Books of drama, literature and poetry have often served as the basis for musical compositions. The Bible and Shakespeare's plays are prominent in the list of works by great authors writing in many languages to portray the human condition.
The rhythmic prose dramas of 1911 Nobel literature prizewinner Maurice Polydore-Marie-Bernard Maeterlinck (1862-1949) were regarded as the outstanding works of the symbolist theater. His masterpiece was "Pelleas et Melisande," produced at the avant-garde Theatre de l'Oeuvre in Paris in 1892. Set in a nebulous fairytale past, in motionless scenes it conveys an irresistible mood of the doom and hopeless melancholy of unconsummated, forbidden love.
It inspired a delicately transparent musical setting as an opera by Debussy (1902). The hypnotic fascination of "Pelleas et Melisande" derives from the psychological subtlety of its changing moods.
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