In L’Invisible, Reimann has fashioned his own libretto from the texts of three short Maeterlinck plays, namely, L’Intruse, Intérireur, and La Mort de Tintagiles. (Here I would suggest that the reader look back at my Pelléas et Mélisande article of 2/15/19, for its discussion of Maeterlinck’s mysticism and its theatrical representation, and perhaps even at The Tristan Quadrangle, 4/26/18, wherein other operatic referents are discussed, as well as at the mini-bibliographies at the end of this and the Pelléas posts.) These are among Maeterlinck’s earliest efforts, more or less concurrent with Pelléas, and the first to be staged (L’Intruse, in fact was the very first), in the 1890s at the height of the Symbolist moment, in small avant-garde Parisian theatres. He had already been acclaimed as a dramatist of importance by the critical reception (particularly from the influential Octave Mirbeau) of his first play, La Princesse Maleine. But this was solely on the basis of the written text; the play had not yet been produced. So Maeterlinck’s reputation was in fact first established on the page, not the stage, and the stature he soon attained (e.g., Nobel Prize for literature, 1911) rested at least as much on his widely read essays as on his plays. Further, there has from the start been the question of how, if at all, these plays are meant to be staged. The author himself posed this question. He shared with Edward Gordon Craig the notion that at least some plays are best enacted by marionettes. For Craig, this was because the live actor, in his very humanness, could not help violating the purity of the theatrical idea, or of the philosophical or metaphysical content of the idea (the Moses side of Schoenberg’s Moses/Aron dichotomy, its spiritual meaning transferred from religion to theatre), which he sought to convey through visual emblemization. Maeterlinck shared some of this despair over the actor’s presence, over the impossibility of acting. But for him, the chief attraction of puppet theatre, for which some of these early one-acts were ostensibly intended, was that the marionette on its strings was the ideal representation of the true state of the human individual, struggling to take action in pursuit of his goals, but in reality guided by a Fate he only dimly apprehends and against which he has no power.

Still, both Craig and Maeterlinck wished to work in the theatre, and it is, finally, hard to do away with actors and have theatre. Craig took his ideas about Hamlet to Stanislavski and his Moscow Art Theatre, the most actor-centered of all ensembles. Maeterlinck entrusted his first stagings to the young Lugné-Poe, just then breaking away from the naturalism of André Antoine’s Théatre Libre in favor of the Symbolist aesthetic, rather as Meyerhold was to separate from Stanislavski and the MAT some 12-15 years later to go his own auteurial way. Yet Maeterlinck wound up with the MAT, too, for La Mort de Tintagiles was staged there in 1905 (by Meyerhold), and The Bluebird was in the repertory there for many seasons. ^(I)