Maeterlinck Goes to the Opera

Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian poet and playwright, has little love for music. He once said that, so far as music was concerned, he was "like a blind man in a museum."

Last week M. Maeterlinck, now a white-haired, soft-faced, 78-year-old refugee in Manhattan, went to Philadelphia to hear an opera. As he entered the old Academy of Music, he said grimly: "I will sit through it to the end, no matter that I do not like it." The opera was Pelleas et Meelisande, music by Achille-Claude Debussy, drama by Maurice Maeterlinck. Although Pelleas was first performed nearly 40 years ago, its author had never sat through a production of it.

When Composer Debussy had his opera nearly finished in 1901, he agreed that Maeterlinck's mistress, Georgette Leblanc, should be the first to sing Meelisande. But the director of the Paris Opera Comique had other ideas: he chose a young singer from the U. S., Mary Garden. When Maeterlinck heard the news, he set off, cane in hand, to give Debussy a thrashing. He gave the composer no more than a fright, but wrote to Le Figaro wishing Pelleas et Meelisande "immediate and emphatic failure." It turned out to be a success, and Maeterlinck stayed away from it. In 1920, persuaded to attend a Mary Garden performance in Manhattan, he walked out in the second act.

More persuasive was the Pelleas which Maeterlinck and his chic, 46-year-old wife (Renee Dahon, actress) witnessed last week. The young, hard-working Philadelphia Opera Company made Maeterlinck's dreamy medieval play completely believable, with Tenor John Toms and Soprano Frances Greer a handsome pair of lovers. As he had promised, Maeterlinck sat it through to the end. He had refused to promise to applaud. But he did.

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