ALL ART, it has been said, aspires to the condition of music. And all arts made with music—but, more than any other, opera—aspire to the experience of ecstasy.
Originally, opera’s ecstasies were provided by the singers. Stories—well-known intrigues from classical mythology, ancient history, and Renaissance epic—were dignified pretexts. The music, often glorious, was a platform. Whatever the pleasures afforded by the other elements (music, dance, poetry, scenography), opera was above all a vehicle for a unique reach of the human voice. This was something much more potent than “beautiful singing.” What was released by the dramatic and musical occasion of opera was a substance experienced as sublime, virtually trans-human (in part because it was often transgendered), and so erotically affecting as to constitute a species of ravishment. (Think of the swoons and delirium that Farinelli and the other legendary castrati of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provoked among men and women both—echoed, in diminuendo, by the adulation offered the great bel canto singers of our own century.) The model register was soaring, feminine; the gender line was arbitrary (men sang women’s parts), and opera aroused emotions, excesses of reaction identified as feminine.
A more civically responsible idea of the ecstasies delivered by opera emerged when the devoted audience expanded from its aristocratic
core to a much larger public, and attendance at “opera houses” became a ritual of urban bourgeois life. Opera experienced as preeminently a vehicle for the voice declined in favor of opera as the most inspiring, irresistible form of drama. Singing was a heroic rather than an uncanny enterprise, which furthered the “progressive” idea that the work of the voice and the work of music were at parity. It is about this time that opera began to reflect the nationalist projects of the European nineteenth century. The enthusiasm produced in opera houses fed on something the audience brought to the occasion: tribal self-congratulation. Being construed as an achievement of a national culture resulted in evitably in a certain normalization of opera ecstasies: sexual roles were locked into place; stories chosen (historical or folkloric) were constructed around the contrasts of feminine and masculine traits, vocal and characterological. The model responses of audiences became less outrageously feminine: invigoration, inspiration, exaltation.
It was precisely the composer with the largest ambition for opera, Richard Wagner, who, in addition to bringing this second idea of what opera can be—the apotheosis of a collective spirit—to its greatest, most solemn conclusion, also ushered in the third, or modern, idea of what opera can be: an isolating, ecstatic commotion of feeling aroused not by the sublime feats of a human voice but by exhausting, relentlessly ecstatic music. The voice rides the music; the music, rather than an independent ideal of vocal virtuosity, makes ever more difficult (initially felt to be impossible) demands on the voice. Music, Wagner’s music, depicts the very condition of being flooded by feeling that the uncanny voice once provoked in audiences. The consequence was to weaken the authority of sharply contrasting feminine and masculine styles of emotional reaction—both on the opera stage (for all the masculinist pretensions of Wagnerian ideology) and in the minds of the opera public. But how could reinstating the goal of providing an immoderate, ravishing experience not entail a re-feminizing (in terms of the cultural stereotypes) of the most acute pleasure taken in opera?
FOR WAGNER, who created the idea of opera as overwhelming experience—and whose supreme dramatic subject is the progression of
consciousness through ecstasy into oblivion—certain strictures about the story still held. Wagner could not have accepted as satisfying any drama left unresolved by an epiphany of acceptance, of understanding. Since Wagner, however, the stories that operas tell are more likely to end with collective dismay, with the defeat of understanding.
To be sure, some of the greatest operas (L’incoronazione di Poppea, Così fan tutte, Fidelio, Don Carlo, Moses und Aron) carry real arguments, real debate. But more commonly favored in opera are stories which are, in effect, tragedies of cognition. This is particularly true of what we could properly call modern opera, the transition to which is made by Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal, whose protagonist enters the story as a child, a holy innocent, a fool. Subsequently, Parsifal does attain enlightenment—offstage. In later versions of this story the naif remains in a state of unknowing. The central figure of modern opera is often someone in a state of deficient consciousness, of pathological innocence.
Pelléas et Mélisande is one of the masterpieces in this evolution. Onto one of the most traditional opera stories, that of a young man whose love for a woman his own age or younger is thwarted because she is promised or already married to an older relative (Tristan und Isolde, Don Carlo, Eugene Onegin, inter alia), is grafted the modern story about not understanding, not knowing, being balked by a mystery; or creating a mystery, by being afflicted by an unexplained injury or suffering.
Debussy’s opera (following the Maeterlinck play used almost in its entirety as the libretto) has its special inflections. We are in the world without clear borders and fixed dimensions of Symbolist enigma: where appearances are known by their shadows or reflections, where debility and inexplicable affliction are equated with voluptuousness, and the emblematic object of desire is a languid childlike woman with Art Nouveau long hair.
In this kingdom of stretched, fairy-tale dualities—ancient and juvenile, ill and well, dark and light, wet and dry—is set a neo-Wagnerian tale of yearning and thwarting, of incurable vulnerability. Maeterlinck’s drama can be read as an idealization of depression. It can also be seen
as a representation, a literalizing, of once widely accepted ideas about physical illness—which attributed many illnesses, tautologically, to an illness-producing atmosphere (“miasma”). The story is set in precisely such a damp, sun-deprived environment, replete with water sources and subterranean spaces. Debussy began at the play’s second scene, with Mélisande at a forest spring: “Une petite fille qui pleure au bord de l’eau.” (It was surely not for lack of thematic aptness that he cut the first scene of Maeterlinck’s play: a chorus of castle servants calling for water.) The omnipresence of water, which generally signifies purity—or emotional volatility—here signifies a generalized unhealthiness.
Most characters are ill (Pelléas’s father, Pelléas’s friend Marcellus) or wounded (in the course of the story, Golaud) or infirm (the grandfather, Arkel) or physically weak (Golaud’s little son, Yniold, who sings of his inability to lift a stone). Mélisande, of course, is the epitome of fragility—and dies of a wound that, the doctor says, would not kill a bird. (In Maeterlinck’s play, the doctor adds, “Elle est née sans raison … pour mourir; et elle meurt sans raison.”) Every reference to Mélisande emphasizes her smallness (her hands are always her “petites mains”), her untouchability (her first words are “Ne me touchez pas! Ne me touchez pas!”). Her benign discoverer, Golaud, who appears to her like a giant—and possibly a rapist—wins Mélisande by promising not to touch her, and by avowing his own vulnerability (“Je suis perdu aussi”). But when he brings Mélisande back to his family and begins to treat his child-bride as a woman, he becomes, despite himself, a brute.
The love of Pelléas and Mélisande cannot be consummated not because the young woman is married to an older relative of the young man’s, the usual story, but because she is too fragile, sexually immature. Any adult sexuality would constitute an aggression against the heroine. Golaud is the story’s one normally mature male character—in contrast to the ancient grandfather, whose request to kiss Mélisande is ostentatiously chaste, and to Golaud’s young half brother, still a boy, who, when he wishes to embrace and be embraced by Mélisande, wraps himself in the part of her body that is not solid, not flesh: her hair. Mélisande seems endowed with a body only for others to marvel at its delicacy. It is startling to realize (I have never seen it depicted in any
production of the opera) that Mélisande would be nine months pregnant when she and Pelléas finally do confess their love to each other, only immediately to be torn apart by the jealous Golaud. But her altered, swollen body is unmentionable, perhaps unstageable, and, in a certain sense, unthinkable. It is as if Mélisande herself cannot realize she is pregnant (and therefore a woman), for the same reason that, at the story’s close, she cannot take in that she now has a daughter and is about to die.
Eventually the lovers do embrace, body to body, but this moment of shared immolation-in-feeling is cut short, to be followed by amnesia (Mélisande) and excruciating mental confusion (Golaud). Mélisande doesn’t remember that Pelléas has been slain by Golaud, isn’t aware that she has just given birth (“Je ne sais pas ce que je dis … Je ne sais pas ce que je sais … Je ne dis plus ce que je veux”), and is genuinely incapable of giving the frantically bereaved Golaud the relief of knowing that, however much he regrets what he has done, he was not wrong in suspecting that Mélisande and Pelléas were in love.
The well-intentioned Golaud has turned into one of opera’s remorseful, inadvertent murderers who kills an innocent woman whom he truly loves. For in this story in which not just a protagonist but everyone feels inadequate, helpless, baffled by what she or he is feeling, Golaud is the only character physically capable of violence. Mental deficiency or frustrated understanding (combined with feelings of helplessness) is indeed a recipe for violence. Like Wozzeck and Lulu, like Bluebeard’s Castle, Pelléas et Mélisande is a story of blind cruelty, with the difference that the cruelties perpetrated are not transactions between adult men and women but acts of adults against children. Mélisande is a lost child whom Golaud rescues and pledges to protect but cannot help destroying; in the anguish of jealousy he also manhandles his little son. But all this does not make the ogre any less a victim—like Wozzeck, like Peter Grimes, Golaud is innocently guilty—and therefore a proper object of the audience’s pity.
Pity for the innocent lovers; pity for Yniold and the infant Mélisande has left; and pity for Golaud—Pelléas et Mélisande completes the process begun long ago whereby opera exalts the feelings regarded as feminine. No work that is now part of opera’s standard
repertory is so devoid of the triumphalist accents by which opera, traditionally, gives such pleasure. A robust art (compared with, say, chamber music), opera has specialized in broad—broadly contrasting, broadly legible—emotions. The emotional stream of Debussy’s masterpiece is deliberately narrower: he wagers on a more harrowing, more finely calibrated intensity. But the great modern tragedies of deficient consciousness propose their own voluptuous standards as they rise to an ecstasy of lament. Debussy’s portrayal of lacrimae rerum is unlike any other in opera. It must be the saddest opera ever composed. (The only rival of Pelléas et Mélisande in this respect is Wozzeck, which also ends on the excruciating presence of a just-orphaned child.) As the heartbroken Arkel sings: “Mais la tristesse, Golaud, mais la tristesse de toute que l’on voit!”
[1997]