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.