The Struggling Siren: Speech Therapy and Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande

Abstract

In Claude Debussy’s opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, the audience first encounters Mélisande in the depths of an impassable forest. Discovered by the nobleman Golaud, Mélisande trembles and weeps beside a fountain. She either cannot or will not speak. When her voice finally escapes her body, she cries out to Golaud that he is not to touch her. Taken aback, he asks what has happened to her, and Mélisande utters her first complete sentence: “I do not want to say! I do not want to say!” (“Je ne veux pas le dire! Je ne veux pas le dire!”). Carried along by Debussy’s lush impressionistic harmonies, Mélisande stammers and stutters through this opening scene, in contrast to the clarity and eloquence of Golaud’s lines. Through this vocal exchange, heard publicly for the first time on 30 April 1902, Debussy redefined French opera. Rapidly, critics hailed Pelléas et Mélisande as the first French work to truly oppose and surpass the dominant influence of Richard Wagner’s music dramas.1 Debussy’s pioneering opera elevated the French language to a position where the text could be heard distinctly, while his musical adaptation of Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck’s words heightened the mystery of the original text. Scholars such as Katherine Bergeron, Jane Fulcher, Jann Pasler, Lydia Goehr, and Marianne Wheeldon among others have examined the multiple meanings of Debussy’s opera, defining it as the arch-French modernist work with its revolutionary treatment of language.2 Building on this scholarship, we offer another layer of evidence for hearing Debussy’s opera and the modes of expression conveyed by the character Mélisande.