Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande

Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score

AUTHOR OF "PHASES OF MODERN MUSIC," "THE MUSIC OF TO-MORROW," "STORIES OF SYMPHONIC MUSIC," "EDWARD MACDOWELL" (IN "LIVING MASTERS OF MUSIC" SERIES) "STRAUSS' 'SALOME,'" ETC. "It is not an ill thing to cross at times the marches of silence and see the phantoms of life and death in a new way. It is not an ill thing, even if one meet only the fantasies of beauty."FIONA MACLEOD. With the production at Paris in the spring of 1902 of Claude Debussy's Pellas et Mlisande, based on the play of Maeterlinck, the history of music turned a new and surprising page. "It is necessary," declared an acute French critic, M. Jean Marnold, writing shortly after the event, "to go back perhaps to Tristan to find in the opera house an event so important in certain respects for the evolution of musical art." The assertion strikes one to-day, five years after, as, if anything, over-cautious. Pellas et Mlisande exhibited not simply a new manner of writing opera, but a new kind of musica new way of evolving and combining tones, a new order of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic structure. The style of it was absolutely new and absolutely distinctive: the thing had never been done before, save, in a lesser degree, by Debussy himself in his then little known earlier work. Prior to the appearance of Pellas et Mlisande, he had put forth, without appreciably disturbing the musical waters, all of the extraordinary and individual music with which his fame is now associated, except the three orchestral "sketches," La Mer (composed in 1903-1905 and published in the latter year), the piano pieces Estampes (1903), and Images, Masques, l'le joyeuse (1905), and a few songs. Certain audiences in Paris had heard, nine years before, his setting of Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel" (La Demoiselle lue), a "lyric poem" for two solo voices, female chorus, and orchestra; in the same year (1893) his string quartet was played by Ysae and his associates; in 1894 his Prlude l'Aprs-midi d'un Faune was produced at a concert of the National Society of Music; the first two Nocturnes for orchestra, Nuages and Ftes, were played at a Lamoureux concert in 1900; the third, Sirnes, was performed with the others in the following year. Yet it was not until Pellas et Mlisande was produced at the Opra-Comique in April, 1902, that his work began seriously to be reckoned with outside of the small and inquisitive public, in Paris and elsewhere, that had known and valuedor execratedit. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 16488
Author: Gilman, Lawrence
Release Date: Aug 8, 2005
Format: eBook
Language: English