Debussy, the reader of Pelléas
This is a well-known story: a few days before the first performance, Maeterlinck had no words hard enough to describe the opera that Debussy created from Pelléas et Mélisande, the dramatist’s masterpiece. The critics, however, are too much inclined to reduce the causes of Maeterlinck’s anger to the expulsion of Georgette Leblanc, his mistress, who was to perform the first female role. The text of the play, which the composer almost always followed to the letter, has actually been cut and some amendments made by Maeterlinck to its 1892 text have not been taken into consideration. This paper aims at showing that, despite the apparent fidelity of the musical adaptation, the few variants inserted by Debussy generate a semiotic system and lead us to see the opera as a true translation, that is to say the transformation of a subordinate work into a source context and its adaptation to a target context. All typically “Belgian” aspects are blurred and attempts to make the unconscious emerge, as defined by Eduard von Hartman as early as 1869, are annihilated by the use of the leitmotif.
