Claude Debussy's only opera (1902) is often said to have changed opera forever (but didn't Massenet & Wagner & Mozart &...?) Here is a dark and disconnected tale of a doomed love triangle (with strong plot musical and thematic echoes of Tristan) in which all is ambiguous and allusive. A prose play by Maeterlinck is the libretto - almost complete but still nearly three hours - and the music though very melodic lacks hummable tunes, choruses, and arias - radical enough for you? The libretto too is radical, less like presenting the interactions between the principals; more like their interior monologues, deaf to each other. Full libretto in English is here.
The Music
Debussy wrote: I imagine a kind of drama quite different from Wagner’s, in which music would begin where the words are powerless as an expressive force. Music is made for the inexpressible; I would like it to seem to emerge from the shadows and go back into them from time to time, and it should always be discreet. The composer Russell Steinberg commented: "Debussy takes the orchestra of Wagnerian opera one step further: where Wagner's orchestra is a magnificent mirror that amplifies characters conveying the depth of their feelings in song, Debussy's orchestra is the opera itself—it’s set, it’s plot, it’s stage, it’s emotions. Characters essentially just run commentary while the orchestra unfolds its magic. The melody lies in the orchestra, not with the singers."
Steinberg sees three "worlds" in the music. First: "There are no arias or ensemble pieces—the “red meat” for opera lovers.... Debussy’s pianissimo first sensitizes us into a fragile sound world of infinite color. ... Those seductive chords with piled thirds that so inspired jazz artists—7th, 9th, 11th, 13th chords—work their sensual magic.
"The second world is the pentatonic (5 note) scale so much a part of folk and ethnic music. ... The music of Pelléas and Mélisande ... connotes not an ethnic quality, but a suggestion of a Medieval mythological past which becomes an important musical element of the opera.
"Debussy’s third harmonic world is that of the whole tone scale [which] divides the octave into 6 equally spaced pitches so that all the notes sound equal, not leading to or arriving at any place in particular. "
Here in Melbourne
Vic Opera performed Pelléas last October with Siobhan Stagg as Mélisande, and to celebrate Madeline Roycroft wrote an excellent analysis of the opera in the Conversation, with valuable links. "For his only completed opera, Debussy rejected the musical and dramatic conventions of the genre, crafting a work that is as captivating as it is perplexing." Download Vic Opera's PDF that goes into some detail about the music as well as the story. It has a great analysis by Richard Mills (who conducted): "Debussy was very, very conscious of the need for formal exactitude that makes up part of the whole French tradition. It’s very much there but it’s an immensely subtle thing." Again, "Previously in opera, melodic and rhythmic structures held sway. Here it’s another world. It’s the progression of harmony, the flux of harmony, the flux of immensely subtle chordal progressions and declamation that has the rhythm of ordinary speech which makes the process of continuity, so that’s what’s different about it." And read his most thought-provoking answer to "Do you think there are themes in Pelleas and Melisande that are relatable to modern-day society?"
Symbolism - out with the old
The opera like the play is explicitly Symbolist in content and style - a late nineteenth century movement, particularly French, devoted to the idea that art should evoke not describe. It is easy to see how this approach would reject both operatic romanticism (e.g. La Traviata) and the verismo approach of Cav & Pag. Hear Debussy: Music should not be confined to producing Nature more or less exactly, but rather to producing the mysterious correspondences which link Nature with Imagination. Outside of France, think of Poe, Yeats, Eliot, Joyce.
Wagner was certainly Symbolist (leitmotifs as symbols), and he fascinated the movement. But Debussy, though influenced by him, remarked We are bound to admit that nothing was ever more dreary than the neo-Wagnerian school in which the French genius had lost its way among the sham Wotans in Hessian boots and the Tristans in velvet jackets. Yet Debussy has musical themes associated with the three main characters, though they are more about expressing their minds than identifying the characters. Debussy took the importance of orchestration from Wagner, but in the words of the critic Grout, "In most places the music is no more than an iridescent veil covering the text."
Plot, Production
The plot is simple - see Wikipedia, which also discusses the opera's history, orchestration and character. But the plot is not the point - it is just a vehicle to express the disconnectedness and darkness of the events that we fatalistically create and which in turn destroy us. It is the themes of darkness and light, water and pools and the sea, not knowing oneself or others, hair and doors and blindness, ambiguity of time, loss of valuables, hunger and famine - these are the clues to understanding the story.
In fact, trying to separate the play, the music, and the production is impossible, so tightly are they woven. This is well illustrated in our very gothic production - a labyrinthine and chaotic castle, an ambiguous forest, and grey disconnected characters (except Mélisande who is golden and disconnected). From the Theater an der Wien (Vienna) in 2009, designer Laurent Pelly, conductor Bertrand de Billy. Mélisande is Natalie Dessay (soprano) - her performance has been hailed as defining the role, Pelléas is Stéphane Degout and his brother Golaud is Laurent Naouri (both baritones - there are no tenors!) As a foretaste of the music try the links in Roycroft's Conversation article, and numerous full performances listed here on Youtube - take your pick.