Pelléas et Mélisande

by Claude Debussy from the play by Maurice Maeterlinck

seen at the Barbican Hall on 9 January 2016

This semi-staged production was directed by Peter Sellars. The London Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Simon Rattle. Mélisande was sung by Magdalena Kožená, Pelléas by Christian Gerhaher, Golaud by Gerald Finley, Arkël by Franz-Josef Selig, Geneviève by Bernarda Fink, Yniold by Elias Madler, and the shepherd and the doctor by Joshua Bloom.

The Symbolist play of 1893 by Maeterlinck was transformed into an opera by Debussy which was first performed in 1902. It is unlike any other opera still regularly performed, hard to pin down but, when successfully produced, strangely compelling.

There is something strangely wrong about the kingdom of Allemonde, but it is almost impossible to work out exactly what the problem is. The old king Arkël is half blind, although there is a well in the castle grounds which reputedly cured blindness. ('People have stopped coming for a cure,' explains Pelléas, 'since the king began to lose his sight'.) Geneviève apparently found it hard to settle when she first came 'almost forty years ago' - yet it is not explained how both her sons can regard Arkël as their grandfather if she is not the king's daughter, as they have different fathers. The father of Pelléas, never seen, is gravely ill at the beginning of the opera, but on rallying tells his son that he has the look of death on him.

Into this febrile state of affairs comes Mélisande, whom Golaud discovers weeping, lost and confused in a forest where he too has lost his way. She is fleeing from something or someone, and refuses to allow Golaud to retrieve a crown she has lost in the water. Yet despite her reluctance to trust him, she agrees to accompany him out of the forest; when next we hear of them they have been married for six months. But this is Golaud's second marriage; there is a young son Yniold who seems rapidly happy to call Mélisande 'mère'. 

The events of the opera after Mélisande's arrival in Allemonde are freighted with significance without being fully explained. Mélisande loses her wedding ring, but does not give a truthful account of the loss; Golaud becomes sure that she and Pelléas have become lovers though Yniold is too naive to act as a successful spy - or perhaps the couple really are only playing like children. Violence erupts out of frustration, but final knowledge - even self-knowledge - is not attained.

Debussy's music perfectly enhances and complements this strange atmosphere. It shimmers with mystery while avoiding portentousness, and rises at times to intense climaxes of emotion, ecstatic or painful as the case may be. The LSO played extremely well, and the singers were excellent. Although the situations are rife with ambiguities, unexplained threats and meanings which constantly seem to elude our grasp, the sheer power of the singing and playing made for an extraordinary musical experience.

Sellars and Rattle have decided in this collaboration to forego a full staging. Instead, the characters wander through the orchestra and there is a raised platform beside the conductor which is used for various scenes, and another area behind the orchestra. The orchestra desks have discreet lighting, but there are also ten stands of coloured neon lights, and other general lighting effects. Considering that the opera is difficult to visualise in explicit terms, this approach proved to be wonderfully appropriate. Given that everything was intimated, it was acceptable that Golaud's sword should be mentioned, but that he should mime drawing it; and the famous passage in which Mélisande lets down her hair so that strands catch on the tower wall and the tresses cascade over Pelléas could safely be imagined rather than awkwardly ignored by a stage design unable to deal with it. 

The weirdly oppressive watchfulness of both Arkël and the increasingly unstable Golaud was ideally represented by Selig's motionless presence in the first half and Finley's restless prowling through the orchestral players. Later, when Arkël takes a more active role, his attempt to alleviate Mélisande's remote sadness morphs dangerously into an abusive coercion which is only a foretaste of Golaud's final violent outburst. In the meantime, the really painful scene in which Golaud attempts to use his young son as a spy on his stepmother and uncle was powerfully rendered by Finley and the boy soprano Elias Madler, whose voice had a piercingly strong timbre to match the otherwise dark resonances of the other male singers.

That this approach was a success is beyond doubt, but it was superbly confirmed at the conclusion of Act IV (in which Golaud monstrously kicked a prone and pregnant Mélisande), after which there was silence in the auditorium while the conductor stood down, the orchestra waited in complete stillness for the actors to be ready for the final scene, and the audience barely made a sound. There had been the usual coughings and adjustments at the act breaks in the first half, but by now we were totally bewitched by the spectacle before us.