Pelléas and Mélisande 101
“Music in opera is far too predominant. There’s too much singing and the settings are too cumbersome.”
Pelléas and Mélisande
Drame Lyrique in Five Acts
The Premiere
April 30, 1902, Opéra Comique, Paris
The People
Arkel, elderly King of Allemonde
Golaud, a widower, grandson of Arkel
Pelléas, grandson of Arkel, Golaud’s half-brother Mélisande
The Percentage of Main Characters Who Don’t Make It Out Alive: 50%
The Place
The kingdom of Allemonde, in and around its castle near the ocean.
The Plot
ACT I While out hunting, Golaud gets lost in the woods, where he discovers a mysterious girl sitting by a spring. Her name is Mélisande, but she refuses to tell him more about herself. He persuades her to come with him to the castle before it gets dark. Six months later, Golaud sends a letter to Arkel saying that he has married Mélisande, although he knows no more about her than the day they met. Golaud is worried about Arkel’s reaction, but his grandfather accepts the marriage. Golaud and Mélisande move to the family castle. She remarks about how dark the grounds are, then goes to the seacoast with Pelléas, where they see a ship departing as the sun sets.
ACT II
Pelléas and Mélisande visit a well reputed to have water that can cure blindness. As Mélisande tries to see to its bottom, Pelléas starts to become attracted to her. She drops her wedding ring into the well, at exactly noon. They return to the castle to find Golaud, who was injured when his horse fell on him, at exactly noon. Mélisande complains to Golaud about how gloomy the castle is, and when he takes her hands, he notices that her ring is missing. She claims she lost it in a cave by the sea and the furious Golaud orders her to look for it, accompanied by Pelléas, as night falls.
ACT III
As Mélisande combs her long hair, it spills out the tower window onto Pelléas, who wraps himself in it. Golaud arrives unexpectedly and chastises them for their childishness. He takes Pelléas to the vaults beneath the castle and forces him to look down into the stagnant pool. Golaud warns him not to repeat the “game” with Mélisande, as she is pregnant and her health is delicate. Golaud then interrogates his young son Yniold about Pelléas and Mélisande. He eventually admits he saw them kiss once and the increasingly jealous Golaud lifts him up to spy on the couple through the window.
ACT IV
Pelléas arranges a rendezvous with Mélisande that evening at the well. Arkel celebrates the happier era he believes Mélisande’s child will bring to the castle. Golaud barges in angrily and demands that she give him his sword. He derides Arkel’s notion that she is innocent, tells Mélisande that her flesh disgusts him, and flings her around the room. Later, at the well, Pelléas and Mélisande declare their mutual love. Golaud arrives and kills Pelléas; Mélisande runs off into the woods.
ACT V Mélisande has given birth to a baby girl and is very weak. Golaud blames himself for killing Pelléas, still clinging to the fiction that they kissed “like brother and sister.” Mélisande asks that the window be opened so she can see the sunset. Golaud begs
Mélisande’s forgiveness, but then resumes interrogating her about her relationship with Pelléas. Arkel brings in the baby but Mélisande doesn’t have the strength to hold her. The serving women file in and, at the moment of Mélisande’s death, fall to their knees.
The Symbolist Movement
The Symbolist movement originated in the late 19th century with a group of French poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Symbolism countered the restraint, emphasis on technical perfection and precise description, and objective viewpoint popular in poetry of the time in favor of evoking the intuitions and fleeing sensations of mankind’s inner life, conveying the mysteries of existence through metaphors and images. The movement was influential but short-lived, dying out around 1910.
Maurice Maeterlinck Playwright
Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck was the most important Symbolist playwright. His best plays, all written in French, include The Intruder and The Blind (both 1890), Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), and The Blue Bird (1908). They’re notable for their poetic diction, short scenes with frequent changes of location, an ominous sense that some fearful event is just out of the understanding of his protagonists, and a type of tentative, half-formed dialogue that could achieve great emotional impact. Maeterlinck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, although by then his career was on the wane.
His Pelléas was performed just once in its first staging, on May 17, 1893. The production was as unusual as the script, with no footlights, a much-reduced number of lighting instruments used onstage, and a scrim across the proscenium opening to provide a gauzy, hazy feeling.
Claude Debussy Adapter and Composer
Claude Debussy attended the single Pelléas performance and realized it had many of the attributes he had outlined in a letter sent to a friend three years earlier describing his ideal opera libretto:
Two associated dreams. No place. No time. No big scenes. No expectations on the musician who must give body to the words of the poet. Music in opera is far too predominant. There’s too much singing and the settings are too cumbersome. The blossoming of the voice into true singing should occur only when required.
Debussy adapted the text, at first with Maeterlinck’s full support, by eliminating four scenes and removing some repeated dialogue and descriptions of settings and costumes that could be seen onstage. At first, he had a great deal of difficulty finding the musical language that would convey the text along with the mysterious, elusive nature of Maeterlinck’s characters.
He wrote to friends about the challenge of capturing the “nothingness” he found in Mélisande and the “beyond the grave” impression made by Arkel. Eventually he was able to describe a major breakthrough in a letter to Ernest Chausson, his former teacher and a lifelong supporter. “It’s a technique which seems to me quite extraordinary. That is to say, silence (don’t laugh) as a means of expression.”
Another innovative technique involved his use of the orchestra. Instead of thinking of it as a big block or as large groups (the strings, the winds, the brass), or even as instrument families (the flutes, the oboes, and so on), he treated it as a chamber orchestra, scoring individual lines for many different instruments in varying combinations.
— Claude Debussy
The Premiere
Debussy finished the initial version of the score in August 1895, knowing it would never be taken up by the Opéra National de Paris, home of grand opera, and its conservative management. The only real option was Paris’ smaller Opéra Comique, but even it dragged it heels, finally agreeing to stage it in 1902. Then matters got sticky ...
Duel Over the Divas
Maeterlinck’s longtime mistress was Georgette Leblanc, a soprano particularly associated with the operas of Jules Massenet, and the playwright expected she would be the first operatic Mélisande.
Debussy and Albert Carré, head of the Opéra Comique, preferred the Scottish American soprano Mary Garden, who was known as “The Sarah Bernhardt of opera” for her acting skills. They
eventually won out, because Maeterlinck had given Debussy the rights to make all decisions regarding the opera.
The playwright was not a gracious loser, however, bashing Debussy in the press, saying he hoped the opera would be a flop, complaining about the length of the interludes composed to cover the many scene changes, and writing a “programme du spectacle” with many salacious details lampooning his own text, which prompted much laughter from patrons at the opera’s public dress rehearsal.
Still, as one commentator noted, the cast got through the entire opera without the police having to be called in, so it was a success by local standards.
The Response
The premiere itself happened without a ruckus, but critical and audience response to Pelléas and Mélisande was mixed. A review in Paris’ Figaro said, “Pelléas and Mélisande reaches a limit which cannot be transgressed … Perhaps M. Debussy will consent to renounce his system and return to a more sane conception of musical art,” and Camille Saint-saëns announced that he was forgoing his usual vacation to stay in Paris and “say nasty things about Pelléas.”
Other composers, including Pierre Lalo, Paul Dukas, and Vincent d’indy, were more perceptive about its merits, and its 14-performance run at the Opéra Comique was a financial success, prompting frequent revivals there and productions in Brussels, Frankfurt, New York, Milan, Munich, and Prague by 1908.
Pelléas and Mélisande is now considered one of opera’s greatest masterworks, although audiences remain divided over its merits, thanks to its deliberately ambiguous text and its predominantly restrained vocal and orchestral writing.
To sum up:
You’ll like Pelléas and Mélisande if you like (see “Know the Score,” Pasatiempo, June 16):
• Moody, atmospheric French films in which as much goes unsaid as is spoken
• Music that suggests rather than pounds home its emotional points
• Jerry Springer’s convoluted family dramas that ended tragically, and you wanted them set to music and sung in French