Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal, was premiered at the composer’s own theater in Bayreuth in 1882. Debussy was among those who experienced it there — and he was mesmerized by the opera’s shimmering music and its exploration of the characters’ fate and destinies.
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participated in a ninth as a pianist, and heard many Wagner excerpts in concert. In his circle, Wagner figured in nearly every conversation about the arts and its future direction, with the focus placed often on the yearning harmonies of Tristan and Isolde. For his part, Debussy was most moved by the spiritual aspirations of Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, with its orchestration that, as he said, “glowed as if lit from behind.” Recalling those days, Debussy wrote, “For a long time I had been striving to write music for the theater.” He did not say “to write an opera,” because what he had in mind was radically different from most people’s idea of what an opera is, then and now. In conversation with his former composition teacher Ernest Guiraud in 1890, Debussy approved of Wagner’s elimination of talking “recitatives in the Italian manner” and also of the “lyrical arias,” but said he wanted to go further. Guiraud asked what kind of poet he wanted to set to music. Debussy replied: “One who deals in things half-said. The ideal would be two associated dreams. No place, nor time. No big scenes. . . . Music in opera is far too predominant. Too much singing and the musical settings are too cumbersome. The blossoming of the voice into true singing should occur only when required. A painting executed in gray is the ideal. No developments merely for the sake of developments. . . . No discussion or arguments between the characters, who would simply be at the mercy of life and submit to destiny.” A N E N I G M AT I C P L AY, M E E T I N G T H E P L AY W R I G H T
“Things half-said” were the stock in trade of the symbolist writers, who abhorred anything literal or realistic, instead striving to take the reader into realms of fantasy and emotional suggestion. Among them was Maurice Maeterlinck, whose elusive plays exemplified the symbolist ethos. In 1891, Debussy requested the rights to set one of them, La princesse Maleine, but learned they had already gone to another composer. He read another Maeterlinck play, Pelléas et Mélisande, attended its first About the Opera
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