The Rest Is Noise Series: Doctor Faust: Schoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality

Long shall my discourse from the echoing shore

Depict those goddesses: by masquerades,

I’ll strip the veils that sanctify their shades.

The score begins by summoning the very music that the faun plays—a languid melody on the flute, descending a tritone and going back up. The harmony, likewise, swings across the tritone and comes to rest on a richly resonant B-flat dominant seventh, which, in classical harmony, would resolve to E-flat. Here the chord becomes a self-sufficient organism, symbolic of unbounded nature. Then the flute repeats its melody while a new texture forms around it. Debussy thus resists the Germanic urge to develop his thematic material: the melody remains static while the accompaniment evolves. Cloudy whole-tone sonorities mark the horizon of the faun’s vision, where shapes dissolve in mist.

All this suggestion eventually coalesces into a voluptuous, full-orchestral love song in D-flat major. The strings savor long, flowing unison lines, more akin to Indian ragas than to Wagner or Strauss. It is music of physical release, even of sexual orgasm, as Vaslav Nijinsky demonstrated in his undulating dance of the Faun at the Ballets Russes in 1912. “I hold the queen!” Mallarmé’s faun exults. Yet the tritone lingers in the bass, a mystery ungrasped.

With the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, sketched in the early 1890s and then extensively revised before its 1902 premiere, Debussy created a new kind of interior music drama, using Wagner as raw material. The text is by the Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, and, as Strauss would do in Salome, Debussy set Maeterlinck’s play word for word, following its riddling prose wherever it took him. The love triangle of Pelléas, his half brother Golaud, and the inscrutable wandering princess Mélisande moves toward a grim climax, but most of the action takes place offstage; the score places the listener in a liquid medium into which individual psychologies have been submerged. Debussy’s established resources—whole-tone scales, antique modes, attenuated melodies that rise from wavering intervals—conjure an atmosphere of wandering, waiting, yearning, trembling.

Later come glimpses of a beautiful country on the other side. When Pelléas and Mélisande finally confess their love for each other—“I love you,” “I love you, too,” without accompaniment— the orchestra responds with a simple textbook progression moving from a tonic chord to its dominant seventh, except that in Debussy’s spectral scoring it sounds like the dawn of creation. A similar transfiguring simplicity overtakes the prelude to Act V, in which we discover that Mélisande has given birth to a child.

At some point, Debussy’s sense of himself as a sonic adventurer, a Faustian seeker, dissipated. By 1900 he was no longer calling for a Society of Musical Esotericism; instead, he prized classic French values of clarity, elegance, and grace. He was also listening intently to Spanish music—in particular, to the cante jondo, or deep song, tradition of Andalusian flamenco. His major works from the first decade of the century—La Mer; the Preludes, Book I, and Estampes for piano; and the cycles of Images for piano and for orchestra—intermingle familiar qualities of unearthliness with dancing movement and clean-cut lyricism. “Voiles” (“Sails”), in the Preludes, confines itself almost entirely to the whole-tone scale. “Steps in the Snow” revolves around hypnotic repetitions of a four-note figure. But “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair” has a melody of the sort that begs to be whistled in the street; many people would be surprised to learn that it had been “composed” at all. And the “Interrupted Serenade,” a Spanish scene, intertwines flamenco guitar with Arabic scales suggestive of Moorish influence. Debussy did not learn to write such music in Faustian isolation; instead, he picked up clues from desultory nights at the opera, operetta, cabarets, and cafés.

Paris bohemia promoted an easy back-and-forth between occult esotericism and cabaret populism, not least because the two worlds were sometimes literally on top of each other. The Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross met in a room above the cabaret Auberge du Clou, and as the cabal debated its arcane philosophy, the insinuating tunes of the café-concert would have floated up from below.

In such places, Debussy often encountered Erik Satie, another clandestine revolutionary of the fin de siècle, and, in some ways, the more daring one. Satie, too, dabbled in Rosicrucianism, serving briefly as the house composer for the Order of the Rose-Cross of the Temple and Graal, which the novelist Joséphin Péladan had founded in a Parsifal daze. Satie’s music for Péladan’s play Le Fils des étoiles (1891) begins with a totally irrational string of dissonant six-note chords—the next step beyond late Liszt. Yet a life of experiment was not to Satie’s liking. The son of a publisher of music-hall and cabaret songs, he found deeper satisfaction in playing piano at the Auberge du Clou. He achieved liberation from the past in three piano pieces titled Gymnopédies, which discard centuries of knotted-brow complexity in favor of a language at once simple and new. In the first eighteen bars of the first piece, only six pitches are used. There is no development, no transition, only an instant prolonged.

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