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Pelléas et Mélisande (opera)
Encyclopedia
Pelléas et Mélisande is an opera
in five acts with music by Claude Debussy
. The French libretto
was adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck
's Symbolist
play Pelléas et Mélisande
. It premiered at the Opéra-Comique
in Paris
on 30 April 1902 with Jean Périer
as Pelléas and Mary Garden
as Mélisande in a performance conducted by André Messager
, who was instrumental in getting the Opéra-Comique to stage the work. The only opera Debussy ever completed, it is considered a landmark in 20th-century music.
The plot concerns a love triangle
. Prince Golaud finds a mysterious young woman, Mélisande, lost in a forest. He marries her and brings her back to the castle of his grandfather, King Arkel of Allemonde. Here Mélisande becomes increasingly attached to Golaud’s younger half-brother Pelléas, arousing Golaud’s jealousy. Golaud goes to excessive lengths to find out the truth about Pelléas and Mélisande’s relationship, even forcing his own child, Yniold, to spy on the couple. Pelléas decides to leave the castle but arranges to meet Mélisande one last time and the two finally confess their love for one another. Golaud, who has been eavesdropping, rushes out and kills Pelléas. Mélisande dies shortly after, having given birth to a daughter, with Golaud still begging her to tell him “the truth”.
, entitled Rodrigue et Chimène
, from the poet and Wagner aficionado Catulle Mendès
.
At this point, Debussy too was a devotee of Wagner's music, but - eager to please his father - he was probably more swayed by Mendès' promise of a performance at the Paris Opéra and the money and reputation this would bring. Mendès' libretto, with its conventional plot, offered rather less encouragement to his creative abilities. In the words of Victor Lederer, "Desperate to sink his teeth into a project of substance, the young composer accepted the type of old-fashioned libretto he dreaded, filled with howlers and lusty choruses of soldiers calling for wine." Debussy's letters and conversations with friends reveal his increasing frustration with the Mendès libretto and the composer's enthusiasm for the Wagnerian aesthetic was also waning. In a letter of January 1892, he wrote, "My life is hardship and misery thanks to this opera. Everything about it is wrong for me." And to Paul Dukas
, he confessed that Rodrigue was "totally at odds with all that I dream about, demanding a type of music that is alien to me."
Debussy was already formulating a new conception of opera. In a letter to Ernest Guiraud in 1890 he wrote: "The ideal would be two associated dreams. No time, no place. No big scene [...] Music in opera is far too predominant. Too much singing and the musical settings are too cumbersome [...] My idea is of a short libretto with mobile scenes. No discussion or arguments between the characters whom I see at the mercy of life or destiny." It was only when Debussy discovered the new Symbolist plays of Maurice Maeterlinck
that he found a form of drama that answered his ideal requirements for a libretto.
Maeterlinck's plays were tremendously popular with the avant-garde in the Paris of the 1890s. They were anti-naturalistic in content and style, forsaking external drama for a symbolic expression of the inner life of the characters. Debussy had seen a production of Maeterlinck's first play La princesse Maleine and, in 1891, he applied for permission to set it but Maeterlinck had already promised it to Vincent d'Indy
.
Debussy's interest shifted to Pelléas et Mélisande, which he had read some time between its publication in May 1892 and its first performance at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens on 17 May 1893, a staging the composer attended. Pelléas was a work that fascinated many other musicians of the time: both Gabriel Fauré
and Jean Sibelius
composed incidental music
for the play, and Arnold Schoenberg
was to write a tone poem on the theme. Debussy found in it the ideal opera libretto for which he had been searching. In a 1902 article, "Pourquoi j’ai écrit Pelléas" (Why I wrote Pelléas), Debussy explained the appeal of the work:
Debussy abandoned work on Rodrigue and Chimène and, in August 1893, he approached Maeterlinck via his friend, the poet Henri de Régnier
, for permission to set Pelléas. Maeterlinck was happy to grant it. Régnier claimed Debussy had already started work on the music but the evidence suggests that he did not begin composing the score until September. In November, Debussy made a trip to Belgium
, where he played excerpts from his work in progress to the famous violinist Eugène Ysaÿe
in Brussels
before visiting Maeterlinck at his home in Ghent
. Debussy described the playwright as being initially as shy as a "girl meeting an eligible young man", but the two soon warmed to each other. Maeterlinck authorised Debussy to make whatever cuts in the play he wanted. He also admitted to the composer that he knew nothing about music.
Debussy finished the short score of the opera (without detailed orchestration) on 17 August 1895. He did not go on to produce the full score needed for rehearsals until the Opéra-Comique
accepted the work in 1898. At this point he added the full orchestration, finished the vocal score, and made several revisions. It is this version that went into rehearsals in January 1902.
to have it performed at his Pavillon des Muses, but nothing came of this.
The composer and conductor André Messager
was a great admirer of Debussy's music and had heard him play extracts from the opera. When Messager became chief conductor of the Opéra-Comique
theatre in 1898, his enthusiastic recommendations prompted Albert Carré
, the head of the opera house, to visit Debussy and hear the work played on the piano at two sessions, in May 1898 and April 1901. On the strength of this, Carré accepted the work for the Opéra-Comique and on 3 May 1901 gave Debussy a written promise to perform the opera the following season.
Debussy had promised the role of Mélisande to Maeterlinck's companion Georgette Leblanc
and had even rehearsed the part with her privately. But Albert Carré became keen on a new Scottish singer, Mary Garden
, who had captivated the Parisian public when she had taken over the lead role in Gustave Charpentier
's Louise
shortly after its premiere in 1900. Debussy was at first reluctant to comply with Carré but when he heard Garden sing, he was so impressed that he later recalled: "That was the gentle voice that I had heard in my inmost being, with its hesitantly tender and captivating charm, such that I had barely dared to hope for."
Maeterlinck first learned of Debussy's preference for Garden when an announcement appeared in Le ménestrel newspaper on 29 December 1901. He was furious and tried to take legal action to prevent the opera from going ahead. When this failed, he threatened Debussy with physical violence, telling Leblanc he was going to "give Debussy a drubbing to teach him what was what," and Madame Debussy had to dissuade him from attacking her husband with a cane. On 14 April, Le Figaro
published a letter from Maeterlinck in which he completely dissociated himself from the production, complaining about the cuts that had been made in the libretto (although he had originally sanctioned them) and describing "the Pelléas in question" as "a work that is strange and hostile to me [...] I can only wish for its immediate and decided failure." Maeterlinck finally saw the opera in 1920, two years after Debussy's death. He later confessed: "In this affair I was entirely wrong and he was a thousand times right."
in Paris on 30 April 1902 with André Messager conducting. The sets were designed in the Pre-Raphaelite style by Lucien Jusseaume and Eugène Ronsin. The premiere received a warmer reception than the dress rehearsal because a group of Debussy aficionados counterbalanced the Opéra-Comique's regular subscribers, who found the work so objectionable. Messager described the reaction: "[It was] certainly not a triumph, but no longer the disaster of two days before...From the second performance onwards, the public remained calm and above all curious to hear this work everyone was talking about...The little group of admirers, Conservatoire pupils and students for the most part, grew day by day..."
Critical reaction was mixed. Some accused the music of being "sickly and practically lifeless" and of sounding "like the noise of a squeaky door or a piece of furniture being moved about, or a child crying in the distance." Camille Saint-Saëns
, a relentless opponent of Debussy's music, claimed he had abandoned his customary summer holidays so he could stay in Paris and "say nasty things about Pelléas." But others — especially the younger generation of composers, students and aesthetes — were highly enthusiastic. Debussy's friend Paul Dukas
lauded the opera, Romain Rolland
described it as "one of the three or four outstanding achievements in French musical history", and Vincent d'Indy
wrote an extensive review which compared the work to Wagner and early 17th-century Italian opera
. D'Indy found Pelléas moving, too: "The composer has in fact simply felt and expressed the human feelings and human sufferings in human terms, despite the outward appearance the characters present of living in a dream." The opera won a "cult following" among young aesthetes, and the writer Jean Lorrain
satirised the "Pelléastres" who aped the costumes and hairstyles of Mary Garden and the rest of the cast.
took over the role of Mélisande from Mary Garden. She described Debussy's reaction on learning her nationality: "Une autre anglaise—Mon Dieu" ("Another Englishwoman—my God"). Teyte also wrote about the composer's perfectionist character and his relations with the cast:
on 9 January 1907. This was followed by foreign premieres in Frankfurt
on 19 April of the same year, New York
at the Manhattan Opera House on 19 February 1908, and at La Scala
, Milan
with Arturo Toscanini
conducting on 2 April 1908. It first appeared in the United Kingdom at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
on 21 May 1909.
In the years following World War I
, the popularity of Pelléas et Mélisande began to fade somewhat. As Roger Nichols writes, "[The] two qualities of being escapist and easily caricatured meant that in the brittle, post-war Parisian climate Pelléas could be written off as no longer relevant." The situation was the same abroad and in 1940 the English critic Edward J. Dent observed that "Pelléas et Mélisande seems to have fallen completely into oblivion." However, the Canadian premiere was given that same year at the Montreal Festivals
under the baton of Wilfrid Pelletier
. Interest was further revived by the famous production which debuted at the Opéra-Comique on 22 May 1942 under the baton of Roger Desormière
with Jacques Jansen
and Irène Joachim
in the title roles. The couple became "the Pelléas and Mélisande for a whole generation of opera-goers, last appearing together at the Opéra-Comique in 1955."
Notable later productions include those with set designs by Jean Cocteau
(first performed in Marseille
in 1963), and the 1969 Covent Garden
production conducted by Pierre Boulez
. Boulez's rejection of the tradition of Pelléas conducting caused controversy among critics who accused him of "Wagnerising" Debussy, to which Boulez responded that the work was indeed heavily influenced by Wagner's Parsifal
. Boulez returned to conduct Pelléas in an acclaimed production by the German director Peter Stein
for the Welsh National Opera
in 1992. Modern productions have frequently re-imagined Maeterlinck’s setting, often moving the time period to the present day or other time period; for instance, the 1985 Opéra National de Lyon
production set the opera during the Edwardian period
. In September 2010 the opera was on the stage of Deutsche Oper Berlin
.
Prince Golaud, grandson of King Arkel of Allemonde, has become lost while hunting in the forest. He discovers a frightened, weeping girl sitting by a spring in which a crown is visible. She reveals her name is Mélisande but nothing else about her origins and refuses to let Golaud retrieve her crown from the water. Golaud persuades her to come with him before the forest gets dark.
Scene 2: A room in the castle
Six months have passed. Geneviève, the mother of the princes Golaud and Pelléas, reads a letter to the aged and nearly blind King Arkel. It was sent by Golaud to his brother Pelléas. In it Golaud reveals that he has married Mélisande, although he knows no more about her than on the day they first met. Golaud fears that Arkel will be angry with him and tells Pelléas to find how he reacts to the news. If the old man is favourable then Pelléas should light a lamp from the tower facing the sea on the third day; if Golaud does not see the lamp shining, he will sail on and never return home. Arkel had planned to marry the widowed Golaud to Princess Ursule in order to put an end to "long wars and ancient hatreds", but he bows to fate and accepts Golaud's marriage to Mélisande. Pelléas enters, weeping. He has received a letter from his friend Marcellus, who is on his deathbed, and wants to travel to say goodbye to him. Arkel thinks Pelléas should wait for the return of Golaud, and also reminds Pelléas of his own father, lying sick in bed in the castle. Geneviève tells Pelléas not to forget to light the lamp for Golaud.
Scene 3: Before the castle
Geneviève and Mélisande walk in the castle grounds. Mélisande remarks how dark the surrounding gardens and forest are. Pelléas arrives. They look out to sea and notice a large ship departing and a lighthouse shining. Night falls. Geneviève goes off to look after Yniold, Golaud's young son by his previous marriage. Pelléas takes Melisande's hand to help her down the steep path. He tells her he might have to go away tomorrow. Mélisande asks him why.
Scene 1: A well in the park
It is a hot summer day. Pelléas has led Mélisande to one of his favourite spots, the "Blind Men's Well". People used to believe it possessed miraculous powers to cure blindness but since the old king's eyesight started to fail, they no longer come there. Mélisande lies down on the marble rim of the well and tries to see to the bottom. Her hair loosens and falls into the water. Pelléas notices how extraordinarily long it is. He remembers that Golaud first met Mélisande beside a spring. Mélisande plays with the ring Golaud gave her, throwing it up into the air until it slips from her fingers into the well. Pelléas tells her not to be concerned — she can get another ring — but she is not reassured. He also notes that the clock was striking twelve as the ring dropped into the well. Mélisande asks him what she should tell Golaud. He replies, "The truth."
Scene 2: A room in the castle
Golaud is lying in bed with Mélisande at the bedside. He is wounded, having fallen from his horse while hunting. The horse suddenly bolted for no reason as the clock struck twelve. Mélisande bursts into tears and says she feels ill and unhappy in the castle. She wants to go away with Golaud. He asks her the reason for her unhappiness but she refuses to say. When he asks her if the problem is Pelléas, she replies that he is not the cause but she does not think he likes her. Golaud tells her not to worry: Pelléas can behave oddly and he is still very young. Mélisande complains about the gloominess of the castle, today was the first time she saw the sky. Golaud takes her hands to comfort her and notices the wedding ring is missing. Mélisande claims she dropped it in a cave by the sea where she went to collect shells with little Yniold. Golaud orders her to go and search for it at once before the tide comes in, even though night has fallen. When Mélisande replies that she is afraid to go alone, Golaud tells her to take Pelléas along with her.
Scene 3: Before a cave
Pelléas and Mélisande make their way down to the cave in pitch darkness. Mélisande is frightened to enter, but the cave gives off its own light and Pelléas tells her she will need to describe the place to Golaud to prove she has been there. The moon comes out and reveals three beggars sleeping in the cave. Pelléas explains there is a famine in the land. He decides they should come back another day.
Scene 1: One of the towers of the castle
Mélisande is at the tower window, singing a song (Mes longs cheveux) as she combs her hair. Pelléas appears and asks her to lean out so he can kiss her hand as he is going away the next day. He cannot reach her hand but her long hair tumbles down from the window and he kisses and caresses it instead. Pelléas playfully ties Mélisande's hair to a willow tree in spite of her protests that someone might see them. A flock of doves takes flight. Mélisande panics when she hears Golaud's footsteps approaching. Golaud dismisses Pelléas and Mélisande as nothing but a pair of children and leads Pelléas away.
Scene 2: The vaults of the castle
Golaud leads Pelléas down to the castle vaults, which contain the dungeons and a stagnant pool which has "the scent of death." He tells Pelléas to lean over and look into the chasm while he holds him safely. Pelléas finds the atmosphere stifling and they leave.
Scene 3: A terrace at the entrance of the vaults
Pelléas is relieved to breathe fresh air again. It is noon. He sees Geneviève and Mélisande at a window in the tower. Golaud tells Pelléas that there must be no repeat of the "childish game" between him and Mélisande last night. Mélisande is pregnant and the least shock might disturb her health. It is not the first time he has noticed there might be something between Pelléas and Mélisande but Pelléas should avoid her as much as possible without making this look too obvious.
Scene 4: Before the castle
Golaud sits with his little son, Yniold, in the darkness before dawn and questions him about Pelléas and Mélisande. The boy reveals little that Golaud wants to know. He says that Pelléas and Mélisande often quarrel "about the door" and that they have told Yniold he will one day be as big as his father. They never send Yniold away because they are "afraid" when he is not there and "keep on crying in the dark." He admits that he once saw Pelléas and Mélisande kiss "when it was raining." Golaud lifts his son on his shoulders to spy on Pelléas and Mélisande through the window but Yniold says that they are doing nothing. He threatens to scream unless Golaud lets him down again. Golaud leads him away.
Pelléas tells Mélisande that his father is getting better and has asked him to leave on his travels. He arranges a last meeting with Mélisande by the Blind Men's Well in the park.
Scene 2: The same
Arkel tells Mélisande how he felt sorry for her when she first came to the castle "with the strange, bewildered look of someone constantly awaiting a calamity." But now that is going to change and Mélisande will "open the door to a new era that I foresee." He asks her to kiss him. Golaud bursts in with blood on his forehead — he claims it was caused by a thorn hedge. When Mélisande tries to wipe the blood away he angrily orders her not to touch him and demands his sword. He mentions that another peasant has died of starvation. Golaud notices Mélisande is trembling and tells her he is not going to kill her with the sword. He mocks the "great innocence" Arkel says he sees in Mélisande's eyes. He commands her to close them or "I will shut them for a long time." He tells Mélisande that she disgusts him and drags her around the room by her hair. When Golaud leaves, Arkel asks if he is drunk. Mélisande simply replies that he does not love her any more. Arkel comments: "If I were God, I would have pity on the hearts of men."
Scene 3: A well in the park
Yniold tries to lift a boulder to free his golden ball which is trapped between it and some rocks. As dark falls he hears a flock of sheep suddenly stop bleating. A shepherd explains that they have turned onto a path that doesn't lead back to the sheepfold, but does not answer when Yniold asks where they will sleep. Yniold goes off to find someone to talk to.
Scene 4: The same
Pelléas arrives alone at the well. He is worried how far he has become involved with Mélisande and fears the consequences: "I have been playing like a child round a thing I did not suspect was there. I have been playing in a dream, round the snares of fate." He knows he must leave but first he wants to see Mélisande one last time and "tell her all the things I haven't said." Mélisande arrives. She was able to slip out without Golaud noticing. Pelléas tells her he is going away but first he wanted to tell her that he loves her. Mélisande confesses that she has loved him since she first saw him. Pelléas hears the servants shutting the castle gates for the night. Now they are locked out, but Mélisande merely says, "All the better." Pelléas is resigned to fate too: "Things no longer depend on our wish. All is lost, all is saved." The two kiss then Mélisande hears something moving in the shadows. It is Golaud, who has been watching the couple from behind a tree. Golaud strikes down Pelléas with his sword and kills him. Mélisande flees into the woods in terror with Golaud in pursuit.
Mélisande sleeps in a sick bed after giving birth to her child. The doctor assures Golaud that her condition is not serious. Overcome with guilt, Golaud claims he has killed for no reason. Pelléas and Mélisande merely kissed "like a brother and sister." Mélisande wakes and asks for a window to be opened so she can see the sunset. Golaud asks the doctor and Arkel to leave the room so he can speak with Mélisande alone. He blames himself for everything and begs Melisande's forgiveness. Golaud presses Mélisande to confess her forbidden love for Pelléas. She maintains her innocence in spite of Golaud's increasingly desperate pleas to her to tell "the truth." Arkel and the doctor return. Arkel tells Golaud to stop before he kills Mélisande, but he replies "I have already killed her." Arkel hands Mélisande her newborn baby girl but she is too weak to lift the child in her arms. The room fills with serving women, although no one can tell who has summoned them. Mélisande quietly dies. At the moment of death, the serving women fall to their knees. Arkel comforts the sobbing Golaud. He says Mélisande "was a poor little mysterious being like all of us. She lies there as if she were her baby's elder sister." Now her daughter must live in her place. C'est au tour de la pauvre petite ("It's the poor little thing's turn now.")
' Salome
, Alban Berg
's Wozzeck
and Bernd Alois Zimmermann
's Die Soldaten
.
The nature of the libretto Debussy chose to set contributes to the most famous feature of the opera: the almost complete absence of arias or set pieces. There are only two reasonably lengthy passages for soloists: Geneviève's reading of the letter in Act One and Mélisande's song from the tower in Act 3 (which would probably have been set to music in a spoken performance of Maeterlinck's play in any case). Instead, Debussy set the text one note to a syllable in a "continuous, fluid 'cantilena
', somewhere between chant and recitative
".
. As Donald Grout writes: "it is customary, and in the main correct, to regard Pelléas et Mélisande as a monument to French operatic reaction to Wagner". Wagner had revolutionised 19th-century opera by his insistence on making his stage works more dramatic, by his increased use of the orchestra, his abolition of the traditional distinction between aria
and recitative
in favour of what he termed "endless melody", and by his use of leitmotifs, recurring musical themes associated with characters or ideas. Wagner was a highly controversial figure in France. Despised by the conservative musical establishment, he was a cult figure in "avant-garde" circles, particularly among literary groups such as the Symbolists, who saw parallels between Wagner's concept of the leitmotif and their use of the symbol. The young Debussy joined in this enthusiasm for Wagner's music, making a pilgrimage to the Bayreuth Festival
in 1888 to see Parsifal
and Die Meistersinger and returning in 1889 to see Tristan und Isolde
. Yet that same year he confessed to his friend Ernest Guiraud his need to escape Wagner's influence.
Debussy was well aware of the dangers of imitating Wagner too closely. Several French composers had tried to write their own Wagnerian music dramas, including Emmanuel Chabrier
(Gwendoline) and Ernest Chausson
(Le roi Arthus). Debussy was far from impressed by the results: "We are bound to admit that nothing was ever more dreary than the neo-Wagnerian school in which the French genius had lost its way among the sham Wotans in Hessian boots and the Tristans in velvet jackets." Debussy strove to avoid excessive Wagnerian influence on Pelléas from the start. The love scene was the first music he composed but he scrapped his early drafts for being too conventional and because "worst of all, the ghost of old Klingsor, alias R.Wagner, kept appearing."
However, Debussy took several features from Wagner, including the use of leitmotifs, though these are "rather the 'idea-leitmotifs' of the more mature Wagner of Tristan than the 'character-leitmotifs' of his earlier music-dramas." Debussy referred to what he felt were Wagner's more obvious leitmotifs as a "box of tricks" (boîte à trucs) and claimed there was "no guiding thread in Pelléás" as "the characters are not subjected to the slavery of the leitmotif." Yet, as Debussy admitted privately, there are themes associated with each of the three main characters in Pelléas.
The continuous use of the orchestra is another feature of Wagnerian music drama, yet the way Debussy writes for the orchestra is completely different from Tristan, for example. In Grout's words, "In most places the music is no more than an iridescent veil covering the text." The emphasis is on quietness, subtlety and allowing the words of the libretto to be heard; there are only four fortissimos in the entire score. Debussy's use of declamation is un-Wagnerian as he felt Wagnerian melody was unsuited to the French language. Instead, he stays close to the rhythms of natural speech, making Pelléas part of a tradition which goes back to the French Baroque tragédies en musique of Rameau and Lully
as well as the experiments of the very founders of opera, Peri
and Caccini
.
Like Tristan the subject of Pelléas is a love triangle set in a vaguely Medieval world. Unlike the protagonists of Tristan, the characters rarely seem to understand or be able to articulate their own feelings. The deliberate vagueness of the story is paralleled by the elusiveness of Debussy's music.
. As Hugh Macdonald
writes: "Both operas were much-loved only children of doting creators who put so much into their making that there could be no second child to follow after." This was not for want of trying on Debussy's part and he worked hard to create a successor. Details of several opera projects survive. The most substantial surviving musical sketches are for two works based on short stories by Edgar Allan Poe
: Le diable dans le beffroi
and La chute de la maison Usher
.
Debussy also planned a version of Shakespeare's As You Like It
with a libretto by Paul-Jean Toulet
but the poet's opium addiction meant he was too lazy to write the text. Two other projects suggest Debussy intended to challenge German composers on their own ground. Orphée-Roi (King Orpheus) was to be a riposte to Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice
, which Debussy considered to "treat only the anecdotal, lachrymose aspect of the subject.". But, according to Victor Lederer, for "shock value, neither [As You Like It nor Orphée] tops the Tristan project of 1907 [...] According to Léon Vallas, one of Debussy's early biographers, its 'episodic character... would have been related to the tales of chivalry, and diametrically opposed to the Germanic conception of Wagner.' That Debussy entertained, if only for a few weeks, the idea of writing an opera based on the Tristan legend is quite incredible. He knew Wagner's colossal Tristan und Isolde as well as anyone, and his confidence must have been great indeed if he felt up to treating the subject." However, nothing came of any of these schemes, partly because the rectal cancer which afflicted Debussy from 1909 meant that he found it increasingly hard to concentrate on sustained creative work. Pelléas would remain a unique opera.
in 1927. The 1942 recording conducted by Roger Désormière
, is considered a reference by most critics.
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
in five acts with music by Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
. The French libretto
Libretto
A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...
was adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, also called Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life...
's Symbolist
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
play Pelléas et Mélisande
Pelléas and Mélisande
Pelléas and Mélisande is a Symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck about the forbidden, doomed love of the title characters. It was first performed in 1893....
. It premiered at the Opéra-Comique
Opéra-Comique
The Opéra-Comique is a Parisian opera company, which was founded around 1714 by some of the popular theatres of the Parisian fairs. In 1762 the company was merged with, and for a time took the name of its chief rival the Comédie-Italienne at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and was also called the...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
on 30 April 1902 with Jean Périer
Jean Périer
Jean Périer was a French operatic baritone and actor. Although he sang principally within the operetta repertoire, Périer did portray a number of opera roles; mostly within operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Giacomo Puccini...
as Pelléas and Mary Garden
Mary Garden
Mary Garden , was a Scottish operatic soprano with a substantial career in France and America in the first third of the 20th century...
as Mélisande in a performance conducted by André Messager
André Messager
André Charles Prosper Messager , was a French composer, organist, pianist, conductor and administrator. His stage compositions included ballets and 30 opéra comiques and operettas, among which Véronique, had lasting success, with Les p'tites Michu and Monsieur Beaucaire also enjoying international...
, who was instrumental in getting the Opéra-Comique to stage the work. The only opera Debussy ever completed, it is considered a landmark in 20th-century music.
The plot concerns a love triangle
Love triangle
A love triangle is usually a romantic relationship involving three people. While it can refer to two people independently romantically linked with a third, it usually implies that each of the three people has some kind of relationship to the other two...
. Prince Golaud finds a mysterious young woman, Mélisande, lost in a forest. He marries her and brings her back to the castle of his grandfather, King Arkel of Allemonde. Here Mélisande becomes increasingly attached to Golaud’s younger half-brother Pelléas, arousing Golaud’s jealousy. Golaud goes to excessive lengths to find out the truth about Pelléas and Mélisande’s relationship, even forcing his own child, Yniold, to spy on the couple. Pelléas decides to leave the castle but arranges to meet Mélisande one last time and the two finally confess their love for one another. Golaud, who has been eavesdropping, rushes out and kills Pelléas. Mélisande dies shortly after, having given birth to a daughter, with Golaud still begging her to tell him “the truth”.
Debussy's ideal of opera
Looking back in 1902, Debussy explained the protracted genesis of his only finished opera: "For a long time I had been striving to write music for the theatre, but the form in which I wanted it to be was so unusual that after several attempts I had given up on the idea." There were many false starts before Pelléas et Mélisande. In the 1880s the young composer had toyed with several opera projects (Diane au Bois, Axël) before accepting a libretto on the theme of El CidEl Cid
Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar , known as El Cid Campeador , was a Castilian nobleman, military leader, and diplomat...
, entitled Rodrigue et Chimène
Rodrigue et Chimène
Rodrigue et Chimène is an unfinished opera in three acts by Claude Debussy. The French libretto, by Catulle Mendès, is based on the plays Las Mocedades del Cid by Guillén de Castro y Bellvís and Corneille's Le Cid which deal with the legend of El Cid...
, from the poet and Wagner aficionado Catulle Mendès
Catulle Mendès
Catulle Mendès was a French poet and man of letters.Of Portuguese Jewish extraction, he was born in Bordeaux. He early established himself in Paris and promptly attained notoriety by the publication in the Revue fantaisiste of his Roman d'une nuit, for which he was condemned to a month's...
.
At this point, Debussy too was a devotee of Wagner's music, but - eager to please his father - he was probably more swayed by Mendès' promise of a performance at the Paris Opéra and the money and reputation this would bring. Mendès' libretto, with its conventional plot, offered rather less encouragement to his creative abilities. In the words of Victor Lederer, "Desperate to sink his teeth into a project of substance, the young composer accepted the type of old-fashioned libretto he dreaded, filled with howlers and lusty choruses of soldiers calling for wine." Debussy's letters and conversations with friends reveal his increasing frustration with the Mendès libretto and the composer's enthusiasm for the Wagnerian aesthetic was also waning. In a letter of January 1892, he wrote, "My life is hardship and misery thanks to this opera. Everything about it is wrong for me." And to Paul Dukas
Paul Dukas
Paul Abraham Dukas was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher. A studious man, of retiring personality, he was intensely self-critical, and he abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions...
, he confessed that Rodrigue was "totally at odds with all that I dream about, demanding a type of music that is alien to me."
Debussy was already formulating a new conception of opera. In a letter to Ernest Guiraud in 1890 he wrote: "The ideal would be two associated dreams. No time, no place. No big scene [...] Music in opera is far too predominant. Too much singing and the musical settings are too cumbersome [...] My idea is of a short libretto with mobile scenes. No discussion or arguments between the characters whom I see at the mercy of life or destiny." It was only when Debussy discovered the new Symbolist plays of Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, also called Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life...
that he found a form of drama that answered his ideal requirements for a libretto.
Finding the right libretto
Vincent d'Indy
Vincent d'Indy was a French composer and teacher.-Life:Paul Marie Théodore Vincent d'Indy was born in Paris into an aristocratic family of royalist and Catholic persuasion. He had piano lessons from an early age from his paternal grandmother, who passed him on to Antoine François Marmontel and...
.
Debussy's interest shifted to Pelléas et Mélisande, which he had read some time between its publication in May 1892 and its first performance at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens on 17 May 1893, a staging the composer attended. Pelléas was a work that fascinated many other musicians of the time: both Gabriel Fauré
Gabriel Fauré
Gabriel Urbain Fauré was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th century composers...
and Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer of the later Romantic period whose music played an important role in the formation of the Finnish national identity. His mastery of the orchestra has been described as "prodigious."...
composed incidental music
Incidental music
Incidental music is music in a play, television program, radio program, video game, film or some other form not primarily musical. The term is less frequently applied to film music, with such music being referred to instead as the "film score" or "soundtrack"....
for the play, and Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...
was to write a tone poem on the theme. Debussy found in it the ideal opera libretto for which he had been searching. In a 1902 article, "Pourquoi j’ai écrit Pelléas" (Why I wrote Pelléas), Debussy explained the appeal of the work:
"The drama of Pelléas which, despite its dream-like atmosphere, contains far more humanity than those so-called ‘real-life documents’, seemed to suit my intentions admirably. In it there is an evocative language whose sensitivity could be extended into music and into the orchestral backcloth."
Debussy abandoned work on Rodrigue and Chimène and, in August 1893, he approached Maeterlinck via his friend, the poet Henri de Régnier
Henri de Régnier
Henri François Joseph de Régnier was a French symbolist poet, considered one of the most important of France during the early 20th century....
, for permission to set Pelléas. Maeterlinck was happy to grant it. Régnier claimed Debussy had already started work on the music but the evidence suggests that he did not begin composing the score until September. In November, Debussy made a trip to Belgium
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
, where he played excerpts from his work in progress to the famous violinist Eugène Ysaÿe
Eugène Ysaÿe
Eugène Ysaÿe was a Belgian violinist, composer and conductor born in Liège. He was regarded as "The King of the Violin", or, as Nathan Milstein put it, the "tzar"...
in Brussels
Brussels
Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
before visiting Maeterlinck at his home in Ghent
Ghent
Ghent is a city and a municipality located in the Flemish region of Belgium. It is the capital and biggest city of the East Flanders province. The city started as a settlement at the confluence of the Rivers Scheldt and Lys and in the Middle Ages became one of the largest and richest cities of...
. Debussy described the playwright as being initially as shy as a "girl meeting an eligible young man", but the two soon warmed to each other. Maeterlinck authorised Debussy to make whatever cuts in the play he wanted. He also admitted to the composer that he knew nothing about music.
Composition
Debussy began work on Pelléas in September 1893. He decided to remove four scenes from the play (Act I Scene 1, Act II Scene 4, Act III Scene 1, Act V Scene 1), significantly reducing the role of the serving-women to one silent appearance in the last act. He also cut back on the elaborate descriptions of which Maeterlinck was fond. Debussy's method of composition was fairly systematic; he worked on only one act at a time but not necessarily in chronological order. The first scene that he wrote was Act 4 Scene 4, the climactic love scene between Pelléas and Mélisande.Debussy finished the short score of the opera (without detailed orchestration) on 17 August 1895. He did not go on to produce the full score needed for rehearsals until the Opéra-Comique
Opéra-Comique
The Opéra-Comique is a Parisian opera company, which was founded around 1714 by some of the popular theatres of the Parisian fairs. In 1762 the company was merged with, and for a time took the name of its chief rival the Comédie-Italienne at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and was also called the...
accepted the work in 1898. At this point he added the full orchestration, finished the vocal score, and made several revisions. It is this version that went into rehearsals in January 1902.
Finding a venue
Debussy spent years trying to find a suitable venue for the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande, realising he would have difficulties getting such an innovative work staged. As he confided to his friend Camille Mauclair in 1895: "It is no slight work. I should like to find a place for it, but you know I am badly received everywhere." He also told Mauclair that he had contemplated asking the wealthy aesthete Robert de MontesquiouRobert de Montesquiou
Marie Joseph Robert Anatole, comte de Montesquiou-Fézensac , was a French aesthete, Symbolist poet, art collector and dandy....
to have it performed at his Pavillon des Muses, but nothing came of this.
The composer and conductor André Messager
André Messager
André Charles Prosper Messager , was a French composer, organist, pianist, conductor and administrator. His stage compositions included ballets and 30 opéra comiques and operettas, among which Véronique, had lasting success, with Les p'tites Michu and Monsieur Beaucaire also enjoying international...
was a great admirer of Debussy's music and had heard him play extracts from the opera. When Messager became chief conductor of the Opéra-Comique
Opéra-Comique
The Opéra-Comique is a Parisian opera company, which was founded around 1714 by some of the popular theatres of the Parisian fairs. In 1762 the company was merged with, and for a time took the name of its chief rival the Comédie-Italienne at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and was also called the...
theatre in 1898, his enthusiastic recommendations prompted Albert Carré
Albert Carré
Albert Carré was a French theatre director, opera director, actor and librettist. He was the nephew of librettist Michel Carré and cousin of cinema director Michel Antoine Carré...
, the head of the opera house, to visit Debussy and hear the work played on the piano at two sessions, in May 1898 and April 1901. On the strength of this, Carré accepted the work for the Opéra-Comique and on 3 May 1901 gave Debussy a written promise to perform the opera the following season.
Trouble with Maeterlinck
Georgette Leblanc
Georgette Leblanc was a French operatic soprano, actress, author, and the sister of novelist Maurice Leblanc. She became particularly associated with the works of Jules Massenet and was an admired interpreter of the title role in Bizet's Carmen...
and had even rehearsed the part with her privately. But Albert Carré became keen on a new Scottish singer, Mary Garden
Mary Garden
Mary Garden , was a Scottish operatic soprano with a substantial career in France and America in the first third of the 20th century...
, who had captivated the Parisian public when she had taken over the lead role in Gustave Charpentier
Gustave Charpentier
Gustave Charpentier, , born in Dieuze, Moselle on 25 June 1860, died Paris, 18 February 1956) was a French composer, best known for his opera Louise.-Life and career:...
's Louise
Louise (opera)
Louise is an opera in four acts by Gustave Charpentier to an original French libretto by the composer, with some contributions by Saint-Pol-Roux, a symbolist poet and inspiration of the surrealists....
shortly after its premiere in 1900. Debussy was at first reluctant to comply with Carré but when he heard Garden sing, he was so impressed that he later recalled: "That was the gentle voice that I had heard in my inmost being, with its hesitantly tender and captivating charm, such that I had barely dared to hope for."
Maeterlinck first learned of Debussy's preference for Garden when an announcement appeared in Le ménestrel newspaper on 29 December 1901. He was furious and tried to take legal action to prevent the opera from going ahead. When this failed, he threatened Debussy with physical violence, telling Leblanc he was going to "give Debussy a drubbing to teach him what was what," and Madame Debussy had to dissuade him from attacking her husband with a cane. On 14 April, Le Figaro
Le Figaro
Le Figaro is a French daily newspaper founded in 1826 and published in Paris. It is one of three French newspapers of record, with Le Monde and Libération, and is the oldest newspaper in France. It is also the second-largest national newspaper in France after Le Parisien and before Le Monde, but...
published a letter from Maeterlinck in which he completely dissociated himself from the production, complaining about the cuts that had been made in the libretto (although he had originally sanctioned them) and describing "the Pelléas in question" as "a work that is strange and hostile to me [...] I can only wish for its immediate and decided failure." Maeterlinck finally saw the opera in 1920, two years after Debussy's death. He later confessed: "In this affair I was entirely wrong and he was a thousand times right."
Rehearsals
Rehearsals for Pelléas et Mélisande began on 13 January 1902 and went on for 15 weeks; Debussy was present for 69 of the sessions. Mélisande was not the only role which caused casting problems: the child who was to play Yniold was not chosen until 5 March. In the event, the boy (Blondin) proved incapable of singing the part competently and Yniold's main scene (Act IV Scene 3) was cut and only reinstated in later performances when the role was given to a woman. The rehearsals also showed that the stage machinery of the Opéra-Comique was unable to cope with the rapid set changes the libretto demanded and Debussy had to compose orchestral interludes to cover them. Many of the orchestra and cast were hostile to Debussy's innovative work and, in the words of Roger Nichols, "may not have taken altogether kindly to the composer's injunction, reported by Mary Garden, to 'forget, please, that you are singers'." The dress rehearsal took place on the afternoon of Monday, 28 April and was a rowdy affair. Someone (in Mary Garden's view, Maurice Maeterlinck) distributed a salacious parody of the libretto to the audience, who also laughed at Garden's Scottish accent (she allegedly pronounced courage as curages, meaning "the dirt that gets stuck in drains"). The censor, Henri Roujon, asked Debussy to make a number of cuts before the premiere, including a mention of the word "bed". Debussy agreed but kept the libretto unaltered in the published score.Premiere
Pelléas et Mélisande received its first performance at the Opéra-ComiqueOpéra-Comique
The Opéra-Comique is a Parisian opera company, which was founded around 1714 by some of the popular theatres of the Parisian fairs. In 1762 the company was merged with, and for a time took the name of its chief rival the Comédie-Italienne at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and was also called the...
in Paris on 30 April 1902 with André Messager conducting. The sets were designed in the Pre-Raphaelite style by Lucien Jusseaume and Eugène Ronsin. The premiere received a warmer reception than the dress rehearsal because a group of Debussy aficionados counterbalanced the Opéra-Comique's regular subscribers, who found the work so objectionable. Messager described the reaction: "[It was] certainly not a triumph, but no longer the disaster of two days before...From the second performance onwards, the public remained calm and above all curious to hear this work everyone was talking about...The little group of admirers, Conservatoire pupils and students for the most part, grew day by day..."
Critical reaction was mixed. Some accused the music of being "sickly and practically lifeless" and of sounding "like the noise of a squeaky door or a piece of furniture being moved about, or a child crying in the distance." Camille Saint-Saëns
Camille Saint-Saëns
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony...
, a relentless opponent of Debussy's music, claimed he had abandoned his customary summer holidays so he could stay in Paris and "say nasty things about Pelléas." But others — especially the younger generation of composers, students and aesthetes — were highly enthusiastic. Debussy's friend Paul Dukas
Paul Dukas
Paul Abraham Dukas was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher. A studious man, of retiring personality, he was intensely self-critical, and he abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions...
lauded the opera, Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915.-Biography:...
described it as "one of the three or four outstanding achievements in French musical history", and Vincent d'Indy
Vincent d'Indy
Vincent d'Indy was a French composer and teacher.-Life:Paul Marie Théodore Vincent d'Indy was born in Paris into an aristocratic family of royalist and Catholic persuasion. He had piano lessons from an early age from his paternal grandmother, who passed him on to Antoine François Marmontel and...
wrote an extensive review which compared the work to Wagner and early 17th-century Italian opera
Italian opera
Italian opera is both the art of opera in Italy and opera in the Italian language. Opera was born in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until the present day. Many famous operas in Italian were written by foreign composers,...
. D'Indy found Pelléas moving, too: "The composer has in fact simply felt and expressed the human feelings and human sufferings in human terms, despite the outward appearance the characters present of living in a dream." The opera won a "cult following" among young aesthetes, and the writer Jean Lorrain
Jean Lorrain
Jean Lorrain , born Paul Duval, was a French poet and novelist of the Symbolist school....
satirised the "Pelléastres" who aped the costumes and hairstyles of Mary Garden and the rest of the cast.
Later performance history
The initial run lasted for 14 performances, making a profit for the Opéra-Comique. It became a staple part in the repertory of the theatre, reaching its hundredth performance there on 25 January 1913. In 1908, Maggie TeyteMaggie Teyte
Dame Maggie Teyte DBE was an English operatic soprano and interpreter of French art song.-Early years:Margaret Tate was born in Wolverhampton, England, one of ten children of Jacob James Tate, a successful wine and spirit merchant and proprietor of public houses and later lodgings. Her parents...
took over the role of Mélisande from Mary Garden. She described Debussy's reaction on learning her nationality: "Une autre anglaise—Mon Dieu" ("Another Englishwoman—my God"). Teyte also wrote about the composer's perfectionist character and his relations with the cast:
As a teacher he was pedantic—that's the only word. Really pedantic [...] There was a core of anger and bitterness in him—I often think he was rather like Golaud in Pelléas and yet he wasn't. He was—it's in all his music—a very sensual man. No one seemed to like him. Jean Périer, who played Pelléas to my Mélisande, went white with anger if you mentioned the name of Debussy...Debussy's perfectionism—plus his dislike of the attendant publicity—was one of the reasons why he rarely attended performances of Pelléas et Mélisande. However, he did supervise the first foreign production of the opera, which appeared at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels
Brussels
Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
on 9 January 1907. This was followed by foreign premieres in Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
on 19 April of the same year, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
at the Manhattan Opera House on 19 February 1908, and at La Scala
La Scala
La Scala , is a world renowned opera house in Milan, Italy. The theatre was inaugurated on 3 August 1778 and was originally known as the New Royal-Ducal Theatre at La Scala...
, Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
with Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor. One of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th and 20th century, he was renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his photographic memory...
conducting on 2 April 1908. It first appeared in the United Kingdom at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The...
on 21 May 1909.
In the years following World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, the popularity of Pelléas et Mélisande began to fade somewhat. As Roger Nichols writes, "[The] two qualities of being escapist and easily caricatured meant that in the brittle, post-war Parisian climate Pelléas could be written off as no longer relevant." The situation was the same abroad and in 1940 the English critic Edward J. Dent observed that "Pelléas et Mélisande seems to have fallen completely into oblivion." However, the Canadian premiere was given that same year at the Montreal Festivals
Montreal Festivals
The Montreal Festivals was an arts festival held annually in Montreal, Canada from 1936-1965. The festival was originally dedicated to the performance of classical music, presenting concerts of symphonic works, operas, oratorios, chamber music, and recitals...
under the baton of Wilfrid Pelletier
Wilfrid Pelletier
Joseph Louis Wilfrid Pelletier , CC was a Canadian conductor, pianist, composer, and arts administrator. He was instrumental in establishing the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, serving as the orchestra's first artistic director and conductor from 1935-1941...
. Interest was further revived by the famous production which debuted at the Opéra-Comique on 22 May 1942 under the baton of Roger Desormière
Roger Désormière
Roger Désormière was a French conductor.Désormière was born in Vichy in 1898. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where his professors included Philippe Gaubert , Xavier Leroux and Charles Koechlin , and Vincent d'Indy...
with Jacques Jansen
Jacques Jansen
Jacques Jansen was a French baryton-martin singer, particularly associated with the role of Pelléas but also active in operetta and on the concert platform, and later as a teacher.-Life and career:Jansen had a wide musical and artistic education; after studying the violin in Paris, he took lessons...
and Irène Joachim
Irène Joachim
Irène Joachim, born 13 March 1913 in Paris, died 20 April 2001, also in Paris, was a French soprano, and later a vocal teacher.-Early life:Daughter of Herman Joachim and Suzanne Chaigneau, and grand-daughter of the violinist Joseph Joachim, she learnt violin and piano as a child...
in the title roles. The couple became "the Pelléas and Mélisande for a whole generation of opera-goers, last appearing together at the Opéra-Comique in 1955."
Notable later productions include those with set designs by Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
(first performed in Marseille
Marseille
Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...
in 1963), and the 1969 Covent Garden
Covent Garden
Covent Garden is a district in London on the eastern fringes of the West End, between St. Martin's Lane and Drury Lane. It is associated with the former fruit and vegetable market in the central square, now a popular shopping and tourist site, and the Royal Opera House, which is also known as...
production conducted by Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.-Early years:Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics...
. Boulez's rejection of the tradition of Pelléas conducting caused controversy among critics who accused him of "Wagnerising" Debussy, to which Boulez responded that the work was indeed heavily influenced by Wagner's Parsifal
Parsifal
Parsifal is an opera in three acts by Richard Wagner. It is loosely based on Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the 13th century epic poem of the Arthurian knight Parzival and his quest for the Holy Grail, and on Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, the Story of the Grail.Wagner first conceived the work...
. Boulez returned to conduct Pelléas in an acclaimed production by the German director Peter Stein
Peter Stein
Peter Stein is a critically acclaimed German theatre and opera director who established himself at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, a company that he brought to the forefront of German theatre....
for the Welsh National Opera
Welsh National Opera
Welsh National Opera is an opera company founded in Cardiff, Wales in 1943. The WNO tours Wales, the United Kingdom and the rest of the world extensively. Annually, it gives more than 120 performances of eight main stage operas to a combined audience of around 150,000 people...
in 1992. Modern productions have frequently re-imagined Maeterlinck’s setting, often moving the time period to the present day or other time period; for instance, the 1985 Opéra National de Lyon
Opéra National de Lyon
Opéra National de Lyon is an opera company in Lyon, France which performs in the Nouvel Opéra, a modernized version in 1993 of the original 1831 opera house.The inaugural performance of François-Adrien Boïeldieu's La Dame blanche was given on 1 July 1831...
production set the opera during the Edwardian period
Edwardian period
The Edwardian era or Edwardian period in the United Kingdom is the period covering the reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910.The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 and the succession of her son Edward marked the end of the Victorian era...
. In September 2010 the opera was on the stage of Deutsche Oper Berlin
Deutsche Oper Berlin
The Deutsche Oper Berlin is an opera company located in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, Germany. The resident building is also home to the Berlin State Ballet.-History:...
.
Roles
| Role | Voice type Voice type A voice type is a particular kind of human singing voice perceived as having certain identifying qualities or characteristics. Voice classification is the process by which human voices are evaluated and are thereby designated into voice types... |
Premiere Cast, 30 April 1902 (Conductor Conducting Conducting is the art of directing a musical performance by way of visible gestures. The primary duties of the conductor are to unify performers, set the tempo, execute clear preparations and beats, and to listen critically and shape the sound of the ensemble... : André Messager André Messager André Charles Prosper Messager , was a French composer, organist, pianist, conductor and administrator. His stage compositions included ballets and 30 opéra comiques and operettas, among which Véronique, had lasting success, with Les p'tites Michu and Monsieur Beaucaire also enjoying international... ) |
|---|---|---|
| Arkel, King of Allemonde | bass | Félix Vieuille Félix Vieuille Félix Vieuille was a French operatic bass who sang for more than four decades with the Opéra-Comique in Paris during the first half of the twentieth century... |
| Geneviève, mother of Golaud and Pelléas | contralto Contralto Contralto is the deepest female classical singing voice, with the lowest tessitura, falling between tenor and mezzo-soprano. It typically ranges between the F below middle C to the second G above middle C , although at the extremes some voices can reach the E below middle C or the second B above... |
Jeanne Gerville-Réache Jeanne Gerville-Réache Jeanne Gerville-Réache was a French operatic contralto from the Belle Époque. She possessed a remarkably beautiful voice, an excellent singing technique, and wide vocal range which enabled her to perform several roles traditionally associated with mezzo-sopranos in addition to contralto parts... |
| Golaud grandson of Arkel | baritone Baritone Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or... or bass-baritone Bass-baritone A bass-baritone is a high-lying bass or low-lying "classical" baritone voice type which shares certain qualities with the true baritone voice. The term arose in the late 19th century to describe the particular type of voice required to sing three Wagnerian roles: the Dutchman in Der fliegende... |
Hector-Robert Dufranne Hector Dufranne Hector Dufranne was a Belgian operatic bass-baritone who enjoyed a long career that took him to opera houses throughout Europe and the United States for more than four decades... |
| Pelléas, grandson of Arkel | tenor Tenor The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2... or high baritone (baryton-martin) |
Jean Périer Jean Périer Jean Périer was a French operatic baritone and actor. Although he sang principally within the operetta repertoire, Périer did portray a number of opera roles; mostly within operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Giacomo Puccini... |
| Mélisande | soprano Soprano A soprano is a voice type with a vocal range from approximately middle C to "high A" in choral music, or to "soprano C" or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which usually encompasses the melody... or high mezzo-soprano Mezzo-soprano A mezzo-soprano is a type of classical female singing voice whose range lies between the soprano and the contralto singing voices, usually extending from the A below middle C to the A two octaves above... |
Mary Garden Mary Garden Mary Garden , was a Scottish operatic soprano with a substantial career in France and America in the first third of the 20th century... |
| Yniold, the young son of Golaud | soprano or boy soprano Boy soprano A boy soprano is a young male singer with an unchanged voice in the soprano range. Although a treble, or choirboy, may also be considered to be a boy soprano, the more colloquial term boy soprano is generally only used for boys who sing, perform, or record as soloists, and who may not necessarily... |
C Blondin |
| Doctor | bass | Viguié |
| Shepherd | baritone | |
| Offstage sailors (male chorus), serving women and three paupers (mute) | ||
Instrumentation
The score calls for:- 3 fluteWestern concert fluteThe Western concert flute is a transverse woodwind instrument made of metal or wood. It is the most common variant of the flute. A musician who plays the flute is called a flautist, flutist, or flute player....
s/piccoloPiccoloThe piccolo is a half-size flute, and a member of the woodwind family of musical instruments. The piccolo has the same fingerings as its larger sibling, the standard transverse flute, but the sound it produces is an octave higher than written...
, 2 oboeOboeThe oboe is a double reed musical instrument of the woodwind family. In English, prior to 1770, the instrument was called "hautbois" , "hoboy", or "French hoboy". The spelling "oboe" was adopted into English ca...
s, cor anglaisCor anglaisThe cor anglais , or English horn , is a double-reed woodwind instrument in the oboe family....
, 2 clarinetClarinetThe clarinet is a musical instrument of woodwind type. The name derives from adding the suffix -et to the Italian word clarino , as the first clarinets had a strident tone similar to that of a trumpet. The instrument has an approximately cylindrical bore, and uses a single reed...
s, 3 bassoonBassoonThe bassoon is a woodwind instrument in the double reed family that typically plays music written in the bass and tenor registers, and occasionally higher. Appearing in its modern form in the 19th century, the bassoon figures prominently in orchestral, concert band and chamber music literature...
s - 4 French horns, 3 trumpetTrumpetThe trumpet is the musical instrument with the highest register in the brass family. Trumpets are among the oldest musical instruments, dating back to at least 1500 BCE. They are played by blowing air through closed lips, producing a "buzzing" sound which starts a standing wave vibration in the air...
s, 3 tromboneTromboneThe trombone is a musical instrument in the brass family. Like all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player’s vibrating lips cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate...
s, tubaTubaThe tuba is the largest and lowest-pitched brass instrument. Sound is produced by vibrating or "buzzing" the lips into a large cupped mouthpiece. It is one of the most recent additions to the modern symphony orchestra, first appearing in the mid-19th century, when it largely replaced the... - timpaniTimpaniTimpani, or kettledrums, are musical instruments in the percussion family. A type of drum, they consist of a skin called a head stretched over a large bowl traditionally made of copper. They are played by striking the head with a specialized drum stick called a timpani stick or timpani mallet...
, cymbalCymbalCymbals are a common percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. The greater majority of cymbals are of indefinite pitch, although small disc-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a...
s, triangleTriangle (instrument)The triangle is an idiophone type of musical instrument in the percussion family. It is a bar of metal, usually steel but sometimes other metals like beryllium copper, bent into a triangle shape. The instrument is usually held by a loop of some form of thread or wire at the top curve...
, glockenspielGlockenspielA glockenspiel is a percussion instrument composed of a set of tuned keys arranged in the fashion of the keyboard of a piano. In this way, it is similar to the xylophone; however, the xylophone's bars are made of wood, while the glockenspiel's are metal plates or tubes, and making it a metallophone...
, bell - 2 harpHarpThe harp is a multi-stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicularly to the soundboard. Organologically, it is in the general category of chordophones and has its own sub category . All harps have a neck, resonator and strings...
s - stringsString sectionThe string section is the largest body of the standard orchestra and consists of bowed string instruments of the violin family.It normally comprises five sections: the first violins, the second violins, the violas, the cellos, and the double basses...
Act 1
Scene 1: A forestPrince Golaud, grandson of King Arkel of Allemonde, has become lost while hunting in the forest. He discovers a frightened, weeping girl sitting by a spring in which a crown is visible. She reveals her name is Mélisande but nothing else about her origins and refuses to let Golaud retrieve her crown from the water. Golaud persuades her to come with him before the forest gets dark.
Scene 2: A room in the castle
Six months have passed. Geneviève, the mother of the princes Golaud and Pelléas, reads a letter to the aged and nearly blind King Arkel. It was sent by Golaud to his brother Pelléas. In it Golaud reveals that he has married Mélisande, although he knows no more about her than on the day they first met. Golaud fears that Arkel will be angry with him and tells Pelléas to find how he reacts to the news. If the old man is favourable then Pelléas should light a lamp from the tower facing the sea on the third day; if Golaud does not see the lamp shining, he will sail on and never return home. Arkel had planned to marry the widowed Golaud to Princess Ursule in order to put an end to "long wars and ancient hatreds", but he bows to fate and accepts Golaud's marriage to Mélisande. Pelléas enters, weeping. He has received a letter from his friend Marcellus, who is on his deathbed, and wants to travel to say goodbye to him. Arkel thinks Pelléas should wait for the return of Golaud, and also reminds Pelléas of his own father, lying sick in bed in the castle. Geneviève tells Pelléas not to forget to light the lamp for Golaud.
Scene 3: Before the castle
Geneviève and Mélisande walk in the castle grounds. Mélisande remarks how dark the surrounding gardens and forest are. Pelléas arrives. They look out to sea and notice a large ship departing and a lighthouse shining. Night falls. Geneviève goes off to look after Yniold, Golaud's young son by his previous marriage. Pelléas takes Melisande's hand to help her down the steep path. He tells her he might have to go away tomorrow. Mélisande asks him why.
Act 2
It is a hot summer day. Pelléas has led Mélisande to one of his favourite spots, the "Blind Men's Well". People used to believe it possessed miraculous powers to cure blindness but since the old king's eyesight started to fail, they no longer come there. Mélisande lies down on the marble rim of the well and tries to see to the bottom. Her hair loosens and falls into the water. Pelléas notices how extraordinarily long it is. He remembers that Golaud first met Mélisande beside a spring. Mélisande plays with the ring Golaud gave her, throwing it up into the air until it slips from her fingers into the well. Pelléas tells her not to be concerned — she can get another ring — but she is not reassured. He also notes that the clock was striking twelve as the ring dropped into the well. Mélisande asks him what she should tell Golaud. He replies, "The truth."
Scene 2: A room in the castle
Golaud is lying in bed with Mélisande at the bedside. He is wounded, having fallen from his horse while hunting. The horse suddenly bolted for no reason as the clock struck twelve. Mélisande bursts into tears and says she feels ill and unhappy in the castle. She wants to go away with Golaud. He asks her the reason for her unhappiness but she refuses to say. When he asks her if the problem is Pelléas, she replies that he is not the cause but she does not think he likes her. Golaud tells her not to worry: Pelléas can behave oddly and he is still very young. Mélisande complains about the gloominess of the castle, today was the first time she saw the sky. Golaud takes her hands to comfort her and notices the wedding ring is missing. Mélisande claims she dropped it in a cave by the sea where she went to collect shells with little Yniold. Golaud orders her to go and search for it at once before the tide comes in, even though night has fallen. When Mélisande replies that she is afraid to go alone, Golaud tells her to take Pelléas along with her.
Scene 3: Before a cave
Pelléas and Mélisande make their way down to the cave in pitch darkness. Mélisande is frightened to enter, but the cave gives off its own light and Pelléas tells her she will need to describe the place to Golaud to prove she has been there. The moon comes out and reveals three beggars sleeping in the cave. Pelléas explains there is a famine in the land. He decides they should come back another day.
Act 3
Mélisande is at the tower window, singing a song (Mes longs cheveux) as she combs her hair. Pelléas appears and asks her to lean out so he can kiss her hand as he is going away the next day. He cannot reach her hand but her long hair tumbles down from the window and he kisses and caresses it instead. Pelléas playfully ties Mélisande's hair to a willow tree in spite of her protests that someone might see them. A flock of doves takes flight. Mélisande panics when she hears Golaud's footsteps approaching. Golaud dismisses Pelléas and Mélisande as nothing but a pair of children and leads Pelléas away.
Scene 2: The vaults of the castle
Golaud leads Pelléas down to the castle vaults, which contain the dungeons and a stagnant pool which has "the scent of death." He tells Pelléas to lean over and look into the chasm while he holds him safely. Pelléas finds the atmosphere stifling and they leave.
Scene 3: A terrace at the entrance of the vaults
Pelléas is relieved to breathe fresh air again. It is noon. He sees Geneviève and Mélisande at a window in the tower. Golaud tells Pelléas that there must be no repeat of the "childish game" between him and Mélisande last night. Mélisande is pregnant and the least shock might disturb her health. It is not the first time he has noticed there might be something between Pelléas and Mélisande but Pelléas should avoid her as much as possible without making this look too obvious.
Scene 4: Before the castle
Golaud sits with his little son, Yniold, in the darkness before dawn and questions him about Pelléas and Mélisande. The boy reveals little that Golaud wants to know. He says that Pelléas and Mélisande often quarrel "about the door" and that they have told Yniold he will one day be as big as his father. They never send Yniold away because they are "afraid" when he is not there and "keep on crying in the dark." He admits that he once saw Pelléas and Mélisande kiss "when it was raining." Golaud lifts his son on his shoulders to spy on Pelléas and Mélisande through the window but Yniold says that they are doing nothing. He threatens to scream unless Golaud lets him down again. Golaud leads him away.
Act 4
Scene 1: A room in the castlePelléas tells Mélisande that his father is getting better and has asked him to leave on his travels. He arranges a last meeting with Mélisande by the Blind Men's Well in the park.
Scene 2: The same
Arkel tells Mélisande how he felt sorry for her when she first came to the castle "with the strange, bewildered look of someone constantly awaiting a calamity." But now that is going to change and Mélisande will "open the door to a new era that I foresee." He asks her to kiss him. Golaud bursts in with blood on his forehead — he claims it was caused by a thorn hedge. When Mélisande tries to wipe the blood away he angrily orders her not to touch him and demands his sword. He mentions that another peasant has died of starvation. Golaud notices Mélisande is trembling and tells her he is not going to kill her with the sword. He mocks the "great innocence" Arkel says he sees in Mélisande's eyes. He commands her to close them or "I will shut them for a long time." He tells Mélisande that she disgusts him and drags her around the room by her hair. When Golaud leaves, Arkel asks if he is drunk. Mélisande simply replies that he does not love her any more. Arkel comments: "If I were God, I would have pity on the hearts of men."
Scene 3: A well in the park
Yniold tries to lift a boulder to free his golden ball which is trapped between it and some rocks. As dark falls he hears a flock of sheep suddenly stop bleating. A shepherd explains that they have turned onto a path that doesn't lead back to the sheepfold, but does not answer when Yniold asks where they will sleep. Yniold goes off to find someone to talk to.
Scene 4: The same
Pelléas arrives alone at the well. He is worried how far he has become involved with Mélisande and fears the consequences: "I have been playing like a child round a thing I did not suspect was there. I have been playing in a dream, round the snares of fate." He knows he must leave but first he wants to see Mélisande one last time and "tell her all the things I haven't said." Mélisande arrives. She was able to slip out without Golaud noticing. Pelléas tells her he is going away but first he wanted to tell her that he loves her. Mélisande confesses that she has loved him since she first saw him. Pelléas hears the servants shutting the castle gates for the night. Now they are locked out, but Mélisande merely says, "All the better." Pelléas is resigned to fate too: "Things no longer depend on our wish. All is lost, all is saved." The two kiss then Mélisande hears something moving in the shadows. It is Golaud, who has been watching the couple from behind a tree. Golaud strikes down Pelléas with his sword and kills him. Mélisande flees into the woods in terror with Golaud in pursuit.
Act 5
A bedroom in the castleMélisande sleeps in a sick bed after giving birth to her child. The doctor assures Golaud that her condition is not serious. Overcome with guilt, Golaud claims he has killed for no reason. Pelléas and Mélisande merely kissed "like a brother and sister." Mélisande wakes and asks for a window to be opened so she can see the sunset. Golaud asks the doctor and Arkel to leave the room so he can speak with Mélisande alone. He blames himself for everything and begs Melisande's forgiveness. Golaud presses Mélisande to confess her forbidden love for Pelléas. She maintains her innocence in spite of Golaud's increasingly desperate pleas to her to tell "the truth." Arkel and the doctor return. Arkel tells Golaud to stop before he kills Mélisande, but he replies "I have already killed her." Arkel hands Mélisande her newborn baby girl but she is too weak to lift the child in her arms. The room fills with serving women, although no one can tell who has summoned them. Mélisande quietly dies. At the moment of death, the serving women fall to their knees. Arkel comforts the sobbing Golaud. He says Mélisande "was a poor little mysterious being like all of us. She lies there as if she were her baby's elder sister." Now her daughter must live in her place. C'est au tour de la pauvre petite ("It's the poor little thing's turn now.")
An innovative libretto
Rather than engaging a librettist to adapt the original play for him (as was customary), Debussy chose to set the text directly, making only a number of cuts. Maeterlinck's play was in prose rather than verse. Russian composers, notably Mussorgsky (whom Debussy admired), had experimented with setting prose opera libretti in the 1860s, but this was highly unusual in France (or Italy or Germany). Debussy's example influenced many later composers who edited their own libretti from existing prose plays, e.g. Richard StraussRichard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till...
' Salome
Salome (opera)
Salome is an opera in one act by Richard Strauss to a German libretto by the composer, based on Hedwig Lachmann’s German translation of the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde. Strauss dedicated the opera to his friend Sir Edgar Speyer....
, Alban Berg
Alban Berg
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.-Early life:Berg was born in...
's Wozzeck
Wozzeck
Wozzeck is the first opera by the Austrian composer Alban Berg. It was composed between 1914 and 1922 and first performed in 1925. The opera is based on the drama Woyzeck left incomplete by the German playwright Georg Büchner at his death. Berg attended the first production in Vienna of Büchner's...
and Bernd Alois Zimmermann
Bernd Alois Zimmermann
Bernd Alois Zimmermann was a post-WWII West German composer. He is perhaps best known for his opera Die Soldaten which is regarded as one of the most important operas of the 20th century...
's Die Soldaten
Die Soldaten
Die Soldaten is a four act opera in German by German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, based on the 1776 play by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. It is dedicated to Hans Rosbaud. Zimmermann himself faithfully adapted the play into the libretto, the only changes to the text being repeats and small cuts...
.
The nature of the libretto Debussy chose to set contributes to the most famous feature of the opera: the almost complete absence of arias or set pieces. There are only two reasonably lengthy passages for soloists: Geneviève's reading of the letter in Act One and Mélisande's song from the tower in Act 3 (which would probably have been set to music in a spoken performance of Maeterlinck's play in any case). Instead, Debussy set the text one note to a syllable in a "continuous, fluid 'cantilena
Cantilena
Il Cantilena is the oldest known literary text in the Maltese language. It dates from the 15th century but was not found until 1966 or 1968 by Prof. Godfrey Wettinger and Fr. M. Fsadni . The poem is attributed to Pietru Caxaro, and was recorded by Caxaro's nephew, Brandano, in his notarial...
', somewhere between chant and recitative
Recitative
Recitative , also known by its Italian name "recitativo" , is a style of delivery in which a singer is allowed to adopt the rhythms of ordinary speech...
".
Debussy, Wagner and French tradition
Pelléas reveals Debussy's deeply ambivalent attitude to the works of the German composer Richard WagnerRichard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
. As Donald Grout writes: "it is customary, and in the main correct, to regard Pelléas et Mélisande as a monument to French operatic reaction to Wagner". Wagner had revolutionised 19th-century opera by his insistence on making his stage works more dramatic, by his increased use of the orchestra, his abolition of the traditional distinction between aria
Aria
An aria in music was originally any expressive melody, usually, but not always, performed by a singer. The term is now used almost exclusively to describe a self-contained piece for one voice usually with orchestral accompaniment...
and recitative
Recitative
Recitative , also known by its Italian name "recitativo" , is a style of delivery in which a singer is allowed to adopt the rhythms of ordinary speech...
in favour of what he termed "endless melody", and by his use of leitmotifs, recurring musical themes associated with characters or ideas. Wagner was a highly controversial figure in France. Despised by the conservative musical establishment, he was a cult figure in "avant-garde" circles, particularly among literary groups such as the Symbolists, who saw parallels between Wagner's concept of the leitmotif and their use of the symbol. The young Debussy joined in this enthusiasm for Wagner's music, making a pilgrimage to the Bayreuth Festival
Bayreuth Festival
The Bayreuth Festival is a music festival held annually in Bayreuth, Germany, at which performances of operas by the 19th century German composer Richard Wagner are presented...
in 1888 to see Parsifal
Parsifal
Parsifal is an opera in three acts by Richard Wagner. It is loosely based on Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the 13th century epic poem of the Arthurian knight Parzival and his quest for the Holy Grail, and on Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, the Story of the Grail.Wagner first conceived the work...
and Die Meistersinger and returning in 1889 to see Tristan und Isolde
Tristan und Isolde
Tristan und Isolde is an opera, or music drama, in three acts by Richard Wagner to a German libretto by the composer, based largely on the romance by Gottfried von Straßburg. It was composed between 1857 and 1859 and premiered in Munich on 10 June 1865 with Hans von Bülow conducting...
. Yet that same year he confessed to his friend Ernest Guiraud his need to escape Wagner's influence.
Debussy was well aware of the dangers of imitating Wagner too closely. Several French composers had tried to write their own Wagnerian music dramas, including Emmanuel Chabrier
Emmanuel Chabrier
Emmanuel Chabrier was a French Romantic composer and pianist. Although known primarily for two of his orchestral works, España and Joyeuse marche, he left an important corpus of operas , songs, and piano music as well...
(Gwendoline) and Ernest Chausson
Ernest Chausson
Amédée-Ernest Chausson was a French romantic composer who died just as his career was beginning to flourish.-Life:Ernest Chausson was born in Paris into a prosperous bourgeois family...
(Le roi Arthus). Debussy was far from impressed by the results: "We are bound to admit that nothing was ever more dreary than the neo-Wagnerian school in which the French genius had lost its way among the sham Wotans in Hessian boots and the Tristans in velvet jackets." Debussy strove to avoid excessive Wagnerian influence on Pelléas from the start. The love scene was the first music he composed but he scrapped his early drafts for being too conventional and because "worst of all, the ghost of old Klingsor, alias R.Wagner, kept appearing."
However, Debussy took several features from Wagner, including the use of leitmotifs, though these are "rather the 'idea-leitmotifs' of the more mature Wagner of Tristan than the 'character-leitmotifs' of his earlier music-dramas." Debussy referred to what he felt were Wagner's more obvious leitmotifs as a "box of tricks" (boîte à trucs) and claimed there was "no guiding thread in Pelléás" as "the characters are not subjected to the slavery of the leitmotif." Yet, as Debussy admitted privately, there are themes associated with each of the three main characters in Pelléas.
The continuous use of the orchestra is another feature of Wagnerian music drama, yet the way Debussy writes for the orchestra is completely different from Tristan, for example. In Grout's words, "In most places the music is no more than an iridescent veil covering the text." The emphasis is on quietness, subtlety and allowing the words of the libretto to be heard; there are only four fortissimos in the entire score. Debussy's use of declamation is un-Wagnerian as he felt Wagnerian melody was unsuited to the French language. Instead, he stays close to the rhythms of natural speech, making Pelléas part of a tradition which goes back to the French Baroque tragédies en musique of Rameau and Lully
Lully
-Places:*Switzerland**Lully, Fribourg, a municipality**Lully, Vaud, a municipality**Lully, Geneva, a village in the municipality of Bernex*France**Lully, Haute-Savoie-People:*Jean-Baptiste Lully , an Italian-born Baroque composer of French opera...
as well as the experiments of the very founders of opera, Peri
Jacopo Peri
Jacopo Peri was an Italian composer and singer of the transitional period between the Renaissance and Baroque styles, and is often called the inventor of opera...
and Caccini
Giulio Caccini
Giulio Caccini , also known as Giulio Romano, was an Italian composer, teacher, singer, instrumentalist and writer of the very late Renaissance and early Baroque eras. He was one of the founders of the genre of opera, and one of the single most influential creators of the new Baroque style...
.
Like Tristan the subject of Pelléas is a love triangle set in a vaguely Medieval world. Unlike the protagonists of Tristan, the characters rarely seem to understand or be able to articulate their own feelings. The deliberate vagueness of the story is paralleled by the elusiveness of Debussy's music.
Aftermath
Pelléas was to be Debussy's only completed opera. For this reason it has sometimes been compared to Beethoven's FidelioFidelio
Fidelio is a German opera in two acts by Ludwig van Beethoven. It is Beethoven's only opera. The German libretto is by Joseph Sonnleithner from the French of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly which had been used for the 1798 opera Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal by Pierre Gaveaux, and for the 1804 opera Leonora...
. As Hugh Macdonald
Hugh Macdonald
Hugh Macdonald is an English musicologist chiefly known for his work within the music of the 19th century, especially in France. He has been general editor of the Hector Berlioz: New Edition of the Complete Works since its inception in 1967 and has been particularly active in the revival of...
writes: "Both operas were much-loved only children of doting creators who put so much into their making that there could be no second child to follow after." This was not for want of trying on Debussy's part and he worked hard to create a successor. Details of several opera projects survive. The most substantial surviving musical sketches are for two works based on short stories by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
: Le diable dans le beffroi
Le diable dans le beffroi
Le diable dans le beffroi is an unfinished comic opera in one act by Claude Debussy to his own libretto, based on Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Devil in the Belfry.-Composition:...
and La chute de la maison Usher
La chute de la maison Usher (opera)
La chute de la maison Usher is an unfinished opera in one act by Claude Debussy to his own libretto, based on Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Fall of the House of Usher...
.
Debussy also planned a version of Shakespeare's As You Like It
As You Like It
As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 or early 1600 and first published in the folio of 1623. The play's first performance is uncertain, though a performance at Wilton House in 1603 has been suggested as a possibility...
with a libretto by Paul-Jean Toulet
Paul-Jean Toulet
Paul-Jean Toulet was a French poet, novelist and feuilleton writer.- Life and works :Paul-Jean Toulet was a descendant of Charlotte Corday, and son of a wealthy man living in Mauritius...
but the poet's opium addiction meant he was too lazy to write the text. Two other projects suggest Debussy intended to challenge German composers on their own ground. Orphée-Roi (King Orpheus) was to be a riposte to Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice
Orfeo ed Euridice
Orfeo ed Euridice is an opera composed by Christoph Willibald Gluck based on the myth of Orpheus, set to a libretto by Ranieri de' Calzabigi. It belongs to the genre of the azione teatrale, meaning an opera on a mythological subject with choruses and dancing...
, which Debussy considered to "treat only the anecdotal, lachrymose aspect of the subject.". But, according to Victor Lederer, for "shock value, neither [As You Like It nor Orphée] tops the Tristan project of 1907 [...] According to Léon Vallas, one of Debussy's early biographers, its 'episodic character... would have been related to the tales of chivalry, and diametrically opposed to the Germanic conception of Wagner.' That Debussy entertained, if only for a few weeks, the idea of writing an opera based on the Tristan legend is quite incredible. He knew Wagner's colossal Tristan und Isolde as well as anyone, and his confidence must have been great indeed if he felt up to treating the subject." However, nothing came of any of these schemes, partly because the rectal cancer which afflicted Debussy from 1909 meant that he found it increasingly hard to concentrate on sustained creative work. Pelléas would remain a unique opera.
Recordings
The earliest recording of Pelléas et Mélisande is a 1904 Edison cylinder recording of Mary Garden singing the passage "Mes longs cheveux", with Debussy accompanying her on the piano. The first complete recording of the opera was made by the Grand Orchestre Symphonique du Grammophone under conductor Piero CoppolaPiero Coppola
Piero Coppola , was an Italian conductor, pianist and composer.-Life and career:Coppola was born in Milan; his parents were both singers. He studied at the Milan Conservatory, graduating in piano and composition in 1910. By 1911 he was already conducting opera at La Scala opera house in Milan...
in 1927. The 1942 recording conducted by Roger Désormière
Roger Désormière
Roger Désormière was a French conductor.Désormière was born in Vichy in 1898. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where his professors included Philippe Gaubert , Xavier Leroux and Charles Koechlin , and Vincent d'Indy...
, is considered a reference by most critics.
Sources
- Roger Nichols and Richard Langham Smith (eds.) Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande (Cambridge Opera Handbooks, Cambridge University PressCambridge University PressCambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
, 1989) ISBN 0-521-31446-1 - Paul Holmes Debussy (Omnibus, 1991) ISBN 0-7119-1752-3
- Robert Orledge Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 1982) ISBN 0-521-22807-7
- The Cambridge Companion to Debussy ed. Simon Trezise (Cambridge University Press, 2003) ISBN 0-521-65478-5
- Roger Nichols The Life of Debussy (Cambridge University Press, 2008) ISBN 0-521-57887-6
- The Viking Opera Guide ed. Amanda Holden (1993) ISBN 0-670-81292-7
- Booklet notes to the 1992 Deutsche Grammophon recording of Pelléas et Mélisande (conducted by Claudio Abbado) by Hugh MacDonaldHugh MacDonaldHugh MacDonald may refer to:* Hugh MacDonald , Canadian poet* Hugh MacDonald , 18th century Roman Catholic bishop* Hugh MacDonald , 19th century Roman Catholic bishop...
(in English), Jürgen Maehder and Annette Kreutziger-Herr (in German), and Myriam Chimènes (in French) - Amadeus Almanac, accessed 2 November 2008