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Post-Wagnerian Klangempfindungen: The Premieres of Maeterlinck Operas in Vienna

The Viennese premieres of Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 1908 and 1911 occurred over a decade after Maeterlinck’s literary style and Fernand Khnopff’s paintings were praised by Secessionist critics, including Hermann Bahr and Ludwig Hevesi. In Vienna, fin-de-siècle discourse treats impressionism and symbolism as aesthetic outgrowths of Ernst Mach’s notion of ‘antimetaphysical’ modes of existence. This article explores the broader Viennese reception of symbolism and its influence on music criticism, which predominantly contends that Debussy and Dukas divert from Wagnerian techniques by cultivating Klangempfindungen (acoustical sensations) and anti-thematic symphonic approaches to generate musical equivalents to the poetic and painterly incitation of psychophysical stimuli. Julius Korngold and other prominent music critics, some of whom were Debussy’s and Dukas’s exact contemporaries, describe how symbolist compositional syntax emerges as a musical terrain that produces a stark contrast between the suspension of latency and frenetic episodes. Symbolist composers accentuate this contrast to increase sensitivity to a literary device at the core of Maeterlinck’s art: the protagonists’ fixation on environmental conditions and changes, descriptive imagery that apprises audiences of their emotional state.