SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
need of the French spirit
I have given more than enough reasons to account for the success of Pelléas et Mélisande and the place that its admirers give it in the history of opera. There is every reason to believe that the composer has not been as acutely conscious of his musico-dramatic reform as his disciples have been. The reform with him has a more instinctive character; and that is what gives it its strength. It responds to an unconscious yet profound need of the French spirit. I would even venture to say that the historical importance of Debussy’s work is greater than its artistic value. His personality is not without faults, and the gravest are perhaps negative faults–the absence of certain qualities, and even of the strong and extravagant faults which made the heroes of the art world, like Beethoven and Wagner. His voluptuous nature is at once changeable and precise; and his dreams are as clear and delicate as the art of a poet of the Pleiades in the sixteenth century, or of a Japanese painter. But among all his gifts he has a quality which I have not found so evident in any other musician–except perhaps Mozart; and this quality is a genius for good taste. Debussy has it in excess, so that he almost sacrifices the other elements of art to it, until the passionate force of his music, even its very life, seems to be impoverished. But one must not deceive oneself; that impoverishment is only apparent, and in all his work there are evidences that his passion is only veiled. It is only the trembling of the melodic line, or the orchestration which, like a shadow passing before the eyes, tells us of the drama that is being played in the hearts of his characters. This lofty shame of emotion is something as rare in opera as a Racine tragedy is in poetry–they are works of the same order, and both of them perfect flowers of the French spirit. Anyone who lives in foreign parts and is curious to know what France is like and understand her genius should study Pelléas et Mélisande as they would study Racine’s Bérénice.
Not that Debussy’s art entirely represents French genius any more than Racine’s does; for there is quite another side to it which is not represented there; and that side is heroic action, the intoxication of reason and laughter, the passion for light, the France of Rabelais, Molière, Diderot, and in music, we will say–for want of better names–the France of Berlioz and Bizet. To tell the truth, that is the France I prefer. But Heaven preserve me from ignoring the other! It is the balance between these two Frances that makes French genius. In our contemporary music, Pelléas et Mélisande is at one end of the pole of our art and Carmen is at the other. The one is all on the surface, all life, with no shadows, and no underneath. The other is below the surface, bathed in twilight, and enveloped in silence. And this double ideal is the alternation between the gentle sunlight and the faint mist that veils the soft, luminous sky of the Isle of France.
this was: Need Of The French Spirit
go to next chapter: forty years of active
