As the story gets under way, let me make note of two conditions: 1) The life being played is encapsulated and temporary. Physically, it is bound in by the limitless, impenetrable forests, from which the only escape is the sea, with its open air and light. And all around the visible drama, as around this life itself, is the invisible presence of death, and the sense that certain people are destined to die young. There is Pelléas’ distant friend Marcellus, who knows the exact hour of his death. There is Pelléas’ unseen father, who is said to be near death but then recovers, and upon recovering tells Pelléas he has the look of one who will die young. (This is the theme of one of Maeterlinck’s most beautiful essays.) There is Mélisande’s own sense that her life will be brief. Then, in the opera’s prehistory, there were the wives of Arkel and of Golaud (the mother of Yniold), and Geneviève’s first husband, Golaud’s father. For these deaths no backstory is provided and, except for Arkel’s mention of Golaud’s loneliness and Pelléas’ tears over the news from Marcellus (who is never mentioned again), no emotion is evoked; they are simply part of the order of things. 2) Of all the symbols presented in the work, that of dark vs. light is the most pervasive—of the dark that is the present reality, and of the light that is sought. And speaking of symbols:

Two aesthetic categoricals were from the first attached to Pelléas: Symbolist and Impressionist, the first clearly applying to Maeterlinck’s contribution, the second to Debussy’s. And while much subsequent commentary has rightly urged us to avoid the reductionist limitation of these terms, they are perfectly accurate as far as they go. I propose taking each in its simplest, most obvious meaning. A Symbolist work is one in which abstractions and essences are made to stand in for more elaborated, quotidian representations of objects and actions. In the visual arts, the symbols take the form of images, which seek to convey purer, more fundamental truths than those conveyed by everyday appearances; indeed, those appearances are seen as concealing the important truths, which the symbolic images will suggest for us. In a drama, a symbol can continue to be an image (in the setting, in the choices of groupings and of stage position), but is more importantly present in the words and actions themselves, and in the choice of scenic events. In Arthur Symons’ foundational study The Symbolist Movement in Literature, he quotes Comte Goblet d’Alviella’s definition of symbol as ” . . . a representation which does not aim at being a reproduction,” and he characterizes Maeterlinck’s theatre as one of “The secret of things which is just beyond the most subtle words, the secret of the expressive silences.”  It happens that in Pelléas, for reasons I’ll come to presently, visual symbolization is not a productive approach, at least in my view.

In Impressionism (again putting the case in simplest terms), a creative artist who is unusually sensitive to the world around him and who finds great beauty and meaning in the impressions it makes upon him, opens himself up to them, then translates them into artworks in his chosen medium. (We contrast this with “Expressionist” art, in which all the pressure is from within: an urgency has built itself up inside the artist until it must be rather forcibly expelled into the world.) In the styles of work we call “Impressionist,” the sensory messages often seem to have been of a dreamlike, selectively softened kind.