Pelleas et Melisande: the ever flowing metaphor.

My first impression of the opera has to do with the fragmentary condition both from text and music. Maeterlinck is building by means of fragments a concealed story. We don’t know anything about the characters and their past. Melisande is a ghost lost in a wood of uncertainties. All the characters seems to be just born. Maeterlinck is building the negative of a drama. The elusive condition of this story is in the emptiness rather than in the shown circumstances; emotions and motivations are frozen.

The musical motives are always flowing, melting ones with others in a continuous change. The continuous change remains then like a uniform feature which is a condition of the persistence of the unity.

“Upon those who step into the same rivers different and ever different waters flow down”.

Heracleitus

The time of music works like a metaphor of the human condition: ever flowing but in depth, always the same.

The perception of time in this opera is “dissolved” in an sort of elastic time that makes the flowing of circumstances eternal. Statism is a synonymous of eternity.

Building with points…

Debussy took some essential points from the symbolist drama by Maeterlinck, working with some frozen and eternal symbols: the water, the fall, the gold in the deep of the wells; he works as well with archetypes: the young, the old and the youngest. Debussy is looking Maeterlinck through a mirror, a flexible mirror as if it is made of water. This mirror reflects the essence of Maeterlinck’s symbolism in an ever flowing musicality.

Debussy is also with the music building silence and mystery. Building the omissions is different than creating a whole and erasing parts.