Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck (29 August 1862 – 6 May 1949), also known as Count / Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was Flemish but wrote in French. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911 for his many different types of writing, especially his plays, which show a lot of imagination and poetic creativity. These works often use fairy tales to explore deep ideas and connect with readers' emotions and imaginations. The main themes in his work include death and the meaning of life. He was an important member of the group La Jeune Belgique, and his plays are a significant part of the Symbolist movement. Later in life, Maeterlinck was accused of copying others' work.

Biography

Maeterlinck was born in Ghent, Belgium, to a wealthy family that spoke French. His mother, Mathilde Colette Françoise (born Van den Bossche), came from a wealthy family. His father, Polydore, was a notary who enjoyed caring for the greenhouses on their property.

In September 1874, he attended the Jesuit College of Sainte-Barbe. At this school, works by French Romantic writers were not allowed, and only plays about religious topics were permitted. His time there made him dislike the Catholic Church and organized religion. One of his classmates was Charles van Lerberghe, a writer whose poems and plays later influenced each other during the start of the Symbolist period.

Maeterlinck wrote poems and short stories while still in school, but his father wanted him to study law. After earning a law degree from the University of Ghent in 1885, he spent a few months in Paris, France. There, he met members of the Symbolist movement, including Villiers de l'Isle Adam, who greatly influenced his future work.

Maeterlinck became well-known when his first play, Princess Maleine, received praise from Octave Mirbeau, a critic for Le Figaro, in August 1890. In the years that followed, he wrote several Symbolist plays known for themes of fate and mystery, including Intruder (1890), The Blind (1890), and Pelléas and Mélisande (1892).

He had a relationship with the singer and actress Georgette Leblanc from 1895 until 1918. Leblanc influenced his work for two decades. With his play Aglavaine and Sélysette (1896), Maeterlinck began creating characters, especially women, who had more control over their lives. Leblanc performed these characters on stage. Although mysticism and deep thinking influenced his work throughout his life, Maeterlinck gradually shifted from Symbolism to a more existential style.

In 1895, after his parents disapproved of his relationship with Leblanc, Maeterlinck and Leblanc moved to the Passy district in Paris. The Catholic Church refused to grant Leblanc a divorce from her Spanish husband. The couple often hosted guests, including Mirbeau, Jean Lorrain, and Paul Fort. They spent summers in Normandy. During this time, Maeterlinck published Twelve Songs (1896), The Treasure of the Humble (1896), The Life of the Bee (1901), and Ariadne and Bluebeard (1902).

In 1903, Maeterlinck received the Triennial Prize for Dramatic Literature from the Belgian government. During this time and until the Great War (1914–1918), he was widely respected across Europe as a wise thinker and a leader of intellectual ideas.

In 1906, Maeterlinck and Leblanc moved to a villa in Grasse, France. He spent time meditating and walking. As he grew emotionally distant from Leblanc, he became depressed. Diagnosed with neurasthenia, he rented the Benedictine Abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy to relax. By renting the abbey, he saved it from being sold as a chemical factory, and the Pope blessed him for this. Leblanc often wore the clothing of an abbess, while Maeterlinck skated around the house. During this time, he wrote his essay The Intelligence of Flowers (1906), in which he supported socialist ideas. He also donated money to workers' unions and socialist groups. His most famous work from this period was the fairy play The Blue Bird (1908, mostly written in 1906).

Stanislavsky’s 1908 production of The Blue Bird in Moscow was visually stunning and is still performed today in a shortened version for children. After writing The Intelligence of Flowers, Maeterlinck experienced depression and writer’s block. Though he recovered after a year or two, he never again created as many original ideas. His later plays, such as Marie-Victoire (1907) and Mary Magdalene (1910), were not as strong as his earlier works and sometimes repeated old ideas. Even though some performances of his plays

Honours

• 1920: Received the Grand Cordon of the Order of Leopold.
• 1932: A royal decree allowed him to begin the process of joining the Belgian nobility with the title of count. However, he did not complete the required steps, such as obtaining letters patent (which includes creating a coat of arms). Because he did not complete the necessary registrations and pay the required taxes, he and his family were never officially added to the Belgian nobility.

Static drama

Maeterlinck is most remembered for his early plays, written between 1889 and 1894. These plays introduced a new style of dialogue that was very simple and focused on what was implied rather than what was directly stated. The characters in these plays lacked foresight and had limited understanding of themselves or their surroundings. Their tragic outcomes, which they did not foresee, suggest that Maeterlinck saw humans as unable to control their fate. However, his style is more similar to modern playwrights like Beckett and Pinter, who also explored human vulnerability in a confusing world, rather than to ancient Greek tragedies.

Maeterlinck believed that actors could not effectively portray the symbolic characters in his plays because physical gestures and expressions might distract from the meaning. He thought marionettes, controlled by strings and operated by a puppeteer, were a better choice. He used marionettes to represent how fate completely controls people. He wrote several plays for marionette theatre, including Interior, The Death of Tintagiles, and Alladine and Palomides.

From this, Maeterlinck developed the idea of "static drama." He believed artists should focus on external forces that influence people, rather than on human emotions. He once wrote that "the stage is a place where works of art are extinguished. … Poems die when living people get into them."

Maeterlinck explained his ideas about static drama in his essay "The Tragic in Daily Life" (1896), published in The Treasure of the Humble. In this essay, he described how actors should move and speak as if guided by an external force, like fate, rather than being driven by their own emotions. He often referred to his characters as "marionettes" to emphasize this concept.

Maeterlinck’s view of modern tragedy focuses on life’s aspects rather than on dramatic events or action. He pointed to many classical Athenian tragedies, such as most of Aeschylus’s works and Sophocles’s Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus, and Philoctetes, as examples of plays that are nearly motionless and focus on individuals facing the universe. He argued these plays inspired his concept of static drama.

Maeterlinck in music

Pelléas and Mélisande inspired several musical compositions at the turn of the 20th century:

• In 1897, William Wallace composed an orchestral suite titled Pelleas and Melisande.
• In 1898, Gabriel Fauré created an orchestral suite (sometimes called incidental music) titled Pelléas et Mélisande (Op. 80).
• Between 1893 and 1902, Claude Debussy composed an opera titled Pelléas et Mélisande (L. 88, Paris).
• Between 1902 and 1903, Arnold Schoenberg composed a symphonic poem titled Pelléas et Mélisande (Op. 5).
• In 1905, Jean Sibelius composed incidental music titled Pelléas et Mélisande (Op. 46).

Other musical works based on Maeterlinck's plays include:

• Aglavaine and Sélysette: an orchestral prelude by Arthur Honegger and an orchestral overture by Cyril Scott.
• Aladina and Palomid: an opera by Burghauser, an opera by Emil František Burian, an opera by Osvald Chlubna, and an unfinished opera by Anton Webern.
• Ariane et Barbe-bleue: incidental music by Anatoly Nikolayevich Alexandrov and an opera in three acts by Paul Dukas.
• The Betrothal: incidental music by Armstrong Gibbs.
• The Blind: a chamber opera titled Ślepcy by Jan Astriab (based on Maeterlinck's Les aveugles), an opera by Lera Auerbach, and an opera by Beat Furrer.
• The Death of Tintagiles: an overture by Adam Carse, an opera by Lawrance Collingwood, a symphonic poem by Charles Martin Loeffler, a symphonic poem (Op. 3) by Jean Absil, an opera by Jean Nouguès, a symphonic poem by Francesco Santoliquido, an orchestral prelude by Alexander Voormolen, and incidental music by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
• Herzgewächse (Foliages of the Heart): a song for soprano with small ensemble by Arnold Schoenberg.
• Intérieur: an opera by Giedrius Kuprevičius.
• L'oiseau bleu: 13 scenes for orchestra by Fritz Hart, incidental music by Leslie Heward, incidental music by Engelbert Humperdinck, an overture by Kricka, incidental music by Norman O'Neill, incidental music by Szeligowski, and an opera by Albert Wolff.
• Monna Vanna: an opera in three acts by Emil Ábrányi, an opera in four acts by Nicolae Brânzeu, an opera in four acts by Henry Février, and an unfinished opera by Sergei Rachmaninoff.
• Princess Maleine: an unfinished opera (or incidental music) by Lili Boulanger, an overture by Pierre de Bréville, an overture by Cyril Scott, and incidental music by Maximilian Steinberg.
• The Seven Princesses: incidental music by Pierre de Bréville, an opera by Vassili Vassilievitch Netchaïev, and an unfinished opera by Anton Webern.
• Sœur Beatrice: an opera by Alexander Grechaninov, a chorus by Anatoly Liadov, an opera titled Sor Beatriu by Antoni Marquès i Puig, incidental music by Erkki Melartin, an opera by Dimitri Mitropoulos, and an opera by Rasse (composer).
• A piano piece titled Pelléas and Mélisande composed by Honorio Siccardi.

Works

• Serres chaudes (1889)
• Douze chansons (1896)
• Quinze chansons (a longer version of Douze chansons) (1900)

• La Princesse Maleine (Princess Maleine) (published 1889)
• L'Intruse (Intruder) (published 1890; first performed on May 21, 1891)
• Les Aveugles (The Blind) (published 1890; first performed on December 7, 1891)
• Les Sept Princesses (The Seven Princesses) (published 1891)
• Pelléas and Mélisande (published 1892; first performed on May 17, 1893)
• Alladine et Palomides (published 1894)
• Intérieur (Interior) (published 1894; first performed on March 15, 1895)
• La Mort de Tintagiles (The Death of Tintagiles) (published 1894)
• Aglavaine et Sélysette (first performed in December 1896)
• Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Ariane and Bluebeard) (first published in German translation, 1899)
• Soeur Béatrice (Sister Beatrice) (published 1901)
• Monna Vanna (first performed on May 1902; published the same year)
• Joyzelle (first performed on May 20, 1903; published the same year)
• Le Miracle de saint Antoine (The Miracle of Saint Antony) (first performed in German translation, 1904)
• L'Oiseau bleu (The Blue Bird) (first performed on September 30, 1908)
• Marie-Magdeleine (Mary Magdalene) (first performed in German translation, February 1910; staged and published in French, 1913)
• Le Bourgmestre de Stilmonde (first performed in Buenos Aires, 1918; an English translation was performed in Edinburgh in 1918; published 1919)
• Les Fiançailles (published 1922)
• Le Malheur passe (published 1925)
• La Puissance des morts (published 1926)
• Berniquel (published 1926)
• Marie-Victoire (published 1927)
• Judas de Kerioth (published 1929)
• La Princess Isabelle (published 1935)
• Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) (published 1948)
• L'Abbé Sétubal (published 1959)
• Les Trois Justiciers (published 1959)
• Le Jugement dernier (published 1959)
• Le Miracle des mères (first published in book form 2006)

• Le Trésor des humbles (The Treasure of the Humble) (1896)
• La sagesse et la destinée (Wisdom and Destiny) (1898)
• La Vie des abeilles. Paris: Charpentier. 1901. Maeterlinck, Maurice; Sutro, Alfred; Teale, Edwin Way (1901). The Life of the Bee. Courier Corporation. ISBN 978-0-486-45143-5.
• Le temple enseveli (The Buried Temple) (1902)
• Le Double Jardin (The Double Garden, a collection of sixteen essays) (1904)
• L'Intelligence des fleurs (The Intelligence of Flowers) (1907)
• La Mort (Our Eternity, first published in English, incomplete version entitled Death, 1911; in enlarged and complete version in original French, 1913)
• L'Hôte inconnu (first published in English translation, 1914; in original French, 1