These categories, Symbolist and Impressionist, do set this work off from many of other, more familiar styles. But beyond the crudest sort of manneristic imitation, they tell us little about meaning, about substance, or of how the drama should be played. For that, we have to enter Pelléas through Maeterlinck, just as Debussy did to find the sources of his music. And  throughout his writing prime, when his plays and essays made him one of Europe’s pre-eminent literary figures, Maeterlinck was a mystic—not just a dabbler, but an avid student of a kind of mysticism whose spirit runs through his oeuvre. Why, then, should we not take Pelléas seriously as a Symbolist drama of the occult?

The spirit of the mysticism in which Maeterlinck was immersed is that of a neo-Manichean dualism, which holds that the world of matter is evil, of the dark, and that the soul’s yearning is to escape it and return to the realm of eternal light, whence it had come. (Pelléas reverses the dark/light, night/day death symbolism of Tristan und Isolde, in which the lovers seek to leave the hateful day for the realm of eternal night.) Since we have come from the light and long to return to it, those closest to it—and to the wisdom that is greater than our worldly kind—are those nearest birth and death, i.e., the very old and the very young. Among the very young, there are (according to this worldview) certain sentient souls, more often female, who sense this pull toward the light more strongly than others. In the opera, that would be Mélisande, youngest of the principals. (The youngest of all the characters, the boy Yniold, is obviously neither sentient in that way nor evolved enough as a worldly being to do more than ingenuously report on what he sees.)

At the other age extreme is Arkel, already far enough from earthly events to regard them with a profound acceptance. In his absorbing essay on the opera, Pierre Boulez rejects the common view of Arkel as ” . . . an old man superabounding in wisdom, gifted with ‘clairvoyance.'” Boulez sees him, rather, as embodying a ” . . . naïveté preserved, despite his age, beyond actual events,” and thus linked to ” . . . the natural adolescent naïveté of Pelléas.” I think Boulez is right to see a connection of spirit between Arkel and Pelléas. But he does not mention Arkel’s even more significant empathy with Mélisande, and he misinterprets the meaning of both bonds, I assume through an unfamiliarity with Maeterlinck’s mystical assumptions. Arkel has arrived at his “naïveté,” his indifference (or “near-blindness”) to the significance of worldly events. “We never see anything but the reverse of destinies, even of our own,” he tells Geneviève, and this puts him closer to the “innocence” of Mélisande—who has as yet learned so little of the world—and to a lesser degree to the “naïveté” of Pelléas.

Let’s peg Arkel’s worldly age at ninety. That most likely puts his daughter, Geneviève, between 65 and 70. (She tells Mélisande that it has been forty years since she first came to the castle, and while we do not know her age on that occasion, her tone suggests that she was a young woman, not a child. Perhaps that’s when Arkel succeeded to the kingdom, bringing her with him.) Not yet near death, in full possession of her worldly faculties, very much a survivor and not at all in touch with the mysteries, she converses about events of great familial importance with extreme practicality, and immediately assumes the role of friendly mother-in-law with Mélisande. Then she vanishes from the drama, and this cannot be some oversight or loose end of Maeterlinck’s; in his text, there are no oversights or loose ends. Geneviève has no part to play in the events to come. Her common-sensical presence would have to be dealt with in the text, and would only weaken the pull toward the light, which is the spine of the drama.