D'Indy's youth was littered with unfulfilled operatic projects, of which only Les Burgraves du Rhin (1869-1872) got musically beyond its overture. Ironically -- given his seriousness and ambition to work on a monumental scale -- his first completed and performed stage work was the negligible opéra comique Attendez-moi sous l'orme (1876-1882). Le Chant de la Cloche (1879-1883), which took Grand Prize in the 1885 City of Paris Competition, exhibits at full strength the preoccupations he would later draw upon to shape his peculiar dramaturgy -- Wagnerian compositional paraphernalia (and inescapable reminiscences of Die Meistersinger, Die Walküre, Siegfried), Berliozian scoring, Gregorian chant, a Manichaean tonal scheme (inherited from Franck) ranging sharp keys as harbingers of Light against flat-key tokens of Darkness, mystically freighted redemptive symbolism -- shot through with a freshness and charm that soon crystallized in the evergreen Symphonie Cévenole (1886). That freshness would largely elude him in Fervaal (1889-1895), leaving the impression of an undigested farrago. But as his fifties approached with the new century, these stylistic oddments -- together with folk song, chanson populaire, and a foreboding atmosphere drawn from Ibsen (whose plays were enjoying a Parisian vogue in the 1890s) -- coalesced in the compelling, two-act L'Étranger (1898-1901), the most compact of his serious stage works. Even so, d'Indy's libretto is verbose: Debussy, who reviewed the Brussels premiere (Théâtre de la Monnaie, January 7, 1903), asked "Why did he not free himself entirely from the craving to explain everything, to emphasize everything, which sometimes burdens the finest scenes...? What is the object of so much music for a customs officer...?" The plot is redolent of Der fliegende Holländer -- the Stranger of the title labors under a divine mission. Calling the female lead Vita, whose love for the Stranger compromises him, underscores d'Indy's heavy-handed symbology. "It is the working out of formulas which are admittedly pure and lofty," Debussy commented, "but which have the coldness, blueness, delicacy and hardness of steel. Beautiful music there is, but it is, as it were, cloaked; and the mastery is so amazing that one hardly ventures to feel anything so incongruous as an emotion." On the other hand, d'Indy moves deftly from the verismo portrayal of a French fishing village to the mystical drama of the protagonists, and, above all, to the universally admired evocation of the ocean, in whose raging waves Vita and the Stranger perish. It is perhaps not coincidental that Debussy began the composition of La Mer within a few months of hearing L'Étranger. ~ Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide
