Pelléas et Mélisande

That which Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir or Odilon Redon meant for painting, Claude Debussy meant for music. His compositions, teeming with imagination, manifold colours and fleeting atmospheres, straddle two epochs – Romanticism and Modernism – actually co-forming the borderline itself. At the turn of the 20th century, the arts, music included, underwent ground-breaking changes, with opera being no exception. Pioneers of modern music – such as Debussy and Igor Stravinsky – assumed a rather standoffish attitude to the genre, hesitant as to how to approach the “obsolete form”. Debussy attempted to write several operas, yet only succeeded in a single case. The one and only opera he completed is the today iconic adaptation of the Belgian Symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pélleas et Mélisande. Debussy’s setting is devoid of conventional grand operatic gesture and effect, giving preference instead to an intimate music drama, with everything decisive happening “between the lines” – in allusions, silence and delicate, symbolic details.

Harbouring the air of a medieval legend, or fairy tale even, the story of Pélleas et Mélisande focuses on the relationship of two men – one old, the other young – to a mysterious young woman. Yet of significance greater than the plot itself is the protagonists being unable to understand and find common ground – they keep loving in silence, yet remain alien to each other.

Debussy’s music brilliantly underlines this world: lacking the customary arias, it passes like speech and the changing orchestral colours give rise to a dreamy atmosphere of silence and suspension. This very temperance affords the opera its power.