| Summary: | "Grandes scènes de grands enfants" ("operatic scenes of grown-up childhood")—this was the neologism coined by the philosopher Julien Benda to summarize Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande shortly after its premiere in Paris in 1902. Current musicological interests in childhood, and their counterparts across the humanities, help to draw back into the spotlight those aspects of the opera that preoccupied Benda. This article investigates how the cultural event that was Pelléas participated in a broader fin-de-siècle artistic construction of childhood. In European culture of the 1890s, Maeterlinck's Symbolist dramas had attained a leading position, and Debussy's opera gave Maeterlinck's best-known play a definitive realization, as refracted onto the Parisian musical stage. In various ways, nineteenth-century French literature had constructed childhood as a distant realm of alterity, inaccessible to adults. Pelléas epitomizes the Symbolist reworking of those tropes to articulate a sense of distance within the adult self—sensations of a shadowy interior, still largely inaccessible. The opera's construction of childhood was ultimately, then, about adulthood. Nonetheless, in the first performances a child singer's agency contributed significantly toward that construction. Overall, Pelléas might appear to confront the longstanding role of perceptions of childhood as, in Tyler Bickford's words, "a constitutive Other to Western ideologies of an autonomous, rational subject." I suggest instead that the opera perpetuates that role.
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