Coming to presence

Debussy’s early setting of Mallarmé’s ‘Apparition’ provides the focus for an exploration of the way music stages the process of appearing and coming to presence. The foregrounding of this, over any idea of narrative or drama, is traced in La damoiselle élue, the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Pelléas et Mélisande, La mer, Jeux – works whose central concern is the play of appearing and disappearing. This category is explored theoretically through the work of Jankélévitch, Martin Seel, and Derrida. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence is central here, as is a consideration of Mallarmé’s discussion of the dancer Loïe Fuller. The idea of an evanescent music is thematised in the ‘fairy’ creatures of Debussy’s piano preludes, a kind of fictional embodiment of Mallarmé’s idea of poetry as a ‘dispersion volatile’.

Mélisande and the silence of music

Through detailed discussion of specific moments in the opera, this chapter explores how Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande exemplifies the central aesthetic idea of ‘saying nothing’. The muteness of Mélisande is an idea that joins the work of Maeterlinck and Debussy to a wider aesthetic movement. It is key to the aesthetics that Mallarmé sets out in relation to the figure of the ballet dancer, whose ‘veils’ make visible a kind of nothing that appears only in her speechless movements. This muteness of art offers a critical and embodied reflection on a key category of wordlessness and the unsayable that preoccupies philosophy from Bergson, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger through to Jankélévitch, Derrida, and Nancy.