A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Debussy
Having completed my magnum opus, “Mozart in 3 Parts”, I am faced with the dilemma of whom to write about next?
To try to understand Beethoven straight after Mozart would, I think, be a thankless task, although I realise that I must address that other titan of music soon. Of the great composers, who is the most enigmatic, the most ephemeral, the hardest to grasp? Step forward Claude Debussy, the creator of, perhaps, my favourite opera of them all, ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’, and certainly the creator of the role which I feel is my best, Arkel, “le vieux roi d’Allemonde”.
Described by Francois Lesure, his biographer, as “withdrawn, unsociable, taciturn, skittish, susceptible, distant and shy”, the man was as enigmatic as his music!
Born just outside Paris in 1862, Debussy was brought up in a relatively poor family, and in 1870, to escape the Prussian siege of Paris, he and his mother fled to his father’s aunt in Cannes on the Riviera, where he had his first piano lessons. His father remained in Paris and joined up to the “Commune” which in turn led to his imprisonment after the suppression of a movement described later by Karl Marx as the first example of the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. Indeed, he was lucky to escape with his life, and his release after only a year allowed the young Claude to come back to Paris, where his musical skills, especially his piano playing, attracted notice at an early stage and led to his enrolment at the Paris Conservatoire in 1872, where he studied for the next 11 years. The character traits noted above were already in evidence, and it seemed the young Debussy was a reluctant student, although clearly talented. The summers of 1880-82 were spent in the employ of Nadezhda von Meck, the patron of Tchaikovsky, as household pianist, and he travelled widely in Europe with her family to Switzerland, Italy and Russia. Towards the end of his time at the Conservatoire, he started to play for Marie Moreau-Sainti’s singing classes, and fell in love with one of the students, Marie Vasnier, for whom he wrote 27 songs during their 7-year relationship, carried on under the nose of her husband, Henri Vasnier, a high-up civil servant.
In 1884, he won the Prix de Rome, France’s highest musical award, which gave him a residence at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome for two years. Debussy hated the whole experience, disliked the life there and couldn’t bear Italian opera! However, he was much taken with the music of Palestrina (see one of my earlier Blogs!) and was inspired by Franz Liszt, who was a visitor to the Villa several times.
By this time, his music was already evolving into an individual style, far from the rules and order of the current orthodoxy. In a way, Debussy was beginning to find his own voice, like Richard Wagner before him, but the restrictions of the French Academy were stifling. He was much taken with Wagner’s operas. He heard Act 1 of ‘Tristan’ in Paris, attended the Bayreuth Festivals in 1888 and 89, and was profoundly inspired by the German master. However, he soon realised that his musical direction was completely different from Wagner’s and set off on his slow quest to find his own individual voice. The oriental sounds of Javanese gamelan music appealed to him, as did the exotic music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who conducted two concerts of his music in Paris, and he struck up a friendship with Erik Satie, another unconventional composer and lover of Bohemian Café society. His love life had also moved on, and, by 1893, he was now living with Gaby Dupond. That same year, he attended the premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ in Paris, an event that changed his life’ inspiring one of the greatest works of art and Debussy’s finest achievement.
Maeterlinck was a French-speaking Belgian, born in 1862 in Ghent, from a reasonably wealthy family, who had attended a Jesuit school which inspired a lifelong dislike of the Catholic Church and organised religion in general. While studying law at Ghent University, he spent some time in Paris, where he became acquainted with some of the founders of the Symbolist movement. This influence inspired him to write plays, steeped in mysticism and fatalism, culminating in ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ which opened at the Bouffes Parisiens in a production with very little lighting, and a gauze screen across the front of the stage. Debussy loved it at first sight and went to Ghent to ask the author for permission to turn it into an opera.
From the beginning, he determined to set the whole play to music, rather than use a librettist or make his own libretto. This proved to be a masterstroke, although also making it almost impossible to translate into other languages. I wrote about this aspect of the opera in ‘A Singer’s Life’ and have had many fascinating discussions with friends over the years, about the pros and cons of translating this masterpiece. I still maintain that Debussy’s setting of Maeterlinck’s text renders a suitable translation impossible, and the advent of supertitles in opera houses nowadays means that no one need fail to understand the words, even when sung in French.
And what words they are! Set in an ancient castle surrounded on three sides by forest and on one by sea, a disfunctional family, led by the 90-year old blind king Arkel (my role), gradually disintegrates before our eyes. A traditional love triangle is transformed in Maeterlinck’s hands into a deeply symbolic story, where none of the characters understand each other, and random violence can break out at any moment. Death pervades everything, and everyone, and decay seems to be the lot of the castle, the family and the kingdom. Much of the action takes place in semi-darkness, either in the forest, deep in the castle, or in dark caves and grottos. Sunlight rarely penetrates the gloom, and when it does, it comes only as temporary relief. Water symbolism is everywhere, a pond, a well, a fountain, the sea, the tears of the characters; there is an unseen chorus of sailors, random characters flit in and out of view, silent servants become actors in their own story, beggars are discovered in the shadows. Nothing is real, and everything. Nothing concrete is said, and misunderstandings are common. Mélisande speaks in riddles or banalities, never answers questions, and seems to live in a different dimension from everyone else. Yet, people love, fight and die, and yearn for hope and salvation, somehow. At the very end, a tiny child is seen as a beacon of hope for the future, but we fear the worst.
The opera is, rightly in my view, seen as one of the greatest works of lyric art, and yet it inspires deep loathing as well as total love. I first saw it as a teenager in Edinburgh in the wonderful production with which Scottish Opera announced itself to the world as a new light in the British operatic firmament, in 1962. I saw it a decade later and loved it so much that I pleaded with my parents to buy tickets the next night to see it again! The main feature of that production was the use of a gauze across the stage, just like the first production of the play. It might seem weird nowadays to play the opera effectively behind a screen, but one soon got used to it, and the sound was unchanged. It allowed the lighting team to create myriad effects of light, colour and texture, and was hugely atmospheric. This was a technique used quite frequently 50 years ago but is surprisingly rare these days. Something similar was used by Jose Cura in his ‘Peter Grimes’ in which I sang a couple of years ago in Monte Carlo, for the Prologue, although there the screen was thicker, and we could not really see the conductor, which made communication harder. To tell the truth, I have still never seen or been in a more beautiful production of ‘Pélleas’ than that old Scottish version, but I have been in several fascinating ones. In Strasbourg, in 2000, Stein Winge, the Norwegian director, chose to set the story in a very sparse modern Scandinavian style, brighter than normal and losing the morbid decaying and gloomy atmosphere of the original. It was set at the Millennium, in modern dress, in a sort of weird post-apocalyptic world, but with a superb cast of fine singing actors, including Laurent Naouri, Brett Polegato and Catrin Wyn-Davies; it was thrillingly effective. He used a young German boy soprano for the role of Yniold (it is often given to a small female soprano, as the role is hard for a child to learn and act) and made him appear more frequently than usual in silent scenes. His presence made the inner drama and violence of some scenes particularly poignant, especially the scene when Golaud abuses Mélisande in front of the King. Having a child watch this awful scene, supposedly oblivious and playing on his Gameboy, made it even more shocking than normal, and when at the end of the scene, I, as Arkel, sang the beautifully sad phrase “Si j’étais Dieu, j’aurais pitié du coeur des hommes” (If I were God, I would pity the hearts of men), the great climactic orchestral interlude which followed was made more heart-rending by an embrace between me and the boy, as I tried to find some solace for him from the horror of the situation.
The opera is notoriously difficult to cast. Pelleas needs a high baritone (baryton-martin in French), who possesses a top A but can sing quite low too. Occasionally it can be sung by a low tenor – the Scottish Opera production of my youth had George Shirley, the wonderful American tenor – but it really needs a baritone for the right sound. Tom Allen was a fantastic Pelleas, as was Scotland’s Russell Smythe, and, in modern times, I saw Stéphane Degout in an otherwise awful production in Aix, singing marvellously. Golaud and Arkel must be different vocally but share many of the same notes. Arkel is a real bass role, warm and mellifluous, while Golaud needs a slightly higher, more edgy voice. I have been fortunate to sing with singing actors of the calibre of Laurent Naouri, Paul Gay and Alan Opie (although Alan found it rather low) and the contrast between the two voices is vital to the opera. It is without doubt my favourite role in all opera, and I revel in its beauty and tenderness. People often say it needs a sonorous and loud bass, but I must disagree, although possessing both qualities myself. If you only get a noise, simply a warm buzz, you lose much of the poignancy of the part. The articulation of the words is crucial, and the ability to express deep emotion through singing is enormously important. A nice sound is not enough. Arkel is the voice of hope and wisdom in the story, although his interventions prove to be helpless, and his wisdom is flawed. The whole final act, when Mélisande lies dying and Arkel tries to console her, is a scene of deep love and sympathy. Productions which try to make Arkel into some sort of pervy old man (sadly too frequent these days) completely miss the point and render the opera meaningless (assuming there is some meaning to find!). I was very lucky to be able to work with the fine director, Sir Michael Boyd, at Garsington, and I cannot say how happy I was when he announced at the start of rehearsals that his view of Arkel matched my own. I think we made it work. Certainly, the number of people who came up to me at the end, deeply moved by the production, suggested that we had achieved our goal. Those were a special series of performances for me, as we were singing with the Philharmonia Orchestra, one of the world’s great orchestras. At the first Sitzprobe rehearsal, when we heard the orchestra for the first time, it only took three chords for me to realise that I would be singing the opera with the most exquisite and sumptuous playing I could ever imagine. My previous productions were with wonderful players, but the Philharmonia took it to a different level. I also discovered that Michael Boyd had spent some of his schooldays at Daniel Stewart’s College, at the same time as I was at George Watson’s! Perhaps that explained our mutual understanding of the opera.
Sadly, only a few months after that production at Garsington, I watched in horror as some director on television was spouting about how unpleasant Arkel is as a character, a power-crazed quasi paedophile! Aaargh!
Mélisande is vocally less difficult to cast, although the role lies low for some sopranos and high for mezzos but needs a special sort of actor to bring off the combination of innocence and weirdness that is needed. It has become a bit of a cliché that her enigmatic responses to almost every event has some meaning and no meaning at the same time. We never learn anything concrete about her throughout the piece, but her ability to completely overwhelm every man who meets her, is an essential aspect of her character. She is both mysterious and childlike and has fascinated audiences for a century and more. Anne-Sophie Duprels, Andrea Carroll and Catrin Wyn-Davies have been the three Mélisandes I have worked with, superb all.
The first singer to play the role was Mary Garden, the Scottish soprano from Aberdeen, who captivated Debussy, and it is absolutely extraordinary to go on YouTube and see an interview her where she talks candidly about the role and the composer.
I could go on at even greater length about ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’, but it would be better for you to find one of the many books about this landmark work, which captivates (and annoys) audiences to this day. Some people will go to any length not to watch ‘Pelléas’, as they genuinely cannot stand it. I have had several friends who regularly come to whatever opera I am appearing in, who have told me, “I’m sure you’ll be great, but I can’t stand Pelléas, so I’m not coming!”
Similarly, there are many recordings available, but none that stand out as a firm first recommendation. Enigmatic to the end! Mind you, if you can find the excellent recording from 1952, with the conductor Ernest Ansermet and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (an orchestra with which I have sung in Geneva on two occasions), it will repay the search. It stars Suzanne Danco as Mélisande, with whom I made my first professional steps towards Arkel at the Britten-Pears School in the 80s. She, like Maeterlinck, was Belgian, and was a very famous post-war exponent of the role. I learned a lot from her.
It only remains for me to point you, our readers, in the direction of Debussy’s many wonderful chansons, and, of course, his marvellous compositions for piano, chamber music and full orchestra. This strange and unsociable man, who had a succession of exotic lovers, and seemed to possess little trace of any orthodoxy in his life or his work, has left us with a body of work unrivalled in history. I hope you find him as fascinating as I have done.
