Belgian Art at the Secession

The formation of the Viennese Secession is generally credited as the impetus for the growth of an increasingly progressive community of avant-garde artists in fin-de-siècle Vienna.Footnote ²⁰ In 1897, the Secession, comprised primarily of painters, architects and designers, announced their intention to break with traditions instituted by their forefathers and entrusted architect Josef Olbrich to design their controversial gallery that would open the next year, which he conceived of as ‘a temple of art which would offer the art lover a quiet, elegant place of refuge’.Footnote ²¹ The Secession’s first exhibition, in 1898, featured the work of many foreign artists, including John W. Alexander, Paul-Albert Besnard, Alexandre Charpentier, Constantin Meunier and Henri Martin. Several paintings by Fernand Khnopff, a Belgian painter, were displayed in the sixth hall, and he was immediately touted by Viennese art critics as the painterly kindred spirit of Maurice Maeterlinck.Footnote ²² In conjunction with the exhibition, a German translation of Maeterlinck’s play La mort de Tintagiles and several of his poems were included in an issue of Ver Sacrum, the official journal of the Secessionist artists.Footnote ²³

Based in Brussels, Khnopff gained international recognition in the early 1890s, noticed especially for his paintings that framed women in intriguing ways: these portraits often feature women that are immobile, confined by high necklines and the weight of their clothing.Footnote ²⁴ In 1883, Khnopff became one of the 11 founding members of Les XX – the Belgian equivalent of the Viennese Secession – a conglomerate that quickly established ties with likeminded artists in Paris and London. Khnopff’s reputation grew as critics recognized his special aptitude for painting symbolist scenes that act as visual manifestations of literary sentiments. The literary sources, including works by Gustave Flaubert and Georges Rodenbach, are openly revealed, as they are adopted or are alluded to in the titles of paintings. Many of Khnopff’s symbolist paintings feature isolated women who are presented in conjunction with literary titles and surrounded by distinctive objects, intensifying the painter’s focus on ‘the inner world of the human mind, portrayed in the same heroic and substantial terms as objects in the real world’.Footnote ²⁵ These qualities, along with the appearance of armour-clad Wagnerian Valkyries in several paintings and drawings, caught the attention of Hermann Bahr long before he became the spokesperson for the Secession. Khnopff’s name became even more familiar to Austrians when he was commissioned by Emperor Franz Joseph I to paint a portrait of his deceased wife, Empress Elisabeth (‘Sisi’), completed in 1902.Footnote ²⁶

Bahr first encountered the symbolist aesthetic in Paris in 1888, where his intellectual interests shifted from politics to art. After expulsion from the University of Vienna in 1883 for his adamant, and often violently aggressive, support of pan-Germanism, Bahr continued his studies in Berlin and took up residence in Paris in 1888. Reflecting on his principles as ‘a modern’, Bahr professed to ‘obey only one law in art, the law of my own sensations, my own impressions’.Footnote ²⁷ Upon returning to Vienna in October 1891, Bahr made numerous contributions to Viennese theatre, art and music circles. Initially convinced to resettle in the city by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, he proceeded to serve as a Dramaturg for Max Burckhard at the Burgtheater and later used his access to this artistic sphere to advocate for staging Maeterlinck’s plays in Vienna’s commercial theatres. Although Maeterlinck’s L’Intruse was performed in Vienna in 1892, recurrent performances of his plays began in 1900 with Pelléas. Over the next three years, La mort de Tintagiles and Monna Vanna were also introduced, with the majority of productions staged by visiting companies from Berlin, including the Berliner Sezessionsbühne troupe.Footnote ²⁸ Before becoming acquainted with Gustav Klimt and his cohort in 1897, Bahr published books and plays in addition to essays in his own weekly magazine, Die Zeit, which he founded in 1894.

Due to these wide-ranging social connections, Bahr’s opinions likely carried more weight among the populace than those of the average commentator. Bahr’s lofty literary style and comparative assessment of artworks in relation to philosophical and cultural developments promoted reflection on the poetics of modernism in Viennese criticism. Bahr’s early chronicle of the Secession, first published in 1900, broadcasts this holistic worldview. The following passage is Bahr’s description of viewing Khnopff’s paintings at the 1898 exhibition: he informs the public of the artist’s Austrian lineage and likens the melodious strains that emanate from his characters to the words of Leopold von Andrian and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.Footnote ²⁹

Alluding to one of his favourite novels, Andrian’s The Garden of Knowledge (1895), Bahr credits Khnopff as the rare painter whose approach to impressionistic portraiture often hinges on the suggestion of memory – rather than instantaneity – through the painting’s setting and the objects positioned therein. Khnopff succeeds at visually conveying the introspective point of view of literary characters that readers acquire through omniscient narration or interior monologue. Bahr mentions the protagonist, Erwin, because it is through intense self-reflection that he concludes that he is incapable of being understood by other humans in the world. As Carl Schorske explains: ‘Erwin’s remembrances became his life. Again, desocialization accompanied internalization’.Footnote ³¹ After acknowledging that some Austrians are not receptive to symbolism’s occult aspirations, Bahr goes on to propose that there are compelling artistic similarities between Maeterlinck and Khnopff:

Bahr’s claiming of Khnopff as a fellow Austrian, and his recognition of the painter’s ‘musicality’, may have been informed by his exposure to a painting entitled En écoutant du Schumann (Listening to Schumann) in Paris or Brussels, which was shockingly modern in its presentation of the artist’s mother immersed in her thoughts while listening to music: her gaze and silhouette is entirely blocked by her hand cupping her brow in a pensive gesture.Footnote ³³

Fig. 1

Fernand Khnopff, En écoutant du Schumann, oil on canvas, 1883, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Digital image retrieved from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium’s online database: http://www.fine-arts-museum.be/fr/la-collection/fernand-khnopff-en-ecoutant-du-schumann?artist=khnopff-fernand-1 (accessed 30 September 2013).

Although this painting was not exhibited in Vienna in 1898, the notion that Khnopff’s works strongly articulate intangible emotional or epistemological states, which were commonly associated with the absorbing experiences of listening to music and/or poetry in the nineteenth century, captivated Viennese artists like Gustav Klimt, who painted his own rendition of the experience of being engrossed in music in a 1899 painting entitled Schubert am Klavier (Schubert at the Piano).Footnote ³⁴ Eric R. Kandel cites Schubert am Klavier as an exemplary early Secessionist work that set a precedent for how Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele ‘wanted to create art whose external coherence is based not on the viewer’s social equality with the people in the painting, but on the viewer’s emotional (empathic) equality with them’.Footnote ³⁵ Kandel, a neurobiologist, fleetingly mentions Khnopff’s works as the impetus for Klimt’s creation of a wondrous output of paintings and murals that delve beneath surface appearances, which Kandel views as the governing principle of fin-de-siècle Viennese experiments in the arts and sciences alike.Footnote ³⁶ Khnopff often spoke of his intent to capture ‘la vie secrète des choses’, which art historian Jeffrey Howe locates in Khnopff’s numerous depictions of ‘the Ideal Woman in isolation from ordinary men and women’, her face always expressing ‘a pensive and ineluctable sadness’.Footnote ³⁷

Maeterlinck’s predilection for introverted characters translates into unconventional female operatic protagonists, and many commentators suggest that they are traditionally rendered as emblematic specimens of fin-de-siècle portraiture, as Susan Sontag does when describing Mélisande as ‘a languid childlike woman with Art Nouveau long hair’.Footnote ³⁸ The message, if any, which Maeterlinck and the composers in question wish to impart by sharply differentiating the female protagonist’s presence and fate from the male’s, has fuelled sustained interest in symbolist operas. Similarly, the majority of Khnopff’s paintings depict women, including many of his sister, Marguerite, whose feminine personality traits were illustrated rather atypically for the era, as outwardly quiet and motionless figures who are deeply immersed in thought. Khnopff, like the pre-Raphaelite English contemporaries whom he admired, sought to offer truthful representations that illustrated and questioned how women interacted with men and were stifled by their roles in the metropolis, where a life of servitude, either domestic or sexual, often awaited them. Yet while many of his English counterparts paint slice-of-life scenes of prostitution or fleshy sexualized bodies, Khnopff’s paintings tend to fixate on women’s faces and, similar to Maeterlinck’s approach, his invocation of literary figures in the imagery or titles of the works, often invites viewers to make connections between a character and a corresponding text.Footnote ³⁹ Khnopff’s inclination to incorporate authentic female perspectives into his work is demonstrated by his integration of Christina Rossetti’s poem, Who Shall Deliver Me?, into two of his canvases, both painted in 1891. A close-up of a woman on a Bruges street submerged in grey daylight is titled after the poem. Its companion piece, I Lock My Door Upon Myself, references the first line of the poem’s third stanza, and places a contemplative woman in a contrasting setting: a spacious and richly decorated domestic interior, where she is surrounded by an array of diversified objects like flowers, several sculptures, paintings and jewellery.Footnote ⁴⁰

Fig. 2

Fernand Khnopff, I Lock My Door Upon Myself, oil on canvas, 1891, Neue Pinakothek, Munich. Digital image retrieved from the Neue Pinakothek’s online database: www.pinakothek.de/en/fernand-khnopff/i-lock-my-door-upon-myself (accessed 4 October 2013).

In this set of paintings Khnopff manipulates the scale of the human figure in relation to the environment in which she is situated and the quantity of signifying objects that occupy the canvas. Khnopff’s fluctuating treatment of compositional arrangement throughout his output encourages the viewer temporally to suspend the ‘life’ of the painting, surveying and retracing the details, whether sparse or abundant, to further substantiate the people he portrays. Not surprisingly, the visual elements that are still crucial to engrossing productions of French symbolist operas – the vantage points from which characters view each other and the musically foregrounded objects (the doors behind which abundant jewels are stowed and the windows that are demolished in Ariane; the well, and the cascading hair flowing down the tower wall in Pelléas, to name but two) – can be likened to the inanimate signifiers that emerge as focal points of Khnopff’s paintings.Footnote ⁴¹

Ludwig Hevesi, art critic for the Wiener Fremden-Blatt newspaper, and Richard Muther, one of the first art historians to publish a book on nineteenth-century Belgian painting, in 1904, offer further impressions on Khnopff’s ability to engage viewers in the construction of the subject by rendering a menagerie of symbols and/or uncommon vantage points, often amid striking and suggestive environments. In these discussions, the authors lend further insight into how Khnopff’s painterly style mirrored Maeterlinck’s literary style at the turn of the century. Hevesi’s first consideration of Khnopff’s sculptures and paintings is a lengthy review of the first Secession exhibition that was published in the Fremden-Blatt on 24 April 1898. In this essay, Hevesi draws attention to Khnopff’s visual replication of Maeterlinck’s often puzzling juxtapositions:

Later in the essay, as Hevesi discusses Khnopff’s modern revitalizations of mythological women, particularly ‘Medusas and sphinxes’, he goes on to emphasize that Khnopff’s portrayals of literary themes and characters are not treated as they would be in historical paintings, but initiate a new approach because the artist aims to portray the entwinement of the character’s physical behaviour and mental faculties.

Literary scholar Patrick McGuinness refers to Maeterlinck’s heightening of this type of mind–body duality as ‘radical paradox’ in his discussion of Annabella (1893), a translation and adaptation of John Ford’s play ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore: ‘Maeterlinck sees Annabella and Giovanni as, at one and the same time, incestuous lovers and murderous (anti-)heroes and perfectly ordinary people. Their characters have simply taken shape around extreme events and passions without altering their profound humanity’.Footnote ⁴⁴

In his book on nineteenth-century Belgian painting, Richard Muther, a distinguished German professor of art history at the University of Breslau from 1895 until his death in 1909, also stresses that Khnopff’s paintings elicit the same modernization of classic archetypes as those of contemporary writers, including Maeterlinck and Hofmannsthal: ‘Fernand Khnopff provides the parallel to Maeterlinck– even to d’Annunzio, Schnitzler, and Hofmannsthal. All that we attest to believe in from the works of the old masters, found in him a subtle performer’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Muther alludes to fairy tale settings, and the imaginative wonderment that they provoke, when describing the array of feminine poses that Khnopff depicts.

When considering the operatic works of Debussy and Dukas, Viennese music critics build on the tendency to describe Belgian paintings in relation to literary works, and they in turn liken Debussy’s and Dukas’s musical conjuring of Maeterlinck’s ‘unknown worlds’ to particular visual techniques and colour palettes. Critics perceive the musical surface as porous, sensitive to the libretto’s privileging of environmental conditions, and they frequently address how the composers defy traditional operatic discourse, some Wagnerian procedures included, to annul the standard syntax. This is achieved through the minimization of tuneful melodies and reflective arias and duets that lend insight into the affections that motivate the action, and, especially, through a reconceptualization of the principle of orchestral accompaniment as elucidative musical commentary. The alternative symbolist syntax that emerges seems to be developed with the intent of translating the character’s physiological impulses into musical terms; leaving the listener to feel anxiety, boredom or unanticipated joy induced by physical stimuli at the same moment as the onstage character, as opposed to revealing his or her internal thoughts and memories. These are, of course, the moods and predicaments that Maeterlinck cites in Le tragique quotidien as neglected in dramatic scenarios, but as crucial to shaping the self, which he concisely posits through a series of questions: ‘Is not tranquillity, watched over by the stars, a terrible thing when you consider it; and does our sense of life grow in tumult or in silence? … Does not happiness or a simple moment of rest reveal more of what is serious and changeless than does the whirlwind of passion?’Footnote ⁴⁷

This nuanced depiction of mood is particularly emphasized in the reception with regard to description of the overall sonic quality of the orchestral accompaniment, which is of greater interest to critics than the vocal writing or the singers. The ‘surges of colour’ (Farbengewoge) in Ariane und Blaubart are routinely characterized as ‘bold’ (kühn) and ‘nervous’, while Pelleas und Melisande is described as monochromatic, a ‘shadowy’ (schattenhaft) and ‘blurry’ (verschwommen) texture that maintains its consistency throughout the work. Moreover, discussion of the value of the operatic production of ‘radical paradox’, to invoke McGuinness’s term, encourages rumination on how opera employs basic aesthetic tenets derived from both painting and drama, but can result in an unfulfilling whole when the open-endedness of a series of paintings, over which the viewer generally controls the temporal duration of his intake, takes precedence over a tightly constructed dramatic scenario. Critics consider whether opera that strives to illustrate the sensory perception of the characters in the present offers a more authentic channel for spectators to vicariously experience a character’s feelings and emotions, as it replaces traditional dramatic character development in which information about past experiences and memories are supplied through the libretto and musical recurrences. As will be addressed below, this attention to viscerality generates an emphasis on what Dukas describes as ‘latent musicality’, as opposed to ‘symphonic musicality’; it is this concept that the Viennese critics detect and associate with painting, offering us an opportunity to better understand what musical qualities were (sometimes negatively) credited with begetting operatic novelty at the fin de siècle, and to re-examine passages from the operas bearing this principle in mind. As a starting point, the devices that stuck out to Viennese critics as particularly fresh, or perhaps overused – like the profusion of extended tertian harmony – were often likened to advancements in painting as demonstrated by Hirschfeld’s assertion that Debussy’s dispersion of the notes of extended tertian chords into extreme registers is initially captivating, but ultimately provides the foundation for a nebulous, elliptic work.

Latency and ‘Impressionistic Reflexes’

The condition of latency has recently been theorized by literary and cultural studies scholars, at the initiation of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, to characterize a mode of interpretation. Latency is a sensory stimulation felt in response to situations in which elements are marked as significant through the assertion of their presence or existence, but they are not ‘accessible to interpretation’; we are not permitted ‘to identify a meaning that seems to lie “under” a surface’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Without particular emphasis on symbolism’s network of evocative associations, Gumbrecht proposes that latency in all contexts falls under the umbrella of Stimmungen: ‘that atmospheres and moods, as the slightest encounters between our bodies and material surroundings, also affect our psyche; however, we are unable to explain the causality (or, in everyday life, control its workings)’.Footnote ⁵⁰ At the fin de siècle, both composers and critics recognized the heightened production of ‘inaccessible’ latency as a powerful antithesis to Wagnerian fixation on the unveiling of the psyche, in a proto-Freudian Schopenhauerian sense, through the orchestral accompaniment.

In the Ring, Wagner reaches the pinnacle of his years-long quest to create a monumental artwork that reveals humankind’s susceptibility to instinctive drives. The musical exposure of a character’s latent persona is conceived to nudge opera closer to a more authentic representation of psychological responses precisely as a way to establish causal links. As James Treadwell argues: ‘Only in the Ring is it possible to treat motifs semantically – to give them names and associate them with specific objects, people and ideas, and to interpret the “grammar” of their musical transformations as a way of expressing the dramatic evolution of those people or ideas’.Footnote ⁵¹ In contradistinction, symbolist operas monumentalize the characters’ experiential interiorization of external environmental conditions as an indicator of emotional disposition. The music thus performs a refashioning of the Wagnerian referential schema, achieved in part by the crafting of musical devices that have not traditionally been central to operatic characterization. Gumbrecht’s observations encourage us to explore these operatic properties as an outgrowth of fin-de-siècle material culture, as he proposes that ‘what distinguishes reading for Stimmung from other modes of literary interpretation is a lack of distinction between aesthetic and historical experience’.Footnote ⁵² For example, there are many instances in these operas when latency is perceived as stalled momentum, generated through uneven phrasing and sonic gradations of the vocal and orchestral texture that verge on inaudible.Footnote ⁵³ Akin to Khnopff’s pictographic representation of literary texts, Debussy and Dukas seize untapped musical resources as a way to render a kind of vitalized portraiture that both illuminates a symbolist character’s experience of the world and develops an overriding musical morphology that corresponds to Maeterlinck’s poetic schema.

In his 1902 review of Pelléas, Dukas himself proposes that latent musicality is the pivotal compositional tactic that Debussy devises as an alternative to ‘symphonic features’ to preserve the poetry’s enigmatic aura. In a lengthy passage, he praises Debussy’s receptiveness to Maeterlinck’s cultivation of an unsettling atmosphere, which the composer sustains by forsaking the verbal externalization of the internal thoughts of individuals and abandoning recurring thematic ideas and their representative potential. Dukas reinforces Debussy’s own proclamations that adhering to a Wagnerian operatic model – the wedding of ‘symphonic form’ to dramatic action – results in ‘killing dramatic music, rather than saving it’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Dukas then insinuates that the singing is not primarily what makes Debussy’s opera musical, and suggests that a combination of episodic music and melodrama might better articulate Maeterlinck’s text.

Like Dukas, Viennese critics, whose intimacy with Wagner’s operas was extensive and encouraged ample reflection on the novelty of Dukas’s and Debussy’s scores with respect to Wagnerian opera, also identify the musical production of latency as a defining characteristic of French modernism. While much of this early twentieth-century Viennese discourse reiterates the same reservations voiced in the reception of Wagner’s works by repeatedly highlighting that the music generates unheard-of ‘acoustical sensations’ (Klangempfindungen or Tonempfindungen) that are harmful to the general public and agitate the peripheral nervous systems of spectators,Footnote ⁵⁶ it also reinforces Dukas’s observations by identifying the modern French orchestral texture and harmonic syntax as the musical source that supplies this suspension of latency. The music is perceived as distinctly novel for its capability to represent Maeterlinck’s linguistic rendering of physiological responses, as opposed to deep-seated psychological fixations, and for its conjuring of a trancelike spectatorial mode of viscerality akin to the experience of being absorbed in a painting, as an anonymous critic for the Montagblatt describes:

As mentioned above, Debussy’s orchestral texture was frequently noted as radically distinct from Wagner’s, due to his conception of operatic accompaniment as ‘sounds’: subtle, quiet and rhythmically blurred tones that emanate from the orchestra. Some critics, especially Julius Korngold, heralded Debussy’s obscuration of clear melodic and rhythmic phrases as the catalyst for generating a sense of latency, which Debussy diligently maintained to ‘unlock new potentialities for development’.

In disagreement, Maximilian Muntz reported that the music’s persistent hue was unremarkable:

This widespread Viennese discussion on music’s ability to induce physiological reactions, from nervous frenzy to boredom, supplies concrete historical evidence that further enlarges the geographical and chronological context of the work of scholars like Vladimir Jankélévitch and Carolyn Abbate, who delineate how rendering intense physiological states in music, especially the ineffable, motivates the creation of an array of post-Wagnerian thematic and compositional procedures. With regard to Debussy, Abbate, in a chapter entitled ‘Debussy’s Phantom Sounds’, proposes that Debussy creates new musical effects and modes of vocal delivery because he is ‘reacting to technical challenges without any technology other than the acoustics of stages, voices, and orchestras’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet Maeterlinck’s validation of psychophysical hypotheses that were central to new theories on the complexity of the human nervous system – through the fastidious exposure of the sensory faculties of his characters – has not been emphasized enough as a driving factor that promoted experimentation with ‘antisymphonic’ musical practices, which abandoned the stability supplied by frequent musical recurrence in favour of musical organization that strings together lengthy sequences of sonic events, perhaps to mirror the variable intensity and inconsistency of excitatory stimuli that impact the nervous system. Ernst Mach’s declaration of the impermanence of the ego in Die Analyse der Empfindungen (Analysis of Sensations, 1886, 1st edition) was well known in Vienna, where the professor challenged Hermann von Helmholtz’s stance on the properties of aural perception, proposing that individual attention was not strictly controlled by psychological processes, but worked in conjunction with the accommodation mechanism – the ear’s ability to classify sound spectrally and separate the sound in the air into its individual component parts. For Mach, gaining information or aesthetic pleasure from listening required psychological and physiological mechanisms to work in conjunction and fluctuated according to the listener’s focus and the strength of his accommodation mechanism, which has the potential to improve exponentially with regular practice.Footnote ⁶¹

Mach made frequent appearances at Viennese café gatherings, and Hermann Bahr’s zealous appreciation for Mach’s text, which he eventually proclaimed ‘the philosophy of impressionism’ in his 1904 Dialog vom Tragischen, was repeatedly discussed in conjunction with French and Belgian painting. As addressed earlier, Bahr was captivated by these paintings because they dualistically convey how both the painter’s and viewer’s sensory receptors are constantly battling, and adapting to, shifting environmental conditions like light, humidity, sound and even pollution, as he or she moves through space.Footnote ⁶² Art historian Christoph Asendorf’s comparative study of both texts leads him to suggest that Mach’s discovery (‘that the division between physical and psychological forces becomes untenable’) promotes a new approach to the representation of the human subject circa 1900. Of particular pertinence to this discussion is Asendorf’s assertion that Viennese artists and Maeterlinck both engage with components of Mach’s theories: ‘Mach’s remark: “When I speak of my own sensations, these sensations do not exist spatially in my head, but rather my ‘head’ shares with them the same spatial field” returns in the aesthetic of Viennese modernism in the figure of the sensitive soul who passively allows stimuli to flow through him, who is ruled by changeable moods’.Footnote ⁶³ Asendorf believes that Maeterlinck responds indirectly to Mach’s notion through his pioneering device of ‘speechlessness’ as a means to suppress any impartation of a character’s ego: ‘he makes silence into the ideal form of interpersonal communication, which is not allowed to be robbed of its purity by words’.Footnote ⁶⁴ But, as Abbate has so brilliantly demonstrated, in operatic adaptations of symbolist works it is sound that furnishes the experience of silence, as well as Maeterlinck’s other ‘numerous incalculable noises’ and stimuli that are flowing through characters.Footnote ⁶⁵ The rapid succession of sensory currents that Mach and Bahr cite as dictating human perception and moods are translated into sonic configurations in the atypical psychophysical operatic moments that have come to define this repertoire: the musical depiction of engrossing experiences of immersive silence and neural cross wiring will be addressed in detail later in the article.

In both Pelléas and Ariane some of the characteristics that Debussy’s and Dukas’s Viennese contemporaries identified as new musical effects are most pronounced when the poetry magnifies, in a painterly fashion, a character’s reaction to his or her sensory detection of natural phenomena that are in actuality improbable or non-existent. The poetic text thus becomes a descriptive voicing of the perception of unusual sensations and environmental conditions, while the music conveys how these impinge on the character’s physiology, in a manner similar to Khnopff’s and Klimt’s manipulation of spectatorial positioning; sharp and soft focus; and the angle of the canvas’s central axis to suggest the movement of sonic frequencies streaming out of the sound source, typically located on outskirts of the painting. The centrepiece of Pelléas is, of course, one of the most striking and extended events in this physiological vein: at the beginning of Act III Pelléas, standing at the base of the tower, plunges into Mélisande’s hair that descends upon him from feet above. Maeterlinck devises a gesture that is erotically charged for Pelléas, but imperceptible to Mélisande; Pelléas’s longing for Mélisande to hear and feel his kisses moving upward on the fabric of her nerveless hair: ‘Tu entends mes baisers le long de tes cheveux? Ils montent le long de tes cheveux. Il faut que chacun t’en apporte’. [‘Do you not hear my kisses all along your hair? They move up to you along your hair. Each one must take kisses up to you’].Footnote ⁶⁶ In a lengthy explication, Julius Korngold suggests that in these pivotal scenes the listener perceives the same riveting visceral potentiality that Hevesi discerns in Khnopff’s visual intimation of the physiological impulses conventionally attached to certain literary types: ‘By sinking into the inner life the energy of the outer, you can also feel their ignorance and onesidedness, their fatalistic course, especially their clinging afflictions that threaten their mysticism’.Footnote ⁶⁷

In his review Korngold goes on to postulate that this cryptic musical ethos is generated by Debussy’s amalgamation of principles pioneered by Paul Verlaine and Wagner, in which Debussy’s preoccupation with Verlaine’s dictum that ‘we do not want colours, only shade, the quiet, its transition, vibrations, the half sound …’Footnote ⁶⁸ is perhaps undercut by his unintentional preservation of Wagnerian properties. Korngold detects Wagnerian techniques in Debussy’s compositional footprint, and summarizes the commonalities matter-of-factly in a list: ‘Yet the fusion of music with poetry, in service of the poetry, remains Wagnerian; the orchestra’s perpetual flooding around, or washing over, the recited word is Wagnerian, as are some of its nuanced colours, especially the sparse and mysterious ones; the leitmotivic treatment, albeit of a single motive, that of Mélisande, is Wagnerian’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Then Korngold elaborates on how Debussy’s self-proclaimed reactionary opposition to Wagnerian opera does in fact result in new operatic procedures, particularly the production of ‘endless harmony’ and the replacement of a traditional dramatic arc with erratic ‘reflexes’.

In his experience of Act III of Pelléas, Korngold senses latent danger entwined with sexual fulfilment and detects that the musical accompaniment already anticipates the opera’s fatalistic outcome by distancing, and ultimately severing, the characters (and listeners) from ‘sequences of sounds’. Throughout his discussions of latency and Stimmung, Gumbrecht emphasizes that a privileging of disconnection and distancing is central to both the authorial inception of the artwork and reader response, and he notes that increased sensitivity to this phenomena emerged at the turn of the century: ‘Perhaps an awareness of the importance of Stimmung developed from the experience of isolation that conditioned the emergence of modern forms of subjectivity’.Footnote ⁷¹ This quality is certainly prominent in Act III, scene 1, as Pelléas and Mélisande are suddenly severed from the figure that Elliott Antokoletz refers to as the ‘night’ motive (G♮–F♯–D♯, Ex. 1a), one of the most aurally stable and repetitive modules in the entire opera.Footnote ⁷² In the first eight minutes of the scene, the module is repeated over 10 times, but it then drops out of the musical fabric abruptly, as Mélisande pleads for Pelléas to release her (vocal score, p. 131). Antokoletz identifies several variations on the cell that are transposed and chromatically inflected (G♯ is frequently exchanged for G♮) and observes that ‘the basic cells of the “night” motif acquire multiple pitch-set functions within the context of increasing passion, seduction, and the imminence of Golaud’.Footnote ⁷³ However, Antokoletz’s detailed analysis of Act III overlooks the re-emergence of this module at the conclusion of scene four as Golaud questions Yniold about the source of his fear after the child declares that he is very afraid while in the act of spying on Pelléas and Mélisande (vocal score, p. 186). This sudden reappearance of the original cell’s intervallic profile, now with a passing tone on E, produces an ‘impressionistic reflex’ due to its pronounced, but distorted, return (Ex. 1b). What had originally been fluid and enchanting connective material in the middle register, first introduced by the flutes and oboes, now becomes a shriekingly high outburst of panic in the flutes and violins foreshadowing Yniold’s threat that he will scream if Golaud does not release him and set him back on the ground. This example illustrates how Debussy’s recollections of musical material are conceived as open-ended provocations as opposed to conventional leitmotives. The module’s resurfacing and mutation may highlight that the conclusion of the scene is a dramatic parallel to Mélisande’s earlier imprisonment, but its meaning, along with Golaud’s question, dissolve into latent nothingness as there is ultimately no disclosure of what Yniold saw.

Ex. 1a

Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande (Paris: Durand, 1907), Act III, scene 1, bars 4–9 (vocal score, p. 115).

Ex. 1b

Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande (Paris: Durand, 1907), Act III, scene 4, bars 283–285 (vocal score, p. 186).

While Korngold’s detailed remarks centre exclusively on the tower scene, his observations invite general reflection on the musical attributes of passages in symbolist operas that exhibit fantastical reflexes that lie beyond the range of normal human perception. The musical contrast that distinguishes the active triggering of a character’s sensory faculties from the uniform latent background that conveys the poetry’s murky psychological underpinnings are often made more intangible by the music, which only offers oblique insight into a character’s internal thoughts, or life experiences, prior to the present moment. The ‘reflexes’ that Korngold discerns perhaps occur in their most exposed state when Maeterlinck’s text actually draws attention to the environmental forces that the characters perceive aurally; the most phenomenal of which include the preternatural condition of silence in a forest at the beginning of Act II of Pelléas, and Ariane’s elation as she hears light in Act II of Ariane.

Environmental Stimmung

Louis Laloy and Richard Langham Smith classify the setting of a silent forest in the first scene of Act II of Pelléas as conventional pre-Raphaelite imagery, an idyllic landscape where the ‘Well at the World’s End’ fosters burgeoning love.Footnote ⁷⁴ Elliott Antokoletz illustrates that this scene is anchored in tritone polarity and features striking harmonic trajectories that are derived from ‘tritone-related whole-tone tetrachords of both statements of the “Well” motive (D–E–F♯–G♯/A♭–B♭–C–D)’.Footnote ⁷⁵ As an example, Antokoletz cites the movement from a sustained E dominant ninth chord (Ex. 2, bar 1), intoned when the sensory faculty of sight is addressed in reference to the well’s former powers of curing the blind, to a lingering dominant ninth chord on B♭ that frames the couple’s apprehension of this silence, initially punctuating Mélisande’s recognition of pure, unadulterated silence (bars 6–7): ‘Comme on est seul ici … on n’entend rien’ [‘How solitary it is – there’s not a sound to be heard’]. Antokoletz notes that Mélisande’s corresponding vocal line subtly dispels the well motive’s pristine B♭ dominant ninth harmony with the entry of a non-chord tone, a G♮, which is established in conjunction with the first mention of the water on the C dominant ninth chord accompanying Mélisande’s view of the clear water (not pictured; vocal score, p. 57).

Ex. 2

Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande (Paris: Durand, 1907), Act II, scene 1, bars 27–35 (vocal score, pp. 58–9).

In landing on the G♮ on the second syllable of ici, it is also significant that Mélisande has internalized Pélleas’s descending fourth cadential gesture with which the act opened (Ex. 3), and which surrounds discussion of this unknown and special place where Pelléas takes Mélisande (Ex. 2, bars 3–6).

Ex. 3

Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande (Paris: Durand, 1907), Act II, scene 1, bars 15–16 (vocal score, p. 56). Pelléas’s opening vocal phrase; cf. Example 2, bars 33–34.

The music subsequently illustrates that the nondescript ‘place’ is simultaneously a conflation of the physical landscape with their interior sensations of peace and clarity intermixed with guilt and despair. This is most powerfully illuminated in the rhythmic structure that accompanies Pelléas’s reply, ‘Il y a toujours un silence extraordinaire … On entendrait dormir l’eau’ [‘There is always here in this place a wonderful (extraordinaire) silence … One can hear the water sleep … ’], which prompts an aural double take through its invocation of Pelléas’s opening Act II vocal phrase (Ex. 2, bars 7–8; Example 3). The accompaniment’s disruptive rhythmic and timbral qualities – sharply articulated, syncopated homorhythmic chords that chime a repeating pitch in the highest register – are more jarring the second time around, and signal how the poetry’s cryptic emphasis on an environmental milieu might be deciphered. In German productions, the foreshadowing of the protagonists’ future may have been even more pronounced as impending fatalism colours Neitzel’s translation of the adjective extraordinaire to grausig: ghastly or horrible.Footnote ⁷⁶ Furthermore, the numerous repetitions of the descending fourth cadential gesture at the beginning of Act II also serve to engender a trenchant contrast between Mélisande’s first interaction with Golaud, which is rife with vocal cadences comprised of descending and ascending thirds, especially the all-important ‘Ne me touchez pas’ section, a moment where instrumental music actually cuts out to punctuate her vulnerability and exhibit the instinctive reflexes that she clearly honed from previous endangerment (Ex. 4).

Ex. 4

Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande (Paris: Durand, 1907), Act I, scene 1, bars 58–63 (vocal score, p. 6).

The demands that Debussy places on the listener’s reflexes, the act of sensing the meaning invested in both prolonged and localized musical allusions, was acknowledged by Hirschfeld, who reported that ‘This illusiveness surrounding corporeality, the meaning of life, and language subsides as the eye and ear are capable of pulling one through to lift the allegory, and in my view, we advance to the being [das Sein]’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Montagblatt critic’s comments confirm that Debussy’s achievements in assembling a new sonic syntax were often viewed teleologically as advancing the history of music, yet he is also endorsing Mach’s theories on listening by suggesting that listeners will become acclimated to Debussy’s sound world through prolonged exposure: ‘This orchestra of Debussy’s speaks entirely on its own, perhaps the first original language of the post-Wagnerian period … It thrusts through excessive quintal passages, unpredictable chord progressions, medieval modes. The harmony is orgiastic and at the end of the evening one is astonished by how well the ear has adjusted to the new’.Footnote ⁷⁸

Psychophysical Excess

Turning now to Ariane, Dukas’s notes on the opera (1910) denote that the work’s greatest merit is its musical portrayal of the triumph of light over darkness (or good over evil) – the fairy tale genre’s quintessential moral. The opera’s modernity lies in Maeterlinck’s re-envisioning of the fairy tale heroine prototype with his assertive female protagonist who takes matters into her own hands to control her own destiny, freeing Bluebeard’s captives along the way. Dukas believes that Ariane’s urge to lead her ‘sisters’ away from Bluebeard’s grip, and her anticlimactic departure from the castle after failing to do so, powerfully demonstrates that humans are often lulled into superficial companionship at the expense of being true to themselves.Footnote ⁷⁹ Many years later, Olivier Messiaen, in the essay that he contributed to La revue musicale in 1936 for the Dukas commemorative issue, proposes that humanity’s long fascination with the thermal and reflective properties of visible light, as evidenced by its centrality to diverse ancient religious rituals, inspire the opera’s entire sonic topoi. Messiaen’s provocative ideas merit some parsing, especially since Dukas refrained from revealing how any of these overriding premises influenced his compositional strategy. Messiaen suggests that Ariane’s large-scale structure is centred on the juxtaposition of active movement through tonal regions and the ‘inert’ whole-tone scale, thus confirming that Dukas may have sought to heighten further the contrast between active and latent states that were addressed so eloquently in his impression of Pelléas:

Messiaen also believes that Dukas’s expansive incorporation of different tonalities and his penchant for dense chromaticism reflects a growing artistic interest in the verisimiltudinous representation of synaesthesia. Speaking about how six different keys correspond to the six different jewels in Act I (B major/g♯ minor; A♭ major/f minor; C major/a minor; D major/b minor; B♭ major/g minor; F♯ major/d♯ minor) Messiaen writes, ‘In this Dukas foresaw many modern theories on luminous vibrations, coloured listening, and the rapport between colour and sound’.Footnote ⁸¹

In 1908, the Viennese critics were stunned by the fast-paced and irregular quality of Dukas’s harmonic arsenal, even describing it with violent terms, as Muntz does in the Reichspost: ‘One would have to hear four dimensionally and, in so doing, be able to dispense with perceiving each melody distinctly in order to find one’s way in the massacre of sound effects’.Footnote ⁸² Similarly, aside from the consistency of ongoing timbral effects, Hirschfeld is irked by the lack of cohesion in Dukas’s score and characterizes his vein of ‘symbolistic music’ as ‘hours of tremolo and twanging by muted violins to depict haze, fog, twilight; meanwhile the harmony, based on the most adventurous dissonant connections, constantly evades everyone and the singing wobbles and stumbles over unthinkable, unfathomable intervals, and, for the most part, resembles only vague improvisations’.Footnote ⁸³ Viennese critics failed to detect how this fluctuation between shadowy stasis and rapid harmonic activity was central to Dukas’s construction of a sonic dichotomy that projects the opera’s themes, especially in Act II when the Act I key scheme is further expanded to the entire chromatic spectrum in a condensed and liberated context to express the transformative neural crosswiring that Ariane experiences after breaking the windows when her sense of hearing is heightened as she is blinded by light:

The real-time unfolding of Ariane’s uncommon psychophysical experience is the centrepiece of the opera, and Dukas’s musical rendering of Maeterlinck’s symbolistic representation of Ariane’s non-normativity, or exceptionality as a woman, apparently stood out as radical and harmonically aberrant to his contemporaries, as indicated by the comments above. Maeterlinck’s pairing of sensory non-normativity with a healthy and rational feminine figure stands out as a bold symbolistic device precisely because it goes against the prevailing artistic grain. French artists often conflated the behaviour of institutionalized women with those engaged in ubiquitous activities, like praying or bathing, when depicting deranged or abnormal states, as art historian Martha Ward explains in her research on neo-impressionism and psychophysical aesthetics: ‘Charcot’s examinations of physical and emotional contortions assumed the realism of past depictions, but fed the present taste for willful distortions, as in the Breton bodies that Gauguin depicted with grimaced stances and oblique gazes, simultaneously suggesting sexual torment and spiritual possession’.Footnote ⁸⁵ The opera’s large-scale harmonic plan seems to embrace current thinking on the psychophysics of colour theory, exemplified by the neo-impressionist paintings of Georges Seurat and Camille Pissarro, and Dukas designs a unique aural equivalent to neo-impressionism’s visual capturing of dynamogeny, which Ward characterizes as a watershed moment because painters ‘recast the role that aesthetics had assumed in painting, thematicizing such bases of psychophysics as stimuli and response, distraction and attention, structuring painting around these problems’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Maeterlinck’s text for this aria is similarly focused on an immediate visceral response to environmental stimuli, and Dukas invests the music with spasmodic energy through chromatic saturation by treating the circle of fifths akin to the spectrum of visible light (i.e. superimposing the colour wheel on the circle of fifths) and creating a lengthy chain of adjacent tritone pedal points that act as analogous to the complementary colours (see Fig. 3).Footnote ⁸⁷

Fig. 3

Tritone relations in the circle of fifths as akin to complementary colours in Ariane’s ‘luminescence aria’.

Ariane’s extraordinary feats in Act II, as she breaks the dungeon windows and exposes Bluebeard’s wives to sunlight for the first time in years, are heightened through Dukas’s depiction of ‘hearing everything’ by his condensation of the tonal spectrum that governs the large-scale harmonic plan of Act I into small-scale harmonic motion in Ariane’s luminescence aria, resulting in a vigorous and ecstatic microcosm (Fig. 3; Rehearsal 109–114; vocal score, pp. 130–36). As in the Pelléas scene discussed above, the harmonic trajectory and density of the orchestral writing projects noises and radiation emanating from the physical space, which in turn are thrust onto Ariane, allowing listeners vicarious access to her internal bouts of sensation. Dukas marks the beginning of Ariane’s luminescence aria (Reh. 109–114; vocal score, pp. 130–36) with the breakthrough of C major, the classic musical signifier for the sudden appearance of blinding light, perhaps employed most dramatically in Haydn’s Creation. After an introductory passage that establishes polarity between the C and C♯ whole-tone collections (bars 1–9), Dukas then begins to progress through this series of interlocking tritone pedal points oscillating between C and F♯ in bars 10 through 13; A and E♭ in bars 14 through 19; and F and B in bars 20 through 24 (Ex. 5).

Ex. 5

Paul Dukas, Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Paris: Durand, 1910), Act II, Ariane’s luminescence aria, bars 11–21 [one bar before Rehearsal 110 to four bars before Rehearsal 111].

Bars 25 through 34 frenetically reinstate the opening C/C♯ polarity before the climactic moment when Ariane’s aural faculties intake light, as she arpeggiates a half-diminished seventh chord upon ‘hearing everything’ and all 12 tones appear in bars 33 through 40. The tritone pairings begin again as the harmony proceeds to briefly set E and B♭ in opposition with each other in bars 37 through 40, followed by G and C♯ in bars 42 through 46. On bar 51, the penultimate phrase of Ariane’s aria, the cessation of the fiery sensation coincides with her descent from A♭ to D, as she feels the last burst of radiation before vowing to sink down into the women’s darkness.

While Ms. Stagl’s execution of the difficult vocal part was admired, critics were struck by the labyrinthine quality of Dukas’s vocal writing, as its active treading through abundant musical material seemingly provides little stability through melodic recall and thus heightens the unceasing nervous energy.Footnote ⁸⁸ Dukas’s melodic procedures are centred on the creation of a lyrical discourse that dispenses with phrasal repetition in favour of a network of recurrent intervallic cells that are outlined in the melodic contours. The luminescence aria consists of 22 vocal phrases, none of which are repeated verbatim, but many feature particular intervallic contours that musically bind this aria to consistent ideas or states, like light. For example, Ariane’s vocal line in bar 41 (B–C♯–D♯–E–F–F♯–A, Ex. 6b) that leads up to the aria’s highest pitch in bar 42 (a′′) is generated from Ariane’s highly emphatic chromatic ascent from b′ to a♯′′ in Act I (Ex. 6a) and then reharmonized at other instances when light is mentioned (Ex. 6b and 6c). This is a kind of leitmotivic procedure, of course, but one that is not embedded in the orchestral texture in the least. Dukas continually prevents the orchestra from reinforcing the salient vocal material through literal reiteration thus dampening its familiarity when subsequently uttered. This is a persuasive example of a symbolist compositional technique – the prolonged combination of tenuous harmonic grounding with melodic ‘motive particles’ – that is deliberately conceived as post-Wagnerian and anticipates procedures employed by Schoenberg and his pupils in The Book of the Hanging Gardens and other vocal works that straddle the tonal–post-tonal divide.Footnote ⁸⁹

Ex. 6a

Paul Dukas, Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Paris: Durand, 1910), Act I, Diamonds, bars 60–64 [four bars after Rehearsal 52].

Ex. 6b

Paul Dukas, Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Paris: Durand, 1910), Act II, Luminescence aria, bars 40–43 [two bars before Rehearsal 113].

Ex. 6c

Paul Dukas, Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Paris: Durand, 1910), Act II, The Pathway, bars 28–30 [three bars before Rehearsal 124].

Examining the reception of post-Wagnerian French opera in cities outside of Paris provides diversified accounts of the qualities of symbolist opera that were appreciated as remarkable when compared to Wagnerian operas. The Viennese contribute especially rich insights because the symbolist style was immediately tied to progressive artistic ideals due to its debut in Secessionist galleries and publications and subsequent association with Ernst Mach’s new privileging of the ‘antimetaphysical’. Years before the French symbolist operas premiered there, intellectual circles discussed how the styles of symbolism and impressionism captured sensory sensations endemic to modern urban life and channelled them into experiential artworks that place demands on the spectator’s physiological faculties in order to increase self-awareness of the body’s responses to colour, sound and environmental variables.Footnote ⁹⁰ While Viennese music critics certainly heard aspects of Wagner’s influence in these operas, they also strove to identify the new musical techniques that distinguish these operas as audibly post-Wagnerian, many of which were explained as derived from effects in modern French and Belgian painting.

The notion that opera could present identity as unfolding in real time, and implement music that signals the triggering of afferent activity, also undergirds the creation of ground-breaking expressionistic vocal works, particularly Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand, which have been treated predominantly as outgrowths of psychoanalysis, overshadowing the concurrent Viennese heritage of psychophysics and its strong association with symbolist aesthetic values.Footnote ⁹¹ Continued examination of the reformulation of Wagnerian leitmotivic procedures by symbolist and expressionistic composers, as well as the mapping of specific sonic properties that are designed to accentuate an opera’s environmental climes and literary topoi, will further reveal how composers sought to illustrate the physiological complexities of subjectivity through melodic modules, striking timbres or deviant harmonic movement that is often etched on the musical foreground only to be defeated by the background.Footnote ⁹² Composers of early twentieth-century operas and vocal works that aim to expose the fluidity and fragmentation of internal sensations increasingly abandoned supple vocal lyricism and melodic continuity in order to invent and propagate compositional tactics that situate listeners in the same susceptible position as the vocalist, hearing and feeling intermittent musical excitation that mimics the workings of the central nervous system.