From Marionettes to Mélisande: The Importance of Incidental Music in Marionette Plays
On a dark November night in 1888, a young Parisian couple strolls through the Galerie Vivenne, happy to be under its glass roof and out of the rain. One by one, shopkeepers close their grates – but this couple are not shoppers. They are here to see a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Having heard this play was unusual – all performed with marionettes! – they decided to brave the wet streets and join a gathering crowd before a small orchestra. Marionette plays became en vogue amongst Symbolist poets, with adaptations of stories ranging from classical literature to the Nativity. More importantly, these play, written by poets like Catulle Mendès and Maurice Bouchor, featured incidental music by composers influenced by Symbolist ideals. The nineteenth-century Symbolist movement had as its goal the attainment of a higher degree of consciousness which would allow the audience to connect with an esoteric, idealist reality beyond everyday life. Music was an essential part of this experience.
Symbolists valued evocation rather than direct description. Some French dramatists began to explore the possibilities of using marionettes to represent real actors. This way, typecast roles based on actors’ physical appearances disappear in the simplified forms of the marionettes. The audience members could now project their idealized version of the performance onto the marionette stage.
Composers including Alfred Bruneau, Claude Terrasse, Francis Thomé, Paul Vidal, and Ernest Chausson all wrote incidental music for marionette plays. This paper examines the music of Vidal and Chausson for plays by Maurice Bouchor, the most prolific author of marionette plays with music. In these scores, recently made digitally, we see contemporaries of Debussy wrestling with Symbolist aesthetics years before his symphonic prelude to Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune, and more than a decade before the completion of Pelléas et Mélisande.
On a dark November night in 1888, a young Parisian couple strolls through the Galerie Vivenne, happy to be under its glass roof and out of the rain. One by one, shopkeepers close their grates – but this couple are not shoppers. They are here to see a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Having heard this play was unusual – all performed with marionettes! – they decided to brave the wet streets and join a gathering crowd before a small orchestra. Marionette plays became en vogue amongst Symbolist poets, with adaptations of stories ranging from classical literature to the Nativity. More importantly, these play, written by poets like Catulle Mendès and Maurice Bouchor, featured incidental music by composers influenced by Symbolist ideals. The nineteenth-century Symbolist movement had as its goal the attainment of a higher degree of consciousness which would allow the audience to connect with an esoteric, idealist reality beyond everyday life. Music was an essential part of this experience.
Symbolists valued evocation rather than direct description. Some French dramatists began to explore the possibilities of using marionettes to represent real actors. This way, typecast roles based on actors’ physical appearances disappear in the simplified forms of the marionettes. The audience members could now project their idealized version of the performance onto the marionette stage.
Composers including Alfred Bruneau, Claude Terrasse, Francis Thomé, Paul Vidal, and Ernest Chausson all wrote incidental music for marionette plays. This paper examines the music of Vidal and Chausson for plays by Maurice Bouchor, the most prolific author of marionette plays with music. In these scores, recently made digitally, we see contemporaries of Debussy wrestling with Symbolist aesthetics years before his symphonic prelude to Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune, and more than a decade before the completion of Pelléas et Mélisande.
