On a winter's evening in late 1893, d'Indy was a dinner guest chez the Chaussons and had the pleasure of playing the third act of his just-completed Fervaal. As midnight approached, Chausson's other guest, young Claude Debussy, took the piano to play from his work-in-progress, Pelléas et Mélisande—a Janus-blessed moment, for Pelléas opens on a novel, visionary musical demesne, while Fervaal, for seeming au courant, looks resolutely to a past Debussy has left far behind. But this would have been apparent only to the most prescient, for d'Indy was already the composer of the trilogy of imposing Wallenstein overtures (1873-1881) and the evergreen Symphonie cévenole (1886)—anything seemed possible to him. Fervaal occupied d'Indy's vacations from 1889 to 1893, the orchestration was completed by July 1895. This protracted gestation partially explains its unevenness, for Fervaal contains some strikingly original music and many ravishing passages to make a fascinating, if desperately mixed, bag. A more apt comparison is Chabrier's similarly Wagner-struck Gwendoline, in which every bar is vividly alive, where, in Fervaal, too many stretches are no more than skillfully contrived. Both scores are overloaded with Wagnerian bric-a-brac, though Gwendoline's indebtedness to Wagner has largely been incurred by Mendès' libretto while the music is some of Chabrier's most idiomatically inspired. But not only is d'Indy's libretto a mélange of Wagnerian curios—eclipse of the Druid pantheon; a hero of Parsifal-like chastity; 13 named Druid chieftains swelling the chorus (à la Die Walküre, e.g., Grympuig, Ferkemnat, Penwald, etc.). The music is elaborated by means of the all-too-imitable features of Wagner's method (e.g., Leitmotiven); a huge and unusually augmented orchestra (e.g., saxhorns), albeit scored more transparently; and elaborate choral apostrophes. Oddly, d'Indy draws at least equally on Meyerbeer's example—for instance, the evocation of the goddess Kaïto, despite its use of whole tone scales, saxophones, and an Impressionist choral complement, harks back with wooden obviousness to the summoning of dead nuns in Robert le diable. The music of the impossible dénouement—Fervaal carrying the body of his beloved toward a mountain top amid lightning strikes to mystic voices singing the Gregorian Pange lingua—has been universally admired. Stylistically, the work manages to be both a Wagnerian white elephant and a disconcerting farrago. The Prelude to Act I—pure d'Indy—remains a fringe repertoire item. Fervaal was first heard at the Théátre de la Monnaie in Brussels, March 12, 1897, and received its Paris premiere at the Opéra-Comique, May 10, 1898.

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