The “feature” I had in mind for my husband Charles and I was a Blu-Ray release of Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande, premiered in 1902 and based on a Symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck that had its own premiere in 1893. I had got an earlier Blu-Ray of a different performance of this opera but my player wouldn’t load that disc (I suspect it’s a region-coding problem), so I looked for another recording and got this one, a production in Essen, Germany from 2013. As a story, Pelléas et Mélisande is a sort of mashup of Tristan und Isolde and Dante’s tale of Paolo and Francesca. Like Dante’s story, Maeterlinck’s play is about a woman who marries a not particularly attractive man and then falls in love with her hotter, hunkier, gentler and nicer brother-in-law. Debussy was attracted to Maeterlinck’s play as a subject for an opera because it gave him a chance to set a very Wagnerian plot of forbidden love and tragedy in a very un-Wagnerian manner. Debussy had previously considered directly competing with Wagner by writing his own Tristan et Isolde opera, though he would have based his on Joseph Bédier’s French version of the legend rather than the German one by Gottfried von Strasbourg Wagner had used. He stepped away from that in-your-face challenge to the German master with whom Debussy had an ongoing love-hate relationship (Debussy famously described Wagner as “a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn”), but he picked an awfully similar — though far more elliptical — story and he deliberately set it in an un-Wagnerian way (though he reportedly destroyed his first draft of Pelléas because he thought too much of “old Klingsor’s ghost,” as he described Wagner’s influence, had seeped into it). Instead of using a huge orchestra to supply the emotional content of the opera and overwhelm the singers at the climactic moments, Debussy used a soft, quiet, sing-songy orchestral part that reinforced and obliquely commented on what the singers were saying.
That’s one reason why Pelléas is one opera that really doesn’t work as pure music: so much of the emotional content of the piece is contained in its words that you have to be able to understand the text. Pelléas doesn’t work in an audio-only format unless either you have enough of a command of French to understand the text or it’s performed in translation — which is why my favorite CD set of the opera is the Chandos release of a BBC broadcast conducted by Mark Elder in which the opera is sung in English. Precisely because Debussy’s vocal writing is so tied to the text and so un-ornamented, it works in translation better than most operas — especially the coloratura showpieces constructed as opportunities for the singers to display their voices. Indeed, the vocal lines in Pelléas are so understated, so parlando (“speech-like”), that at one point during the rehearsals for the 1902 premiere Debussy told his cast to “forget that you are singers.” The designation of Maeterlinck as a “Symbolist” writer means that he’s the sort of playwright for whom a pencil is never just a pencil; the text is full of allusions and parallels that might not be immediately apparent to the audience but add richness to what’s otherwise a basically simple story — though the risk of this approach is that it treads on the thin edge of pretentiousness and sometimes goes over. One story I’ve read is that Puccini sought the opera rights to Pelléas and missed out by only a few weeks — but it’s hard to imagine a Puccini Pelléas because he and whichever of his librettists who would have drawn the assignment would have tried to make it more intense, more emotional, less elliptical and shadowy. (In 1917 Puccini composed his own romantic-triangle opera, Il Tabarro, which borrowed a lot from Debussy’s orchestral style even though it was about proletarians instead of 1-percenters and it ended with the cuckolded husband killing both his wife and her lover.)
Pelléas et Mélisande takes place in the fictional kingdom of “Allemonde” — a Maeterlinck pun that sounds like “Allemagne,” the French name for Germany, but also like “all the world” — ruled by old King Arkel. Arkel’s son is dead — though his daughter-in-law Geneviève is still alive and has a major part in the first act of the opera (and then disappears until the very end) — and the heir to the throne is Arkel’s grandson Golaud. At the start of the opera Golaud is out hunting when he stumbles upon Mélisande, a strange young woman who has forgotten who she is or where she came from. All she can remember is that she is unhappy (Mélisande’s line “Je suis malheuruse” became an international joke and in an early-1930’s play review Dorothy Parker quipped that the female lead of the play she was reviewing “is, like Mélisande, Not Happy”) and that she was given a crown (a royal headdress, not an obsolete coin) which she has accidentally dropped into a well. Golaud offers to retrieve it for her but she says she doesn’t want it anymore — which made me think one possible way to motivate Mélisande’s character is that she was a princess whose father, a king, molested her: that would explain why she doesn’t want to recover the crown he gave her and also why she ran away into the forest and recoils in horror when Golaud wants to touch her. Nonetheless, she marries Golaud and he writes home to the decaying old castle that’s the palace of the ruling family of Allemonde that he’s bringing home his new bride — pissing off his grandfather Arkel, who had arranged a dynastic marriage between Golaud and Ursula, princess of a neighboring kingdom with which Arkel wanted to make peace.
Mélisande settles into an uncertain existence in the crumbling castle with her boor of a husband, and her only solace is washing and combing her ultra-long hair (so there’s a bit of Rapunzel in this story as well) and hanging out with Pelléas, Golaud’s younger and far more charming half-brother. When Golaud returns with his bride, Pelléas was just about to leave the castle to attend to his terminally ill friend Marcellus, but Arkel forbade him to go because Pelléas’s father (who’s talked about a lot as a character but whom we never actually see) is also fatally ill. Pelléas takes Mélisande to a grotto on the castle grounds, in which Mélisande loses the wedding ring Golaud had given her — the second time she’s lost a circular gold object given to her by a man — and when Golaud finds out he insists that she go back and retrieve the ring before the tide washes it out to sea, apparently because it’s an irreplaceable family heirloom and it’s more important to him than his wife. Golaud uses the boy Yniold, his son by his now-dead first wife, to spy on Pélleas and Mélisande, and the boy reports that they’re hanging out together but not touching each other — but that’s enough for Golaud to tell Pelléas not to see Mélisande or speak to her beyond what’s inevitable between two people living in the same house. Eventually Pelléas and Mélisande declare their love for each other just as Pelléas, at Golaud’s insistence, is about to leave the castle for good — and Golaud stabs Pelléas to death, then has an Othello-like fit of remorse when he realizes that, though they were attracted to each other, Pelléas and Mélisande never actually had sex. In the final scene Mélisande gives birth to a daughter and then dies, leaving Golaud guilt-ridden and bereft as old Arkel, the voice of reason in this story, says, “And now it is the turn of the poor little one” — presumably to be as miserable as the rest of her family.
According to the Wikipedia page on Maeterlinck’s play, there are elements of political unrest in the text that Debussy (who set the play without rewrites, though with cuts) either toned down or ignored completely — outside the castle walls Allemonde’s population is facing famine and there’s the threat of an imminent revolution (in a scene Debussy didn’t use, the servants at the castle complains that its front steps remain dirty no matter how much they try to clean them), but the only reference to this in the opera is the occasional mention of another dead famine victim’s body washing up on the beach outside the castle. Debussy set Pelléas as a five-act opera, though the work isn’t as long as that suggests (the running time is between 2 ½ and three hours, on the long side for an opera but hardly on the level of Wagner’s!), and the story is divided into 14 scenes. Debussy wanted the scenes to change in full view of the audience as the orchestra played instrumental interludes, and Nikolaus Lehnhoff, who directed this production, decided that the way to stage the scene changes would be to have the stage backdrop fade to blue during the orchestral interludes and then resume normal stage lighting when the singers re-entered. This disappointed me because I’ve long thought the way to stage Pelléas in the modern age would be to use rear-projected backdrops for the scene changes and actually have them dissolve from one vista to another during the interludes, but at least it was better than the expedient used in the initial production, in which a crew of stagehands pushed the old sets off the stage and the new ones on. In the original production Debussy was bothered by the inevitable amount of noise the stage crew made doing this; later, when Arturo Toscanini led the Italian premiere of Pelléas in 1908, Toscanini made the stage crew take their shoes off and work with only socks on their feet.
The Essen Opera assembled a quite good and appropriate cast for the opera, especially in the title roles: white South African baritone[1] Jacques Imbrailo has the right voice for Pelléas, quiet and lyrical most of the time but with enough of a reserve of power to sing loudly and forcefully in the Big Moments. It also helped that he’s a hunk to die for and we got to see him shirtless or open-shirted through most of Act III. Mélisande was Michaela Selinger, who looked a bit too big-chested for the part (I’ve always thought Mélisande should be more Audrey Hepburn than Marilyn Monroe) but managed to capture the right degree of alienation for this bizarre character who’s never quite sure who she is, where she is, what she’s doing or who she’s in love with. The lower-voiced roles were a bit less satisfying — Vincent le Texier tried to make Golaud more than just a stock-figure villain, but he didn’t always succeed. Doris Soffel as Geneviève was quite strong vocally but came off too much like a drill sergeant, and Wolfgang Schöne as Arkel sang well but was also a bit too hectoring for a character that’s supposed to be the voice of reason. I gave Lehnhoff points for casting Yniold with a real boy treble instead of an adult woman in drag, but Dominik Eberle had some nasty pitch problems and I’ve heard better trebles in opera than this. There’s one other character, the doctor who comes on in Act V for Mélisande’s surprisingly Traviata-esque extended death scene, and Mateusz Kabala was perfectly fine in the role. Though staged on simple, spare sets — even when the libretto (and the titles) tell us that we’re in a forest, there are no trees — this Pelléas was an excellent production that did a good job of bringing this tricky opera to life. Debussy’s score sounds like nothing else in the operatic repertory — there was nothing like it before 1902 and there’s been almost nothing like it since, not even from Debussy himself (though he did begin another opera, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher — another story about a monumentally dysfunctional family hiding out from the world in a sinister crumbling castle!). It’s a piece that breaks almost all the rules of opera — there are no set-piece arias, no opportunities for vocal display and none of the huge orchestral climaxes Wagner used to replace arias and display pieces — and yet it works, even though one would hardly want all operas to sound like this any more than you’d want all movies to be like Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
[1] — The part of Pelléas is the sort of in-between role
beloved of French composers, not fitting snugly into the traditional vocal
ranges. It can be sung either by a low tenor or a high baritone.
