The dispersal of the Coronation’s celebrants at the appearance of The Mother “like a phantom of unhappiness” is becoming one of my favorite moments in the opera. The King of Fools bursts into cynical laughter and runs off, as in his Noctambulist guise he had in Act 2, this time with the Daughters of Joy. The musicians and dancers vanish on the instant; the beggars jeer; the Junkman says “Another queen given the sack! . . . farewell songs, farewell dreams . . .  what a misfortune to have a mother!” In short, the whole charade gone up in a single poof of reality (a displacement reversed at the end of the opera, when the voices of the city, of pleasure and light, invade the little foyer and draw Louise away).^(I) And then, after The Mother’s request—timid at first, desperate, but then gaining confidence as she sees the effect she’s having—comes the re-appearance of the Ragpicker, wherein Louise and Julien see a vision of The Father’s image. As with the Otello Act 3 finale, little of all this interaction is in the clear musically, or meant to be. It has to be conveyed in the staging of the individual and group actions, as in the Meiningen troupe’s revolutionary detailed crowd scenes and the adaptations of that approach in the handling of operatic choruses. It’s part of the birth of modern theatrical realism.

We cannot call Claude Debussy’s mystical, “Impressionistic” Pelléas et Mélisande a part of that movement. And there are few more colorfully expressed take-downs of one composer’s work by another than Debussy’s of Louise in a letter to Pierre Louÿs, written three days after the premiere, in which the kindest thing he can say is that “It’s more silly than harmful.”  And it must have rankled that though Pelléas earned the respect of musicians and connoisseurs, for the span of Debussy’s life (and well beyond), Louise was the far more popular opera. Yet in the score of Louise we can hear much that sounds Impressionistic, that suggests a world beyond the one we’re seeing, and that bears harmonic traces not dissimilar to Debussyian usage (at times suggestive of a common ancestor, Wagner). Both operas (though Debussy’s more consistently, with Charpentier’s inclining more emphatically to the “operatic”) set long stretches of singing as almost naturalistic dialogue, aided along a through-composed line of development by atmospheric orchestral interludes. Finally, in terms of plot and character relationships, both share the template of the E-19 metanarrative, in the case of Pelléas going directly to its medieval source, and in that of Louise embedding it, in typical veristic fashion, in a modern petit bourgeois family drama. (It is set in place almost at rise of curtain, with Julien serenading his imprisoned maiden, and she replying that she’s had to wait for her handsome knight to deliver her, just as in the storybooks. As they relate, their surveilled, arm’s-distanced courtship has been filled with flowery gestures and imagery.) Finally, Louise and Pelléas share at least one more crucial feature: Mary Garden, who, almost exactly two years after taking over the role of Louise, created that of Mélisande. She was lauded in both these parts, and loved both. But Louise, she said, remained her favorite.

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NEXT TIME: I have been struck by the frequency with which comment, more wistful than challenging, has recently come my way about my insistence on live performance as the only environment wherein opera as opera can occur, and the implications of this for all the other ways we now have to experience opera. So, with full-scale live performance in abeyance or at least curtailed, this may be a good time for me to re-formulate my thoughts on the natural state of our artform. There has also been some advancement of the discussion, which I first introduced in my “Before the First Lesson” series, on some of the environmental factors that may (well, are—it’s a question of to what extent) affecting singing. So I may chime in on that, as well.

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