Maurice Maeterlinck (1862 - 1949) was a Belgian playwright, poet and essayist who wrote in French and was a leading figure of the Symbolist movement. [1] He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911 for a body of work the Swedish Academy praised for its imaginative richness and poetic fancy. [2] His best-known plays are Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), set to music by Claude Debussy, and the allegorical fairy play L'Oiseau bleu (The Blue Bird, 1908).
Early life and education
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck was born in Ghent on 29 August 1862 into a wealthy Flemish family; his father was a notary and the household was French-speaking. He was educated at the Jesuit Sainte-Barbe College, where the religious regime left him with a lasting aversion to institutional Catholicism, and then studied law at Ghent University, qualifying in 1885. [1]
He practised law only briefly. A stay in Paris in 1885-86 brought him into contact with Symbolist writers including Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Stéphane Mallarmé, and he abandoned the legal profession for literature.
Symbolist drama
Maeterlinck's first book was the poetry collection Serres chaudes (Hot Houses, 1889), published in the same year as his first play, La Princesse Maleine. The critic Octave Mirbeau devoted a front-page article in Le Figaro to the play in 1890, comparing it to Shakespeare and making its unknown author suddenly famous. [3]
A sequence of short, static dramas followed - L'Intruse, Les Aveugles, Intérieur - built on silence, repetition and a pervading sense of unseen fate rather than on action. Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), a tragedy of doomed love in an indeterminate medieval setting, became the movement's emblematic work and was later set as an opera by Claude Debussy in 1902, as well as inspiring music by Fauré, Sibelius and Schoenberg. [1]
L'Oiseau bleu (1908), written for the Moscow Art Theatre and staged by Konstantin Stanislavski, follows two children searching for the bluebird of happiness; it became his most widely performed play and was repeatedly filmed.
Essays and natural philosophy
Maeterlinck was equally known in his lifetime as an essayist. Le Trésor des humbles (The Treasure of the Humble, 1896) set out a mystical view of everyday life, and La Sagesse et la destinée followed in 1898.
He also wrote a celebrated series of works on the natural world, beginning with La Vie des abeilles (The Life of the Bee, 1901), followed by L'Intelligence des fleurs and La Vie des termites (1926). The last of these drew sustained criticism for reproducing, without acknowledgement, the findings of the South African naturalist Eugène Marais, a charge that has remained attached to the book. [3]
Later life and legacy
Maeterlinck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. [2] King Albert I of Belgium granted him the title of count in 1932, and he held the French Legion of Honour at commander rank. He lived for many years in France, latterly at Nice and at the Château de Médan, and left Europe for the United States in 1940 during the German occupation, returning in 1947.
He died at Nice on 6 May 1949. His reputation, immense in the two decades either side of 1900, declined sharply in the mid-twentieth century, but his short, mood-driven plays are now recognised as an important precursor of modern anti-naturalist and absurdist theatre, and Pelléas et Mélisande survives in the repertory through Debussy's opera. [1]
