Pelléas et Mélisande

With his deeply moving Eugene Onegin, Barrie Kosky took audiences and the press by storm – now he is once more peering into the ominous abyss of the human soul and tackling one of the most symbolic Fin de Siècle masterpieces. 
Nadja Mchantaf, who conquered the public’s heart as Cendrillon, Tatjana and Rusalka, will play Mélisande at the side of Dominik Köninger, the darling of the audience.

In a far-flung place, Golaud, the grandson of King Arkel of Allemonde, meets the lonely Mélisande. Her crown is irretrievably lost, yet she seems to care not. She follows the prince. Once back in Golaud’s homeland, the two marry. Yet this is also where Mélisande meets her husband’s younger brother, Pelléas. And even though for the longest time no one cares to admit it, this encounter is fateful and matters take their inevitable course. 
Defying all convention, Maurice Maeterlinck reduced the external action of his plays to a minimum; everything of consequence is to be found in the implications between the lines, and is created only through the viewer’s powers of empathy and imagination. Debussy congenially captured the ambiguous currents of the source material in a musical chamber play in the Impressionist style. This production by Barrie Kosky conjures up the psychogram of a moribund, late-bourgeois society which has nothing with which to counter a world out of balance other than the solace of a finely chiselled melancholy.
The musical direction is provided by Canadian-born Jordan de Souza, the new Kapellmeister of the Komische Oper Berlin and – at not even 30 years of age – a rising star in the international conducting scene.