Debussy: The Preludes 157
and for the first time, one had the impression of touching,
as it were, the reality of thought itself. And silently,
insensibly and of its own accord, the conversation would
rise to heights of almost religious solemnity”.
One can easily imagine what such hours in such company
meant to a sensitive spirit like Debussy; and of the kind and
extent of their influence, we shall have occasion, a little
later, to speak in some detail. It was great and wholly
valuable and it was indeed fitting that Debussy, in 1892,
should have dedicated to Mallarme his first important work
for orchestra, the “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun”
{Prélude a l,Après-Midi d’un Faune}.
For nine years, from 1893 to 1902, Debussy worked
on his one and only opera, “Pelléas and Mélisande”. That
he should have chosen Maeterlinck’s drama for his text is
a tribute to his literary insight and another example of
his marvellous knowledge of his own nature and its artistic
requirements. The deep humanity of the music; its re-
strained intensity of expression; the ease and naturalness
of a diction which has taken over all the subtle inflections
and rhythms of prose, and which is neither speech nor song,
but both at once; and, finally, the marvellous unity of at-
mosphere that pervades the music from beginning to end—
an atmosphere heavy with the sorrow and mystery of
human life and oppressive, at times, with its burdening
sense of man’s helplessness before the dark forces of des-
tiny; all these things combine to make the work one of the
most extraordinary pieces of lyric drama that has ever been
written.
Historically, “Pelléas” represents an almost complete
revolution in operatic technique. In it, Debussy both raised
and solved the problem of a symbolistic music drama and
solved it so well that nothing more remains to be done in