Claude Debussy's sole completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande (he worked, to little avail, on several during his younger days), is based on the Maurice Maeterlinck play that also inspired works by both Schoenberg and Jean Sibelius. Debussy began the first sketches of the opera as early as 1889, though the work did not take its final form until shortly before its Paris premiere in 1902. It was the composer's intention to produce a kind of opera in which the music served the subtleties of text far better (he felt) than the dominant opera style of his day (i.e., the work of Wagner and his immediate successors) did. Thus, while the techniques of Pelléas are frequently Wagnerian in origin, they serve so radically different a purpose as to render the resemblance barely recognizable.

Debussy exploits the utter simplicity of Maeterlinck's allegorical plot and allows the music to assume a texture of thoroughgoing delicacy. It is this fragility, sustained with consummate skill throughout the five-act opera, that, more than any other single feature, draws the most powerful response from both audiences and musicians involved in productions of the work. Subtle musical suggestion is the key to Debussy's magic in Pelléas. Wagner's celebrated leitmotif techniques are modified to make them less of a "visiting card technique," as Debussy himself once described the German composer's method, and more of a way to draw vague musical shapes that represent characters' psychological conditions. Maeterlinck's pessimistic denial of free will finds expression in the uncertain, intentionally non-directional nature of much of Debussy's music (many of the musical motifs themselves seem to have trouble deciding which direction to turn next, so to speak, and undergo a certain amount of internal repetition before finally shooting off in a new direction). Debussy's setting of French texts was never less than superb, and in Pelléas he achieves wonders—the instrumental/vocal balance is such that few listeners will ever be aware of just how dense the orchestration is, while the psychological nature of the play (and its lack of stage action) allows the relationship between music and text to unfold in a spacious way that affords each character plenty of time to explore the depths of his or her individual experience. Although it is safe to say that few twentieth century operas could feasibly exist in their present forms had Debussy not found time to complete Pelléas et Mélisande, the work has never achieved the public adulation bestowed upon many of its "dependents." Perhaps it is the very qualities that make the work so uniquely powerful—its emotional vagueness, the way its apparently simple plot and undramatic (in a Wagnerian sense) music disguise a wealth of textual and musical complexities—that are to blame for its general neglect. In many ways, however, Pelléas is a profoundly intimate work, and one wonders whether it is not better kept so.

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