eyes and ears, out of day into night. Absorbed, we suspend, in Schopen-
hauer’s terms, the principle of suYcient reason and, in Wagner’s, all the whys,
whences, and wherefores.
Tristan, nally, is well described in terms of an Erlebnis, a symbolic distillation,
as Wilhelm Dilthey wrote (in thinking about Wagner), of human experience that
shifts our focus from its ordinary and accidental aspects to its essential or mysterious
ones. ‘‘The material and goal of poetic representation,’’ he continued, ‘‘is always
formed by lived experience [Erlebnis], i.e. either something inner that manifests
itself through something outer or an external image that is enlivened by something
inner. Its basic form is the poetic image which displays an inner process in a situa-
tion, the symbol.’’28
Pelléas shares with Tristan so many of these traits: condensed form stripped of
the worldly and accidental; questions and explanations suspended for characters
and audience; time and place, day and night, water and sky, hearing and seeing
rendered symbolic. So many signi cant events happen at twelve o’clock, at midday
and midnight, in Tristan’s lightness and darkness, as the sun and moon cast their
shadows. So many events pit the conventional world against the forbidden, secret
and silent relationship of the lovers. Pelléas, like Tristan, sings of his being ‘‘brought
. . . to [his] senses,’’ having played ‘‘in a dream, with the strings of fate’’ (4.2). In
both works, this fate is sung though a feminine voice symbolizing the interior move-

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ment of musicality. Pelléas, like Tristan, goes willingly to his death. Mélisande, like
Isolde, must wait for hers. Both set the conditions of their Liebestod to bring the work
to completion. And yet Debussy wants sharply to diVerentiate his aesthetic from
Wagner’s. But just as signi cantly, it is so often the common stylistic traits to which
critics point, to account for Pelléas’s failure in contrast, they say, to Tristan’s success.
Wherein, then, lies the critical diVerence?
Tristan and Pelléas have long been compared in terms of musical references
(which for Debussy are often deliberate) and commonalities of plot (which for Mae-
terlinck are oblique). But few have compared or contrasted Wagner’s metaphysical
concept of musicality with Debussy’s borrowed symbolist concept. Remember,
Maeterlinck’s play was complete before Debussy ever gave to it its music. Mallarmé
famously described the play as already containing its own inherent musicality, a
musicality that is so silent and abstract that even a ‘‘single, pensive violin part would
be unnecessary.’’29 The concept of musicality was well formed prior to Mallarmé’s
use; it permeated the writings of the poets and painters of the symbolist tradition
back to Charles Baudelaire. In it we nd a crucial connection between Tristan and
Pelléas, traced to Baudelaire’s poem ‘‘Correspondances.’’
For the symbolists, correspondances linked the senses to spirit. Musicality culti-
vated the link with its harmony, rhythm, movement, and formal abstraction. The
term correspondance was interestingly translated into German as Zusammenklang. Yet
correspondance as musicality applied to all the arts. ‘‘The appropriate way to deter-
mine when a painting is melodious,’’ Baudelaire wrote, ‘‘is to look at it from a dis-
tance so as to be unable to comprehend its subject or its lines. If it is melodious, it
already has a meaning and has taken its place in the repertory of memories.’’30
Correspondances fused and infused all the senses—hearing, sight, smell, and touch—
with mystery. But they also gave priority to time or, better, the subjective temporal-
ity of human experience.
Henri Dorra recently produced an anthology, Symbolist Art Theories, in which
he traced the concept of musicality through the writings of painters, sculptors, ar-
chitects, decorative artists, poets, writers, critics, and philosophers—but not musi-
cians—from Baudelaire and Eugène Delacroix to Guillaume Apollinaire and Al-
fred Jarry. He connected the symbolists to the romantics and idealists. Wagner’s
in uence was everywhere paramount (think of the symbolists’ journal, La revue
wagnérienne). Again, ‘‘musicality’’ stood for so much: mystery, myth, hermeticism,
purity, and silence; interiority, abstraction, vagueness, and exactitude; unity,
rhythm, movement, and arabesque; shadow, syncretism, synaesthesia, somnambu-
lism, and syntheticism.
To connect musicality to symbol, Dorra referred to the notion of dédoublement.
‘‘The artist,’’ he quoted from Baudelaire, ‘‘can be an artist only on condition that
he be double and not ignore any phenomenon related to his double nature.’’31 Dou-
bleness consists in the ability to observe with scienti c detachment the outer and

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empirical qualities of the world while responding voyeuristically to the interior and
subjective life of our emotions. The principle of musicality symbolized the latter
dimension of interiority. It captured a sensual way of responding to the world, the
world of the mysterious night, made available to us by the poet, painter, and
musician.
In the 1880s, a debate raged amongst the symbolists regarding the relation
between the work’s exterior and interior, between its outer representation and inner
signi cance, or, between its double symbolic status as representation and Idea
(drawn from Schopenhauer’s world seen from its two perspectives). In 1887, the
Belgian poet (and friend of Maeterlinck) Emile Verhaeren asserted: ‘‘The symbol
. . . puri es itself through the process of evocation as it becomes an idea; it is a subli-
mation of perceptions and sensations; it is not demonstrative but suggestive; it de-
stroys any contingency, any fact, any detail.’’32 This assertion represented one side
of the symbolist aesthetic. In 1886, the in uential Greek but Frenchi ed symbolist
Jean Moréas articulated the other: ‘‘The Idea . . . must not . . . be deprived of the
sumptuous trappings of external analogies; for the essential character of symbolic
art is never to reach the Idea itself.’’33
The Moréasian limitation or desired failure of art to reach the Idea highlights
the attention Maeterlinck and Debussy gave to the work’s ‘‘external analogies,’’ to
the material and stylistic means of representation. The other side shows why they
destroyed anything that would make that externality too present, all the ‘‘contin-
gency,’’ ‘‘fact,’’ and ‘‘detail.’’ They asked not that the representation reach the Idea,
but that the Idea be made known to us aesthetically through the negation or subor-
dination of the representation. Perhaps Verhaeren approached this subordination
when he claimed that the work becomes Idea through evocation. It is not that the
work becomes Idea ontologically, only that experientially (via imagination) we gain
access to the Idea through the work’s (representation’s) power to evoke. ‘‘In symbol-
ism,’’ he wrote, ‘‘fact and world become mere pretexts for ideas; they are handled
as appearances, ceaselessly variable, and ultimately manifest themselves only as the
dreams of our brains. The idea, whether responding to them or evoking them, de-
termines their manifestation.’’34
Perhaps Verhaeren trusted aesthetic appearance more than did Moréas, who
was skeptical that the work ever reaches the Idea. But Moréas’s skepticism also dem-
onstrated a profound respect for the Idea, especially if one reads his ‘‘reach’’ as
‘‘realize.’’ The Idea is so great in its magnitude that no work can ever realize its full
potential. And if one does so respect the Idea, then one should be careful about
how one represents it.
Both theorists, indeed all the symbolists, then, had good reason to focus on
‘‘external analogies.’’ Indeed, one might well read their debate as a con ict over
what kind of work best represents or evokes, or tries but fails to reach, the Idea.
Recalling an old theological debate, one may consider whether the representation

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is better rendered full or sparse, determinate or vague, complex or simple, orna-
mental or plain. This is the problem of style. Moréas speaks of symbolism’s com-
plex style of archetypes; Verhaeren speaks of an ‘‘algebra of signs.’’ Both recall
Baudelaire’s ‘‘forests of symbols.’’ Yet Moréas’s reference to sumptuous trappings
(tentatively) sounds more Catholic, and Verhaeren’s reduction to essence, more
Reformed.
But Moréas also sounds more modernist with all his talk of art’s limitations,
and Verhaeren, more romantic. Let me further muddy the relation between style
and Idea by distinguishing a romantic tendency of an ‘‘aesthetic theology’’ that
seeks synthesis and absolutism in this relation from a modernist tendency in what
becomes a ‘‘negative aesthetic theology’’ that stresses the fracture and failure. This
shift from synthesis to fracture implies not a chronological or teleological develop-
ment in the arts, but more a constant point of contention working through their
diVerent histories. I call it a shift only because this highlights what becomes for
some modernists a conceptual way of separating themselves from their romantic
predecessors and, speci cally, how Pelléas is presented as a modernist movement
past Tristan. Thus, my reading of Pelléas stresses that the limit that renders it success-
ful as a work of art, but shows its metaphysical failure or fracture as symbol (with
the symbol’s double character of representation and Idea), underscores what be-
comes an increasingly modernist skepticism regarding the failure of exteriority or
style.
Next we must consider in the development of the symbolists’ concept of musi-

cality how compellingly this concept served as a metaphor for poetry, painting,
drama, theater, literature, even philosophy—but not, until Debussy, as an explicit
metaphor to guide music. When the symbolists rst applied the principle of musi-
cality to their arts, they took from music notions of movement, harmony, vagueness,
and rhythm and turned them into technical or structural principles of composition
appropriate to their arts. Yet, in applying these notions to the structure of poetry
and painting, the artists eVectively expanded the principle of musicality associated
therewith into one seemingly derived from their own artistic media. When the prin-
ciple was then re-engaged by musicians, they found themselves developing a literal
concept of music that now more closely approximated to the arts other than their
own: musicality ‘‘without rhythm and rhyme.’’ This I think is what Debussy did in
Pelléas. He made his exterior music t the metaphorical demands of interior musi-
cality, made the structural principles of musical composition less musical in the
traditional sense and more painterly, dramatic, literary, poetic—scenic, atmo-
spheric, still, motionless, and static. He once wrote: There’s ‘‘something that music
can do better than painting: it can centralize variations of colour and light within
a single picture.’’35
Debussy’s rst point was not that music does it better, but that it does it at all.
For, in thinking the latter, he con rmed music’s desire to ‘‘lead’’ itself, as Poggioli

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has written, ‘‘to the condition of poetry and painting.’’36 Debussy only then thought
that music did it better, but this is probably because he understood the commitment
painting and poetry had already made to the principle of musicality. Of course one
would think music embodies musicality better than any other art. But this would
not be true, paradoxically, if musicality had become more (literally) painterly than
musical. Under the symbolist aesthetic, the battle between the arts has no clear
winner. Debussy knew this. Actually, so did Wagner. But Debussy did not think
Wagner had produced the right artistic ‘‘solution.’’
Wagner developed a metaphor of musicality, derived from the symphonic form
of absolute music, to help give unity to his Gesamtkunstwerk. Debussy took a meta-
phor of musicality used predominantly in arts other than music and applied it to
music. His music was painterly and poetic in a way that Wagner’s, according to
Debussy, remained too symphonic. This contrast helps us distinguish the romantic
from the modernist in the sphere of music, though we must now diVerentiate musical
from literary or poetic romanticism. For whereas musical romanticism tends to be
characterized by the absolute and symphonic, the literary is already, from the early
nineteenth century, often characterized by the static and fragmentary. I am over-
simplifying. I just want to point out that one way to see modernist tendencies in
musical romanticism depends upon our seeing them earlier (or at least diVerently)
made manifest in the other arts.
The play between the diVerent arts was well observed by Hans Rudolf Zeller
in his essay ‘‘Mallarmé and Serialist Thought,’’ where he wrote that the ‘‘musicali-
sation’’ of poetic language resolutely pursued by Mallarmé in the late nineteenth
century led to the ‘‘delingui cation’’ of music in the twentieth.37 Delingui cation
involved a pictorial halting of musical movement and hence also a nulli cation of
communication that occurred when artists like Mallarmé trans gured established
or commonplace techniques of signi cation. It also addressed the breakdown of
communication, but not the end of an interest in language. When language is no
longer thought to communicate its meanings transparently, to mirror the world as
means to end, its means become the focus of attention and gradually the end itself.
Recall Paul de Man’s comment on Baudelaire’s dédoublement, that in the ‘‘re ective
disjunction’’ consciousness sets up between self and world, the self is transferred
‘‘out of the empirical world into a world constituted out of, and in, language.’’38
Language thus conceived divides the subject into an empirical and signifying self.
The focus here is on language as a correlate to the doubling condition of the self.
But how or to whom does this doubled language (or subject) now speak?
Adorno appealed to the halting of communication to explain the consequences
for modernity of the loss in modernist art of the autonomous subject or of expressive
subjectivity. Expressive communication had been suppressed in late capitalist soci-
ety. Like Stravinsky’s, Debussy’s antisymphonic technique—the stopping or spa-
tialization of time (through stasis and mere repetition) and the fragmented forms

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of motivic development—promoted subjects stylized by the rationalized demands
of administered culture. Visualization in contrast to musical perception encour-
aged externalization not internalization. Subjects (think now of listeners) were pre-
vented by the static surface of the work from reaching the interiority they sought
for themselves and sought in the work. The work’s exterior admitted no gap to let
the listeners in. Voided of interiority and exhausted by exterior style, the work lost
its potential for transcendence, the potential that would preserve a gap for listeners
to listen beyond the surface. With that potential lost, the work merely recapitulated
the culture in which it was produced and shaped its listeners accordingly. It did not,
could not, denounce it. The subject it promoted within and without was catatonic,
infantile, and frigid—an unfree subject without will. Does not this subject sound
like our poor Mélisande? Adorno thinks it does, apparently too much. But is there
another way to think about Debussy’s antisymphonic form, the subject it constructs
and the expressivity it promotes?
Recall the ‘‘contradiction’’ Maeterlinck identi ed in staging a symbolist work

of art because ‘‘the stage is where masterpieces die.’’ I suggest that Debussy intended
to give life to such a work by providing it with its music. This does not mean he
thought Maeterlinck produced a play in need of music. Remember Mallarmé’s claim
that the play was already inherently musical. Perhaps, rather, he thought his music
could make Maeterlinck’s work dramatically possible by completing musically the
necessary incompleteness of the metaphorical musicality. Adapting the notion of
dédoublement, Pelléas needed both the musicality and the music, the interior and the
exterior. However, the modernist question was whether he could succeed and
whether, given the symbolist aesthetic, he even intended to.
In part this modernist question was one of classi cation, as Vincent d’Indy
noticed soon after Pelléas’s rst performance: It is, he wrote,
obviously neither an opera, nor a lyrical drama, in the ordinary sense of the term, neither
is it a realistic play nor a Wagnerian drama. It is both less and more than these. It is less,
because . . . the music itself plays a secondary role, the role that illumination plays in medi-
eval manuscripts, or polychromy in the sculpture of that period. It is more, because, unlike
modern opera, or even the lyrical drama, the text is here the principal interest. 39
Debussy likely would have rejected this description of his work as falling ‘‘less
and more’’ into already worked-out genres. He was struggling with something
diVerent. Once he was asked: ‘‘What poet could supply him with a text?’’ He an-
swered: ‘‘One who states only half of what is to be said, and allows me to graft my
dream onto his, one who conceives his characters as out of place and out of time.’’
Partially, saying things by halves meant saying things indeterminately, vaguely. But
more, it meant that the poet, as he explained, ‘‘would allow me the freedom to have
a little more art than he—to nish oV his work.’’40 Certainly he was thinking about
forming a whole out of halves. But the modernist problem was no longer simply

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whether music or text would have priority, but how best to protect the inner face of
the work against its outer face. Or what happens when one half wants to resist the
other half because it fears destruction of itself by its necessary partner? The point
about Maeterlinck’s metaphorical musicality is that it wanted to resist ‘‘external’’
musical expression: it did not want to sing. Remember Mélisande’s muteness. So,
to make the music t the musicality, Debussy paradoxically had to stop the singing.
Stopping the singing marked Debussy’s most ardent departure from Wagner.
Debussy often complained that Wagner made ‘‘music servile to character’’ but re-
jected the times when Wagner made character servile to music. Both directions of
servitude were wrong: music and the soul’s rhythm do not work at the same speed.
He rejected Wagner’s leitmotifs, though in Pelléas not entirely. What he said he ob-
jected to was the construction of characters’ ‘‘calling-cards’’ by symphonic (that is,
large, expansive orchestral) means. Applying symphonic form, he wrote bitterly,
kills dramatic music.41
Pierre Louÿs remarked in the 1890s that Debussy’s rejection of Wagner, and
of Tristan in particular, as overly symphonic depended on Debussy’s not knowing
German, hence his ignoring the libretto, hence his treating the work as musically
pure, symphonic, absolute. If Louÿs is right, it looks as if the symbolic correspon-
dences between Tristan and Pelléas are either entirely of Maeterlinck’s making or
entirely accidental in Debussy’s work. These are interesting options, though both
unlikely. Maeterlinck’s relation to Tristan is oblique. Second, Debussy thought the
symphonic worked well in Tristan. Third, his objections to the symphonic were
more than literally musical.
Debussy thought Wagner’s ‘‘symphonic’’ errors were largely the errors of the
general operatic age preceding him. ‘‘Symphonism’’ had come to connote operatic
excess and imbalance between the work’s interior and exterior. Sometimes Debussy
thought Wagner the only composer worthy of composing with Wagnerian tech-
nique. But following the general symbolist complaint, he found himself rejecting
operatic arias, duets, and ensembles. When people speak to one another, they rarely
‘‘speak at the same time.’’ He also rejected excess—‘‘too much singing.’’
Debussy said he wanted to leave the music to work alongside the words as com-
mentary and extension. Words are rarely uttered in Pelléas in the form of ordinary,
communicative speech. (Even when they are, they still strike one, either through
their intensity or banality, as excessive or mysterious.) Debussy also spoke of a hu-
manity in terms of ‘‘evocation’’ and ‘‘sensibility’’ in which his characters ‘‘sing like
real people, and not’’ as he said, ‘‘in an arbitrary language made up of worn-out
clichés.’’42 And to the objection that real people do not sing, Debussy asserted that:
‘‘a character cannot always express himself melodically: the dramatic melody has to
be quite diVerent from what is generally called melody.’’43 Here he was thinking of
an expressive or dramatic movement of musicality, the ‘‘something more’’ than the
tones one literally sings.

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The reference to real people singing was thick with metaphor, shown formally
through Maeterlinck’s technique of repetition, short utterance, and noncommuni-
cative speech, and by the composer’s choice of contrapuntal short and interrupted
musical lines that stop and start independently of the words uttered. Often the mu-
sic stands still when the words repeat, and the words move when the music stands
still. (This happens notably in Mélisande’s tower song and in Pelléas’s declaration
of love.) Through the developmental interweaving of words and sounds (repetitions
and silences) an eVect is created reminiscent of a presymphonic, declamatory, and
prosaic expression—a nonprogrammatic, musically in ected language, a French
song or recitative of Rousseauian conception adapted in the symbolist theater to
anti-Rousseauian, noncommunicative (distracted or lifeless) ends.
For Debussy, the musical line rarely just accompanied or reduplicated the text;
it continued and extended the meaning of the words when verbal language reached
its limits. ‘‘I am not tempted to imitate what I admire in Wagner,’’ he wrote:
I conceive a diVerent dramatic form in which music begins at the point where speech is
powerless to express; music is made for the inexpressible; I want it to have an air of emerging
from a shadow, into which, at times, it should return; it should always remain a discreet
element [like the discretion of a reticent person].4 4
Wagner too could have said this (he almost did). But if the thought was similar,
the technique was diVerent. (One might say, he rejected the discretion.) Debussy
wrote (though not here speci cally of Pelléas), ‘‘Music has a life of its own that will
always prevent it from being too precise. It says everything that one cannot put
into words; thus it is logical that to emphasize it is to diminish it.’’45 Logic aside,
diminution and discretion in Pelléas are the key anti-Wagnerian traits. They mark
the ‘‘willful suppression of all extraneous happenstance.’’46
Debussy equated these traits with mystery, with silence, sensuousness, and inex-
pressibility. Silence, he said, is what he uses music precisely to express, a silence
Pelléas refers to as ‘‘un silence extraordinaire’’ (2.1).47 Yet this silence in no way
contradicts the musical stress Debussy also gives to the dramatic power of Pelléas
with all its anger, violence, depression, destruction, and dissonance. On the con-
trary, the silence, like the stillness, is deeply disquieting. Catherine Clément thinks
it helps signify the ‘‘bad omen’’ that makes Golaud suVer. Of Mélisande’s silence,
she writes: ‘‘This unyielding voice, this pythian voice, is the voice that always says
what is true while never telling the truth.’’48 ‘‘Je suis aVreuse ainsi,’’ Mélisande sings
as she sits with her hair unbraided in the moonlight. ‘‘Je suis malade ici,’’ she cries
to transfer the pity she has expressed to Golaud for his accident onto herself (2.2).
(She stresses the ‘‘ici’’; Golaud hears only the ‘‘malade.’’)
The stress on voice, particularly Mélisande’s, concurs with the self-
proclamation of symbolist theater as a theater of voiced interiority, a theater, in
Maeterlinck’s vision, where (interior) essence survives (external) accident. Accord-
ingly, theatrical techniques— of atness, depersonalization, monotonous repeti-

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tion, abstracted plays of light and dark, shadow movements, and abstract gestures—
were appropriate to the exterior face of Pelléas insofar as they helped direct the
audience’s attention toward the unnerving expression of Mélisande’s voice, a dra-
matic voice that would constantly prick through the theatrical surface. In symbolist
theater, precisely against the two- or shadowed-dimensionality of picture, note, and
word, voices were supposed to bring out the full dramatic force of the work’s interior
musicality. Listeners, lookers, were supposed, and indeed still are supposed, to listen
through, look through, the atness. That power, I want to say speci cally for Pelléas,
is given in the materiality of the surface, but in a attened surface constantly frac-
tured by the voice.
The way to hear the fracture is via strong dynamic contrasts produced between
voice and orchestra. What one hears so well in early recordings but far less often
in later ones is a voice that sounds dramatic and not ‘‘operatic.’’ A dramatic voice
does not attempt to achieve, as does an operatic singing voice, complete synthesis
with the orchestra. Rather, it stresses the diVerence, and precisely by focusing on
the dramatic enunciation of the words. Maggie Teyte once complained, fty years
after her rst performance as Mélisande, that in modern performances all the blood
had been taken out of the voice. Blood was drama.
In his book Symbolist Theater, Frantisek Deak has described the symbolist voice
and the acting corresponding to it as deriving from an eighteenth-century French
declamatory style associated with the ‘‘theater of voice.’’ Spectacle or scene commu-
nicated meaning far less than voice and gesture. The traditional so-called theatrical
voice was replaced gradually by a poetic voice. The latter was described as sounding
like ‘‘a musical instrument,’’ not, however, because it approximated to an orchestral
sound but because it achieved the required abstractness. So often for the symbolists,
to be musical implied a move toward abstraction and then also diminution and
simplicity, to mark the movement of music and drama toward silent musicality.
Deak further compares Maeterlinck’s theater to an Elizabethan one insofar as
the sets of the former consisted of painted paper ats constructed as curtains mov-
ing along a wire. Apparently Maeterlinck oVered almost no staging or scenic de-
scriptions. He only mentioned locations—‘‘A forest,’’ ‘‘A room in the Castle.’’ He
paid attention to lighting, shadow, movement, and color, all of which he made
washed-out, abstract, vague (relative to what was then the tradition.) He darkened
both stage and auditorium to allow the voices to ‘‘resonate’’ without ‘‘distraction’’
in the audience. ‘‘One had an impression,’’ a critic wrote at the time,
of watching a succession of images projected by a magic lantern, in faded colors, subdued

tones like that of old Flemish tapestries. No visual focus, scenes are blurred, the characters
appear anemic, the dialogue is completely nebulous. All this is fogged over, vague, oat-
ing. . . . The beings that we see acting on stage look like shadows. They live, speak, and
move in the atmosphere of arti ce; they are the creatures of a dream.49

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The critic was not praising the performance. But notice how close the descrip-
tion here is to Wagner’s own description of Bayreuth as a sacred and monumental
dramatic site for the ‘‘purely musical’’ expression of the ‘‘purely human.’’ Wagner
had also sought the appropriate conditions of presence and absence, visibility and
invisibility, to achieve the aesthetic illusion or ‘‘mystic gulf ’’ between an ‘‘imaginary
stage world’’ and the ‘‘ordinary’’ world. He had described a visual space of hazy
and dreamlike eVects, and then the musical counterpart:
In the perfect drama—the full shapes of a dream-vision, or the other world, are projected
before us in a life-like way as if by the magic lantern. It is a ghostly seeing in which all the
gures of all times and places become distinct before our eyes. Music is the lamp of this
lantern. . . . It is often said that in opera one needs to see something because its music does
not ll us. With this attitude, the ear is depotenced—we no longer take in the music inten-
sively. However, music should be able to inspire the sight so that we see the music in shapes.50
Wagner had placed the orchestra below the stage to create the illusion of the
music mysteriously emerging out of the silence from nowhere and thus every-
where—the silent movement of musicality. He thought it would keep the audience’s
attention on the stage. Preempting the symbolists, he demanded that performances
occur in total darkness in the hall but in aesthetic light on the stage. He spoke tanta-
lizingly of an ‘‘invisible theater.’’ But as with his invisible orchestra, so with his stage:
he wanted to hide, for the sake of producing illusion, the mechanical means by
which images and sounds were produced. Yet, though he hid orchestral players, he
never went so far as to hide the singer-actors. Their presence had to be full—in
interior and exterior.
If the similarities between Bayreuth and symbolist theater were evident, so were
the diVerences. The diVerences depended mostly on the matter of exteriority. More
than one symbolist accused Wagner (or at least later producers) of rendering
Tristan’s ‘‘inner action’’ too concrete on the stage. Debussy’s complaint was similar.
Arguing, as Wagner had, that all dimensions were required for the modernist
music-drama, Debussy speci ed the diVerence this way: ‘‘The drama of Pelléas—
which despite its atmosphere of dreams contains much more humanity than the so-
called documents of real life,’’ as we see in the false realism and naturalism of Ger-
man and Italian opera.51 But to move away from documents was not to move to-
ward pure concert performances, for in those the temptation would be to render the
opera symphonic, ‘‘abundant.’’ If Pelléas has ‘‘any merit,’’ it lies ‘‘in the connection
between the movement on stage and the movement in the music,’’ in ‘‘the peculiar
eloquence of the silences,’’ in its ‘‘simplicity of the means.’’ And this ‘‘only makes
its point in the opera house. . . . In my opinion Pelléas and Mélisande must appear
as they are.’’52
Obviously for both Debussy and Wagner voice and character were paramount.
Yet whereas Wagner promoted a visual, verbal, and musical whole that gave full
and equal expression to his Gesamtkunstwerk, Debussy emphasized the interior
movement of musicality by using Maeterlinckian techniques of external diminution

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( atness, monotony). Whereas Wagner, according to Debussy, identi ed musicality
with a symphonic singing voice, Debussy saw his dramatic voice as marking the
true musicality of the modern music-drama.
Lest one think that Debussy’s symbolist endorsement of voice, mystery, silence,
or purity simply conformed to the atmospheric techniques of ‘‘impressionism,’’ he
once remarked that he disliked that term. Better, he said, to speak of ‘‘realities,’’ but
realities full of mystery.53 Mystery did not exist in a separate, transcendent space,
but as completely present in the world in the surging form of interior musicality. I
think Debussy, like Maeterlinck, would have agreed with the point made so soberly
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, that the ordinary world, the conventional world we oc-
cupy, Golaud’s world, is already mysterious enough. No need to invent another.
Violence, fear, pity, love: each appears in all its poignancy in the most local and
ordinary of our circumstances, in our ‘‘domestic interiors.’’ ‘‘There is a tragic ele-
ment in the life of every day,’’ Maeterlinck once wrote, ‘‘that is far more real, far
more penetrating, far more akin to the true self that is in us than the tragedy that
lies in great adventure.’’54 Debussy’s only warning was not to forget the mystery:
‘‘it seems to me that although music was never meant to con ne itself to the world
of dreams, it doesn’t gain anything by concerning itself too much with everyday life.
It is weakened by trying to be too human, for its primary essence is mystery. Nothing
is more mysterious than a perfect chord!’’55
Think here now of Stanley Cavell’s discussion of Pelléas from his relevantly titled
book A Pitch of Philosophy. ‘‘If Wagner may be said to nd that his vision of a totality
of signi cance depends on lifting the human above itself,’’ he writes, ‘‘Debussy may
be said to reverse Wagner in seeking a comparably perpetual transcendence of the
human world as internal to the days and nights of that world.’’56 Cavell describes
how Pelléas’s ‘‘unending banalities’’ are used as a trans guration device, which,
rather than removing us from the ordinary, give us poignant insight into it. Such
immanent transcendence nicely recalls Dilthey’s Erlebnis that produces such an aes-
thetic intensi cation or distillation of the ordinary that the ordinary becomes ex-
traordinary. It also recalls his conception of the artwork as constituted by those
essential aspects that make ‘‘intelligible the meaning of our unfocused experiences
of life.’’ ‘‘Making intelligible’’ perhaps is too strong: that the artwork makes us more
immediately aware that we have certain sorts of human experience might already
be enough.
Cavell’s contrast between Wagner and Debussy highlights a move away from
a sacred or redemptive notion of transcendence toward a secular attitude designed
to highlight the mystery that ‘‘is just human life.’’ Cavell writes: ‘‘A permanent argu-
ment is engaged between [Wagner and Debussy] as to the subject of opera, speci -
cally as to the source of human transcendence as such a subject, whether it is or is
not to be thought of as a step within the human.’’ What is it to make a step within
the human? In the opening scene, he explains, Golaud asks Mélisande why ‘‘she is

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‘so astonished,’ as if he senses that the world is not her element. She replies, ‘Are
you a giant?’ ’’ Cavell now recalls Rousseau’s claim that in the origin of languages,
the gurative precedes the literal. ‘‘Encountering another fellow being for the rst
time, the impression of fear will produce the name ‘giant.’ ’’ Similarly with Méli-
sande when we see her ‘‘trauma of discovering for the rst time what human beings
are capable of.’’57
Valéry also once suggested a Rousseauian theme when he wrote that ‘‘lyrical
poetry is that type of poetry which presupposes the voice in action; its utterances
directly stemming from or caused by things seen or sensed as present.’’58 This is useful
for understanding Debussy’s own famous letter to his conductor, André Messager,
in which he claimed that music’s ‘‘interior rhythm depends on the interpreter’s
evocation of it, as a word depends on the lips that pronounce it’’—the voice in
action. ‘‘So your interpretation of Pelléas was deepened by the personal feelings you
brought to it and from which stemmed that marvellous eVect of ‘everything in its
place.’ ’’59 I quote these lines partially to evoke an additional Wittgensteinian reso-
nance of ‘‘meaning in use’’ and of everything being ‘‘in its place.’’ But more I want
to motivate the thought that there might exist in Pelléas the expressive residue of a
subject acting in a world governed by fate, in a world in which everything seems to
be in its place. Of course, from one perspective, little in Allemonde is in place (it is
a sad and impoverished place). But from the perspective of the world that is, so to
speak, worlded by the work, the contrary impression is formed, and I think it is pre-
cisely Pelléas’s drama to show how human subjects can break out from such a world.
There is a metaphysical correlative to this resistance that returns us to the idea
of a work of art as symbol. The symbol evokes an imaginative space that voices
‘‘something more’’ (the space for interiority) than the externally determined work
of art. Or, in Debussy’s terms oVered to Messager, there is a gap left open for inter-
pretation and imagination even after and even though the work has assumed an
external, qualitative xity.
Debussy associated music’s freedom with ‘‘the law of beauty.’’ But in Pelléas it
did not yield mere comfort or pleasure. Listeners want ‘‘emotions-in-melody,’’ but
they are too easy to come by; listeners want ‘‘something new but jeer at it when
they do not understand it.’’ A work that attempts beauty ‘‘is always taken as a per-
sonal insult by some people.’’60 Beauty is esoteric and to be protected (as Mélisande
needs to protect herself ). ‘‘Music really ought to have been a hermetical science,
enshrined in texts so hard and laborious to decipher as to discourage the herd of
people who treat it casually as they do a handkerchief !’’61 To listen is to discriminate
on the surface but also to probe into the deepest of human resources. Yet such lis-
tening (like Maeterlinck’s cautious listening) is unfashionable and goes against
prevalent taste. Valéry helps again: ‘‘If you always have ‘taste’ it means that you
have never risked delving very deeply into yourself. If you never have it, it means

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that you have taken that risk, but gained nothing by it.’’62 To risk delving deep into
oneself is unnerving, shattering. Taste is to be used with caution.
Incongruously, many critics thought Debussy had ‘‘too much taste,’’ that his
music was too easily assimilated. W. H. Auden said that Pelléas ‘‘succeeds only be-
cause it atters the audience.’’63 Romain Rolland remarked that Debussy’s ‘‘good
taste’’ was used almost to excess, to the point that he almost sacri ced the other
elements of art to it.64 The sacri ce of technique or structure lies also at the heart of
Adorno’s complaint. However, others found Debussy’s taste thoroughly alienating,
non attering. For Debussy, the eVect was intentional.65
Still, listeners complained—of Pelléas’s monotony and ‘‘celestial boredom,’’ re-
member, but also, more relevant now, that the piece was unmusical and hard to listen
to—that if there was any melody, and they thought there was not, it did not go
anywhere. All musical expectations, they said, are unresolved; there are no satisfy-
ing symphonic expansions.66 Here the critics had Wagner clearly in mind. So even
of Maeterlinck’s play, Louis de Fourcaud wrote very early on: it reveals the ‘‘philoso-
phy of passivity’’ carried to the extreme: ‘‘a mixture of Geneviève de Brabant, Shake-
speare and Tristan.’’67 Many critics said that in Tristan they found all the whys and
wherefores explained. Though Tristan has clear metaphysical overtones, they said
it felt complete, fully worked out, justi ed.68 Here was the success of Wagner’s
symphonism.
In Pelléas critics thus saw negatively what Debussy wanted them to see, the pre-
cise opposite of Tristan. And they saw the opposite despite all of Pelléas’s use of tradi-
tional symbols of conventional family life. As Pierre Boulez points out, Pelléas also
has all the old and familiar themes—‘‘love, jealousy, violence, a curse and a mur-
der.’’69 And yet listeners said that ‘‘nothing happens’’ and nothing is explained.
Most paradoxical, some listeners found their satisfaction in Golaud, the character
who asks for answers. But why, one might ask, should listeners get the answers if
Golaud is refused them? Aren’t the unanswered questions Pelléas’s point? Kerman
is not impressed if it is. What is the point of the drama, he asks, if Golaud does
not (and therefore we do not) learn anything? Bernard Williams suggests that the
situation might be more complicated; as listeners we have a choice:
Go one way, and one has a mysterious haze, with music indeed sensuous and marvellously
structured, but losing human and dramatic interest: go the other, and one is left with the
irritable feeling that there must be a truth there, and it is a tiresome and accidental limitation
that we and Golaud do not know what it is.70
Perhaps the point is that we have to listen both ways at once, with a contradic-
tory feeling of sensuous satisfaction and with cognitive discomfort, to appreciate
the symbolic dédoublement. Borrowing a line from Moses and Aron, we might proclaim
‘‘Oh word that I lack’’ to express both our appreciation of the mystery that sur-
rounds la vérité and our irritation that we do not know what it is. Williams says,
‘‘The performance must not let us be seized by Golaud’s conviction.’’ This is right.

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Yet the additional point is that we are seized by Golaud’s conviction, we do want
to know, and only through our identi cation with Mélisande do we experience the
profound one-sidedness of that conviction.
Debussy musically brought out this unresolved contradiction (Williams calls it
a psychological indeterminacy) between Golaud’s conviction and Mélisande’s resis-
tance to it through harmonic resolutions left ambivalent, whole-tone scales leading
into suggestions of chromaticism, modal forms halting melodic development, and
orchestral colors promising familiarity but feeling so strange. Ironically, Adorno
picked up on these ‘‘unresolved’’ techniques as regressive compositional choices,
not because they were unresolved, but because he judged them to be determined
less by the structural demands of inherent musical material than by extraneous (ex-
ternally imposed) considerations of style. In some sense he was concurring with
other critics when they dismissed the score as a ‘‘negation of everything musical.’’
Debussy could have responded by saying, ‘‘That was Maeterlinck’s point’’: negating
exterior music (style) renders interior musicality transparent.
Debussy did not say much about the characters or the construction of his sub-
jects: they were not of his making. But he did interpret them. Of Arkel, he wrote,
he ‘‘comes from beyond the grave and has that objective, prophetic gentleness of
those who are soon to die.’’ ‘‘Mélisande,’’ by contrast, ‘‘is made of nothing[ness]’’;
she is fragile and distant.71 When critics complained that she never develops, De-
bussy pointed to the moment of a new knowing when she begins to lie to Golaud.
After that, she reveals a strange awareness of her fate.72 In another sense she always
remains the same. Catherine Clément nds it relevant, and I do too, that we never
learn anything about Mélisande, where she comes from, why she dies. Secrecy,
Clément says, ‘‘is her cover.’’ She never gives her secret away. She never gives in to
Golaud. In that constancy lies her resistance to fate.
Golaud, however, ends up in a tragic place, Debussy writes, with ‘‘poignant
mystery . . . to get over clearly all that he regrets not having said and done . . . and
all the happiness which is lost to him forever.’’73 But does his tragedy lie in his
mourning for Mélisande or in his loss of reason and control? Of Pelléas, Debussy
said nothing very much, perhaps because, as one critic suggests, the character is so
‘‘passive, introverted, obliging.’’ Yet Debussy does give him the most Tristanesque
musical lines in his equally Tristanesque declaration of love, at the moment of his
death: ‘‘All is lost, all is saved! All is saved this night. . . . Ah! It’s so beautiful in
the dark!’’ (4.4). Plausibly, Pelléas’s song symbolizes Debussy’s farewell gesture to
Wagner, and Mélisande’s voice his embracing of music’s future lying in the silence
of diminution. Debussy thought a lot about voice, as did Maeterlinck, especially
when Pelléas identi es Mélisande’s voice—‘‘Ta voix! Ta voix! ’’—with the discovery
he says he has at last made of beauty. ‘‘I was restless, searching everywhere in the
house, everywhere around the countryside, and could not nd beauty. And now
that I’ve found you, I’ve found it’’ (4.4).
Critics who liked the work appreciated it for its uniqueness, its rhythmic uidity,

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the melodic shape of dialogue, the exquisite sonorities, the discrete use of orchestra,
the lack of excess words, and, as more than one said, its lack of Wagner’s in uence.
So many critics got things wrong and, well, they got many things right too. But what
they left unclari ed was their complex impression that this anti-operatic Pelléas is
somehow a masterpiece that fails.
Kerman writes: ‘‘C’est magnique, mais . . . this play, this opera, suVers from the
chronic disease of dramas constructed essentially out of ideas instead of persons
and their progress. . . . Action is meaningless; and melodrama is not made more
interesting by providing it with metaphysical justi cation.’’ And yet, he concludes:
‘‘The nal paradox is that Debussy succeeded with Pelléas et Mélisande exactly to
the extent that he defeated his ideal of opera as sung play. Operatic ideals, perhaps,
are made to be defeated.’’74 This last thought gets the point exactly right.
Debussy’s Pelléas brings out Tristan’s modernist potential by using an antisym-
phonic technique to reveal the negative potential of Tristan that renders beauty
inexpressible. At rst sight, it does this by making the style t the Idea or the musical
representation adequate to the idea of musicality. And yet insofar as it succeeds in
this t, the style necessarily fails to be complete in itself.
This paradoxical idea of style’s necessary failure recalls a twist pervasive in
modernism. If style is experienced as complete in itself, the criticism normally fol-
lows that it has become mere style, fashion, nothing more. For Adorno, the style
fails to show truth-potential or is insuYciently dialectical—nonauratic. Style as
mere style, image as mere image, can change or stay the same without cost to truth
or Idea. Some describe the eclecticism of style or the repetitiveness of the same style
as typifying the mannerist condition of the postmodern, the celebration of style as
mere style, the celebration of manifest content, or, again, otherwise put, the produc-
tion of ornament made stylish. In modernist terms, however, the mention of mere
style motivates a principle of critique by which to identify the dangers of too easily
assimilated tastes and fashions. In 1929, Boris de Schloezer described a comparable
principle of critique in terms of the ‘‘death of style.’’75 Style dies when style becomes
mere style. It succeeds, by contrast, when it suggests ‘‘something more’’ than itself,
that ‘‘something more’’ I have been referring to with all its symbolist in ation as
the Idea. The Idea is the ‘‘something more,’’ the symbol’s law of form.
One modernist style emanating from the symbolist aesthetic refuses what the
romantic-absolutists desired, namely, the synthesis of style and Idea. Rather, it pur-
sues the space between, where synthesis, mediation, or representation fails. The
style fails in two ways: rst, when it becomes self-suYcient; second, paradoxically,
when it looks as if it has achieved synthesis with the Idea. It succeeds, by contrast,
rst when it fails to be self-suYcient because it aims to reach the Idea, but second
when it fails in that aim. Here is the required failure of a modernist work trans-
formed into its principle of success. It recalls that Moréasian aesthetic that recog-
nizes the inevitable slippage between the sign and the signi ed. As this slippage

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becomes celebrated, so the modernist symbol becomes intentionally fractured. His-
torically, the more radical the modernism, one might say, the more radical the frac-
ture. A modernist masterpiece shows the fracture for what it is by exposing the
illusion of a false synthesis.
Debussy’s Pelléas may be judged the rst modernist masterpiece of this kind in
the eld of music; it rendered the failure in the phrase ‘‘failed masterpiece’’ redun-
dant. It took away from the masterpiece its illusory romantic unity. That it leaves
one with the feeling it gets nowhere, that it is unresolved, is precisely its dramatic
gesture, its rejection of Tristan’s purported synthesis of style and Idea, its defeat
of the ‘‘operatic ideal.’’ Its achievement lies in its apparent failure to resolve and
impotence to communicate. And yet communication (or better, communicability)
in the form of voiced expression survives, even if, as one modernist project would
determine, this expression is of a deep sorrow for a beauty that when seen destroys
and is destroyed: beauty in negation, beauty preserved in death.
Debussy’s work reveals its own internally motivated style, formally determined
as an anti-operatic rejection of Tristan’s purported synthesis of style and Idea and
via the symbolists’ poetic and painterly con gurations of the principle of musicality.
Some critics have said that Debussy’s musical form transformed a not very good
play into a masterpiece of music-drama, but that judgment does not belie the fact
that Debussy’s musical form was conceptually derivative. On the contrary, my as-
sessment of Debussy’s work depends to a degree on just this derivation, since seeing
the deep presence of Maeterlinck’s work within Debussy’s allows us to locate within
and behind the musical surface the residue of the expressive subject that Adorno
thinks has been lost.
Whereas Mélisande sings almost silently, she does not sing catatonically.
Whereas she accepts her death, she does not accept her destiny. Her subjectivity is
not lost to fate, but survives in the ‘‘impossible’’ form of a dramatic articulation that
cannot be staged. ‘‘Oh! Oh! I haven’t the courage!’’ (4.2) she says in an unexpected
outburst of grief, almost protest, as she watches Pelléas go to his death. Her outburst
gives way to a calm, a new strength. She dies peacefully but not on Golaud’s terms.
She refuses, through her nonanswers to his questions, to submit to his world. Her
achievement is negative in the sense that she communicates to the audience by not
communicating with Golaud, in the sense that her nothingness, her emptiness, her
acceptance of nonexistence is just her refusal to live in a world she nds herself in,
as she says, unhappily. Her death symbolizes the work’s deep sorrow.
If Mélisande survives as refusal, she does so now in the music-drama paradoxi-
cally without Debussy’s music, and, then also, because of it. This is Debussy’s mod-
ernist achievement, to ask listeners to listen through the surface to Mélisande or to
make the style metaphysically inadequate to the Idea despite the desire expressed in and
by the music for the result to be otherwise. Debussy’s achievement is to show what
Maeterlinck described as the symbol’s necessary state of contradiction, a contradic-

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tion that one can highlight by distinguishing the dramatic import of the symbol
from the theatrical presentation of the work of art. The work’s refusal of excessive
theatricality in favor of suggestiveness (achieved through the voice) calls for cautious
listening. Debussy’s musical technique enhanced the symbolist meaning of Pelléas
by not allowing the music to reduce to mere expression what for Maeterlinck had
to remain inexpressible. Therefore the symbol that is Debussy’s Pelléas might be
complete as a work of art, but it refuses, according to its symbolist commitment, any
claim for its exterior to exhaust expression. It is performed as visually and verbally
unperformable (‘‘impossible’’ theater). ‘‘A true impression of beauty,’’ Debussy once
wrote, ‘‘can have no other eVect than silence.’’76
Whether my reading will actually change the way we listen, experience, and
then judge the work is not guaranteed. But my task has been to show what aesthetic
theory can do. It cannot and should not reduce the work to mere metaphysical
account, but it can oVer, rather, the sort of clari cation that articulates conceptually
what the work cannot itself say. If the critic feels limited (Valéry said ‘‘impotent’’)
in this act of clari cation, so too does the work show its own failure fully to spell
out its meaning. Making this limitation explicit in the artwork was intended by
many modernists to reveal something about all works of art—thus their perpetual
commentary and often rejection of art’s (romantic) past—and speci cally their re-
jection of the thought that a work could answer all its own questions. What my
reading reveals is the modernist hope that listeners would listen cautiously to all
works, but most cautiously to a work like Tristan, which is thought to succeed—to
come fully to its sense and not just to our senses—in precisely the way Pelléas fails.
No t e s
I am grateful to many colleagues, friends, experts, and lecture audiences for all manner
of comments and criticisms, most especially to the 1999–2000 Getty scholars and
fellows.
1. Maurice Maeterlink, The Treasure of the Humble, trans. Alfred Sutro (London, 1911),
194.
2. Claude Debussy, libretto based on the play by Maurice Maeterlink, in French and En-
glish, trans. Paul Myers, published with Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Berliner
Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan, EMI 7 49350 2. All quotations from the li-
bretto, in French and in translation, are from the notes to this recording.
3. Cf. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère (Neuchâtel, 1949); and Catherine Clém-
ent, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, 1988).
4. Cf. Richard Langham Smith, ‘‘The Play and Its Playwright,’’ in Roger Nichols
and Richard Langham Smith, Claude Debusssy: Pelléas et Mélisande (Cambridge, 1989),
15.

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5. John C. Crawford and Dorothy L. Crawford, Expresssionism in Twentieth-Century Music
(Bloomington, Il., 1993), 37.
6. Northrop Frye, ‘‘Symbol,’’ in Alexander Preminger, ed., Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
(Princeton, 1965), 833.
7. Paul Valéry, Analects, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton, 1970), 562–63.
8. W. H. Auden quoted by Robin Holloway, Debussy and Wagner (London, 1979), 58; and
in Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge, 1982), 99, though the original
source is not given and has apparently not been found.
9. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge,
Mass. 1968), 66, discussing agonism in Mallarmé.
10. Léon Vallas, Claude Debussy: His Life and Works, trans. Maire and Grace O’Brien (New
York, 1973), 123.
11. The boredom is reported in Pierre Boulez, Orientations: Collected Writings, ed. Jean-
Jacques Nattiez, trans. Martin Cooper (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 313. ‘‘A frigid nihil-
ism’’ is Holloway’s choice phrase, Debussy and Wagner, 61.
12. The critics’ complaints are recorded in Claude Debussy to Pierre Lalo, 25 October
1905, in François Lesure and Roger Nichols, eds., Debussy Letters, trans. Roger Nichols
(Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 163; and in François Lesure and Richard Langham Smith,
Debussy on Music: The Critical Writings of the Great French Composer (New York, 1977), 79
(henceforth DM). Some of the complaints are directed toward Debussy’s music in gen-
eral. (All subsequent quotations from Debussy’s letters are from the Lesure and Nich-
ols collection.)
13. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic T heory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis,
1997), 308–9.
14. As Frantisek Deak describes it in his Symbolist T heater: The Formation of an Avant-Garde
(Baltimore, 1993), 23.
15. Maurice Maeterlinck, ‘‘Menus propos—le théâtre,’’ in La jeune Belgique (Brussels, 1890),
trans. in Henri Dorra, ed., Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley, 1994),
144–45.
16. Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories, 144–45.
17. Oscar Thompson, Debussy: Man and Artist (New York, 1940), 88–89.
18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1967),
secs. 6, 1, and 7.
19. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day, trans. J. M. Kennedy (New York, 1974), sec. 509.
20. Bernard Williams, ‘‘ ‘L’envers des destinées,’ Remarks on Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande,’’
University Quarterly (Autumn 1975): 394.
21. Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (Berkeley, 1988), 144–45.
22. Debussy to Victor Segalen, 26 September 1907.
23. Debussy describes his tearing up of the score in a letter to Ernest Chausson, 2 October
1893. In this complaint he actually identi ed Parsifal. Maurice Emmanuel, Pelléas et
Mélisande de Debussy. Etude et Analyse, 3d ed. (Paris, 1950), 30.
24. DM, 233.
25. Carolyn Abbate, ‘‘Tristan in the Composition of Pelléas,’’ 19th -Century Music 5, no. 2
(1981): 141.
26. Nietzsche, Case of Wagner, Sec. 10.
27. To an extent, Richard Wagner thought this too, since his Tristan, as also his building
of Bayreuth, was conceived following his discovery of Arthur Schopenhauer. This led
him to give a more elevated place to music and interiority than he did in his earlier
conception of the music-drama. The symbolists’ criticisms focused on this post-

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Schopenhauerian period, though still they spoke (with some justi cation) as though
Wagner’s early conception of the music-drama fully sustained his later one.
28. Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, vol. 5, Poetry and Experience, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel
and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, 1985), 117.
29. Quoted by Langham Smith, ‘‘The Play and Its Playwright,’’ 4. Note also that when
Debussy decided to set Mallarmé’s ‘‘L’après-midi d’un faune’’ to music, the poet re-
marked with surprise, ‘‘But I already thought I had done that’’; quoted in Joseph Chiari,
Symbolism from Poe to Mallarmé: The Growth of a Myth (New York, 1956), 131.
30. Charles Baudelaire quoted in Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories, 3.
31. Ibid., 7.
32. Emile Verhaeren quoted in ibid., 61.
33. Jean Moréas quoted in ibid., 151. Moréas was a founding member of the group les
Symboliques in 1884 (writing the manifesto for the group in 1885).
34. Verhaeren quoted in ibid., 62.
35. Debussy to Raoul Bardac, 24 February 1906.
36. Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 133.
37. Hans Rudolf Zeller, ‘‘Mallarmé and Serialist Thought,’’ in Herbert Eimert and Karl-
heinz Stockhausen, eds., Speech and Music, Die Reihe: A Periodical Devoted to Develop-
ments in Contemporary Music, vol. 6 (Bryn Mawr, Penn., 1964), 6:6.
38. Paul de Man, ‘‘The Rhetoric of Temporality,’’ in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rheto-
ric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis, 1983), 213.
39. Vincent d’Indy, quoted in Vallas, Claude Debussy: His Life and Works, 135–36.
40. Debussy quoted in Langham Smith, ‘‘The Play and Its Playwright,’’ 29.
41. DM, 35–37.
42. Ibid., 75. Maeterlinck’s speech is prose, not poetry, a feature that with Debussy’s use
becomes a new and signi cant feature of opera. (I thank Robert Orledge for pointing
this out.) But though the prose/poetry contrast distinguishes Pelléas from Tristan, note
still how much the former’s prose lines resemble the short, questioning, and nonrepeti-
tive lines of Tristan.
43. Ibid.
44. Debussy quoted in Emmanuel, Pelléas et Mélisande de Debussy, 35 (my translation),
adapted from Felix Aprahamian, in Debussy, Pelléas, EMI 7 49350 2, notes page 21.
45. DM, 155.
46. David A. Grayson, The Genesis of Pelléas et Mélisande (Ann Arbor, 1986), 34.
47. Debussy’s remark on silence was made in a letter to Chausson, 12 October 1893.
48. Clément, Opera, 113.
49. Deak, Symbolist Theater, 167.
50. Richard Wagner, ‘‘Sketches and Fragments,’’ in Jesus of Nazareth and Other Writings,
trans. W. Ashton Ellis, (Lincoln, Nebr., 1995), 373 (translation modi ed). I have dis-
cussed Wagner’s views in detail in my Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of
Philosophy (Oxford, 1998).
51. DM, 75.
52. Debussy to Eugène Ysaÿe, 13 October 1896.
53. Debussy to Jacques Durand, March 1908 (writing here directly of Images).
54. Maeterlinck, Treasure of the Humble, 93.
55. DM, 155 (my emphasis).
56. Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, Mass.,
1994), 163.
57. Ibid., 157 and 161.

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58. Valéry, Analects, 99.
59. Debussy to André Messager, 9 May 1902.
60. DM, 75.
61. Debussy to Chausson, 3 September 1893.
62. Valéry, Analects, 105.
63. W. H. Auden quoted in Holloway, Debussy and Wagner, 204.
64. Romain Rolland, ‘‘Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande,’’ in Musicians of Today, trans. Mary
Blaiklock (New York, 1945), 244.
65. DM, 279.
66. Boulez, Orientations, 306.
67. Louis de Fourcaud quoted in DM, 82.
68. Boulez, Orientations, 308.
69. Ibid.
70. Williams, ‘‘ ‘L’envers des destinées,’ ’’ 394.
71. Debussy’s remark about Mélisande’s nothingness can be found in his letter to Chaus-
son, Tues. early 1894[?]. Her fragility and distance are mentioned in DM, 227.
72. Debussy to Henri Lerolle, 17 August 1895.
73. Debussy to Hector Dufranne, 26 October 1906.
74. Kerman, Opera as Drama, 155–57.
75. Boris de Schloezer quoted in Pierre Boulez, ‘‘In Search of a Musical Aesthetic,’’ in
Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, trans. Stephen Walsh (Oxford, 1991), 3. Favoring Igor
Stravinsky, de Schloezer saw this death as beginning with Beethoven’s symphonism.
76. Debussy quoted in Marcel Dietschy, A Portrait of Claude Debussy, ed. and trans. William
Ashbrook and Margaret G. Cobb (Oxford, 1990), 169.

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Radical Modernism and the Failure of Style: Philosophical Reflections on Maeterlinck-

Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande

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Radical Modernism and the Failure

Re p r e s e n tat i o n s 74 · Spring 2001 q t h e r e g e n t s o f t h e u n i ve r s i t y o f c a l i f o r n i a

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Radical Modernism and the Failure of Style 57

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My argument partially counters an argument Theodor Adorno once oVered

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Radical Modernism and the Failure of Style 63

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Radical Modernism and the Failure of Style 65

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Next we must consider in the development of the symbolists’ concept of musi-

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Radical Modernism and the Failure of Style 67

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Recall the ‘‘contradiction’’ Maeterlinck identi ed in staging a symbolist work

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Radical Modernism and the Failure of Style 69

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of watching a succession of images projected by a magic lantern, in faded colors, subdued

Radical Modernism and the Failure of Style 71

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Recall the ‘‘contradiction’’ Maeterlinck identi ed in staging a symbolist work