Programme booklet »Pelléas et Mélisande«

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE

CONTENTS

P.

4

SYNOPSIS P.

8

FLYING WITH DEBUSSY INTERVIEW WITH ALAIN ALTINOGLU P.

12

MAURICE MAETERLINCK P.

14

THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS ANDREAS LÁNG P.

18

PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE MARCO ARTURO MARELLI

P.

22

“THE PUBLIC IN THE STALLS AND BOXES DID NOT APPLAUD AT ALL” PETER DUSEK P.

28

WHY I WROTE PELLÉAS CLAUDE DEBUSSY P.

32

“ONWARD, INTO THE DARK, THE ALIEN AND THE HIDDEN” KONRAD PAUL LIESSMANN P.

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IMPRINT

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE DRAME LYRIQUE in five acts Libretto MAURICE MAETERLINCK

ORCHESTRA

3 flutes / piccolo / 2 oboes cor anglais / 2 clarinets 3 bassoons / 4 horns 3 trumpets / 3 trombones 1 tuba / timpani percussion / bells / 2 harps violin I / violin II / viola cello / double bass

AUTOGRAPH National Library, Paris WORLD PREMIÈRE 30 APRIL 1902 Opéra-Comique, Salle Favart, Paris FIRST PERFORMANCE IN VIENNA 23 MAY 1911 Vienna Court Opera

DURATION

3 H 15 MIN

INCL. 1 INTERMISSION

PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE

SYNOPSIS

ACT 1 SCENE 1 Golaud has lost his way. He comes upon an unknown girl sitting by a spring. The girl is clearly distressed, but initially refuses any help and only reluctantly discloses her name: Mélisande.

A crown in the water brings her past to mind. Golaud offers to retrieve it for her, but Mélisande threatens to kill herself. When Golaud then admits to her that he too feels lost, she agrees to go with him.

SCENE 2 Six months later in Allemonde. Pelléas has received a letter from his half-brother Golaud telling him that he has married Mélisande. If the family is not willing to accept his new wife, he vows never to return to Allemonde. Golaud fears that his grandfather, old Arkel, will not agree to his marriage since he had another bride in mind for his grandson. Geneviève, the mother of Pelléas and Golaud, now reads this letter to the half-blind patriarch. The old man reluctantly agrees. Pelléas wants to leave Allemonde to go to the side of his friend who lies dying. Since Pelléas’ father is also ill, Arkel forbids him to leave.

SCENE 3 Mélisande has arrived in Allemonde with Golaud. She complains of the oppressive darkness. Geneviève tells her that she too had to come to terms with it. Together they go in search of the brightness of the sea. Pelléas joins them, and he and Mélisande believe they can see the ship that brought Mélisande.

In spite of an approaching storm, the ship is setting sail again.

Pelléas talks about his possible departure.

Previous pages: KS SIMON KEENLYSIDE as GOLAUD OLGA BEZSMERTNA as MÉLISANDE

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SYNOPSIS

ACT 2 SCENE 1 Pelléas leads Mélisande to a fountain that once possessed magical powers and asks her about her relationship with Golaud. To avoid answering, Mélisande plays with her wedding ring. She drops it, and it falls into the deep water. Mélisande is distressed by this, but Pelléas advises her to tell Golaud the truth.

SCENE 2 At exactly that same moment, Golaud has had an accident. Mélisande nurses him and confesses to him how unhappy she is in Allemonde. Golaud believes that her uneasiness is caused by her pregnancy. When he takes her hands to comfort her, he notices that her ring is missing. Mélisande lies to him, telling him that she lost her ring in a cave where she went to collect shells for little Yniold, Golaud’s son from his first marriage. Golaud demands that she go and look for the ring that night; Pelléas should accompany her.

SCENE 3 Pelléas takes Mélisande to a cave so that she can later describe her search for the ring to Golaud. When they come upon old indigents, the victims of a famine, Mélisande insists on turning back.

ACT 3 SCENE 1 Mélisande sings to herself, daydreaming. Pelléas comes in to say goodbye to her. Mélisande begs him not to go away. Pelléas starts playing with her hair, initially innocently, and Mélisande allows him to do so. When Pelléas becomes passionately entangled in her hair, Golaud surprises the couple and scolds them for their “childish games”.

SCENE 2 Golaud takes Pelléas down to the cisterns of death. Shuddering, Pelléas rushes from the eerie dungeons.

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SYNOPSIS

SCENES 3 & 4 Having escaped from the darkness, Pelléas again encounters Mélisande. Golaud again warns him to stay away from Mélisande.

Overcome by jealousy, Golaud tries to question his little son Yniold about the relationship between Pelléas and Mélisande.

He wants to force the boy to spy on Mélisande and Pelléas.

ACT 4 SCENES 1 & 2 Pelléas tells Mélisande that his father has finally recovered from his illness and hast implored him to take his leave immediately.

Pelléas and Mélisande arrange one last meeting. Arkel is happy that Pelléas’ father has recovered and hopes that happier days now lie ahead for the heavily pregnant Mélisande and for the entire family. Golaud jealously humiliates Mélisande and abuses her until Arkel tries to bring him to his senses.

SCENES 3 & 4 Yniold is looking for his toy at night. He realizes that the sheep have died.

Pelléas and Mélisande declare their love for each other. When the gates are shut, they are prepared to run away together. Golaud thwarts their plan; he kills Pelléas and wounds Mélisande.

ACT 5 Mélisande is weakened as a result of the premature birth of her child, a daughter. Golaud makes one last attempt to learn the truth from her. To no avail.

6

OLGA BEZSMERTNA as MÉLISANDE

KS ADRIAN ERÖD as PELLÉAS

OLIVER LÁNG IN AN INTERVIEW WITH ALAIN ALTINOGLU (CONDUCTOR)

FLYING WITH DEBUSSY ol

You directed Pelléas et Mélisande earlier at Zurich Opera. Was that your first Pelléas? aa Yes, I did Pelléas et Mélisande in Zurich in 2016. But I go back a lot further with this piece. When I was a répétiteur I never rehearsed a complete production of the opera, but I worked with singers a lot on the piece. My Pelléas history actually goes back even further, to when I was 16. I started studying at the Paris Conservatoire, and we had one of the most important and bestknown répétiteurs as a teacher, Irène Aïtoff. She worked with Karajan when he did this opera, and was a fantastic musician, Charles Münch’s favourite pianist. She could play the whole work by heart – and brought us closer to the opera. Ever since, I’ve had a special connection to Pelléas et Mélisande, and it’s been a real labour of love for me. ol You share this with many other people, particularly in your homeland, France. To what extent is Pelléas et Mélisande a French (national) opera? aa It is, and it isn’t. On the one hand Pelléas et Mélisande is totally French,

perhaps the most French of all operas, even more than Carmen (and not just because Carmen is set in Spain). The music is – even if Maurice Maeterlinck was Belgian – as closely linked to the French language as possible, there is a unity of word and music which couldn’t be better. On the other hand, naturally, it’s not necessarily the best-known opera, simply because the melodies aren’t as singable as they are in, say, a Verdi opera.

So, Pelléas et Mélisande is an incredibly French work by its very nature, but not the most popular opera in France. ol There’s a famous saying of Debussy, that the essence of music is freedom. How free are you as a conductor with Debussy? aa (Laughing) That’s a fundamental question with every form of musical interpretation. Every piece of music has its own agogic, its own style that it has to be played in – and its own freedoms.

However, you can’t transfer these oneto-one to other pieces or composers.

If an Italian conductor interprets German music with the freedoms of Italian music, it won’t sound right. Playing Wagner with Italian agogic just doesn’t

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FLYING WITH DEBUSSY

work. The freedom you have as an interpreter always has to be put in relation to the composer’s musical language. If you’re conducting Pelléas et Mélisande then the freedom has to take into account the freedoms of the French language, French music and Debussy’s style. Otherwise, Debussy would sound Italian, or German or whatever – and that’s wrong. He was annoyed if a musician took too many liberties with the rhythm and dynamics. So Debussy wasn’t saying, do whatever you want – but rather, find the freedom to interpret what’s in the music. ol Another idea of Debussy’s was that it’s better not to analyze too much. aa It’s like with Wozzeck. Once, Alban Berg explained all the compositional background before a performance, this part is actually a passacaglia, this part’s a fugue and so on. After all the explanations he said, and now forget everything you’ve learned and just listen to the music. The same goes for Debussy. As a conductor, you naturally have to do all the analysis, you need to know every connection within the piece, to know what’s where and why, and what importance it has for the whole thing. But then you have to take all these details that you’ve got from the analysis and turn them back into a whole. As a conductor, if you want to get the effect Debussy desired, you have to know what the essence of this effect is. If Debussy writes a shadow in the orchestration, you have to work hard on the instrumentation and orchestration to understand how Debussy is using the instrumental sounds – this is the only way you can create a musical shadow. ol A third and final comment of Debussy’s: composing is primarily intuition.

aa I always tell my students, you get the best results if you can bring your head and your heart together. It’s all about the right balance between these two poles. If you get too emotional, there’s something missing on the other side, and if you try to solve everything with your head, it’s the same thing.

Talking about Debussy’s view of intuition, his sister said that as a boy he sometimes stood near the piano focusing on the vibrations of the chords and trying to find harmonic progressions and harmonies just by feeling them.

Another story of his life, in composition class he played chords and harmonic progressions which were prohibited by the rules of the day. When the teacher asked why he was doing things which were disapproved of, he replied, “Because I think it sounds good.” In other words, Debussy wasn’t a composer who followed the rules for their own sake. He started first with his ears and his feelings. And this is the approach he called intuition. ol Debussy is often called one of the main proponents of Impressionism, a description he rejected.

How Impressionistic is Debussy, and Pelléas? aa It’s easy to call Debussy’s music Impressionistic if you’ve heard pieces like La Mer. There are similar connections. But Impressionistic mostly means something blurred, unfocussed, accidental. And that doesn’t fit! Debussy knew very precisely how Pelléas and Mélisande should sing their words, he had the exact expression of the music precisely in his ear. There are perhaps Impressionistic colours at work, although Impressionism has many different expressions, but the music as such is not impressionistic.

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FLYING WITH DEBUSSY

ol

For his whole life Debussy struggled with the music of Wagner, which influenced him. Where in this struggle does Pelléas et Mélisande stand? aa This is an interesting story.

When Debussy was young he was strongly influenced by Richard Wagner, for example in his very Wagnerian Proses Lyriques. But then he wanted to escape, there’s a letter in the period leading up to Pelléas where he writes: “What I composed today is too Wagnerian!” He tried to suppress this influence … What is interesting is that Debussy writes in a very “Wagnerian” style in the additional interludes that he had to write in a very short time just before the première – that was around ten years after starting work on the opera. Why? Because he had very little time and was unable to think much.

This story shows that Wagner was always present in Debussy’s consciousness. He may have tried to suppress it, but without success. The whole business naturally has a political side as well. Debussy was a great nationalist, for a time he called himself Claude de France, and he hated everything German. As a result, it was very important to him to suppress the German influence, that is, Wagner’s. ol Is there something like a main challenge for a conductor in Pelléas et Mélisande? aa Good question. Possibly … finding the right colours at the right point

and letting the singers’ words come through clearly. Actually, I love Pelléas et Mélisande so much I never talk about challenges, just opportunities! ol Adrian Eröd talked about a cathartic effect of the opera. Do you feel this emotional cleansing effect of the piece as strongly as that? aa There is a purity in the opera which takes you out of the world, if you concern yourself with it. You’re suddenly floating, flying. ol You talked about colours with Debussy. What colour is Pelléas et Mélisande? aa Since there’s so much darkness in the piece, it’s more of a dark colour.

There are signs of fear, shadows. But I think it’s less a question of colour than one of light. Pelléas et Mélisande tells the story of the path from darkness to light.

People with near-death experiences tell of a bright light at the end of a tunnel. I think the opera is showing exactly this path. ol If you were to give someone who doesn’t know the opera at all some advice on how to approach the piece, what would it be? aa It would perhaps be a good idea to read the libretto before going to a performance. Pelléas et Mélisande contains so many different things that it can be challenging to experience and understand everything at once. If you know the text and the story, it’s easier to find your way through this opera.

The interview took place before the premiere in 2017.

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KS SIMON KEENLYSIDE

as GOLAUD

BIOGRAPHY

MAURICE MAETERLINCK According to his own account and that of his companion, the singer Georgette Leblanc, Maurice Maeterlinck was unmusical to the extreme. Nevertheless, his works provided the source material for numerous composers; indeed Maeterlinck was a playwright and author whose work was set to music more often than most others in his day. Furthermore, somewhat more than half a century after his death, his name was used by the general public almost exclusively in connection with Claude Debussy and his operatic gem Pelléas et Mélisande, for which the French composer had used Maeterlinck’s play as his libretto.

A career in law was originally planned for Maurice Maeterlinck, born in 1862 (incidentally the same year as Debussy) in the Belgian city of Ghent. Nevertheless he ventured into literature; his first play La Princesse Maleine was such a success that he became one of the best known representatives of Symbolism virtually overnight. His success persisted for years, regardless whether he wrote works for the stage or turned to poetry or mystical-philosophical reflections. At the latest with Blue Bird he achieved world fame and finally, in 1911, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. However towards the end of his long life (he died in 1949, aged nearly 87) he had to watch as his fame faded progressively, and in particular his late works found little resonance.

In connection with Pelléas et Mélisande, two biographical points about Maurice Maeterlinck are perhaps significant. For one, based on his own account, when he was a child he almost drowned. The neardeath experience of this event and being snatched back to life at the last minute influenced him demonstrably. This explains the considerable importance of the element of water in Pelléas et Mélisande (as in almost his entire œuvre). Furthermore, in the character of Pelléas, Maeterlinck is said to have created a literary monument to his brother, who died young.

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CHRISTIANE KARG as MÉLISANDE

ANDREAS LÁNG

THE

PRINCE OF DARKNESS There are many widely accepted stereotypes about numerous composers: the scowling Beethoven is probably the best known. At least in Austria, Claude Debussy is a blank page in this respect.

Generally, people are familiar with his orchestral works Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and La Mer, music lovers who have studied piano will also have played one or two of his piano pieces – at least the Arabesques and several of his Préludes, perhaps even his challenging Études. But very few people outside France really know anything about his life, his character, his artistic intentions (although he also stayed in Vienna on several occasions and also went to the Vienna Opera).

Most people don’t even know his second name – Achille. It is nevertheless worth mentioning that as a student Debussy somewhat pretentiously called himself Achille de Bussy, and this in turn gives us a little insight into his nature. Debussy came from at best a petit bourgeois family whose rough, closedminded outlook he tried to escape as soon as possible. In any events, his later (self-taught) civilized manner, his lavish and confident tastes do not provide any clues to his early life.

Throughout his life, the man whom his classmates called the Prince of Darkness tended to be withdrawn,

extremely selective when it came to friends, and artistically very self-confident. This last characteristic quickly caused headaches for his professors in Paris, for this young, obviously talented pianist and later composer did not know how to accept a subordinate role. Even the Priz de Rome, the biggest and most coveted award for students at the Paris Conservatory, was nothing but torture.

The traditional rules of music were a horror to him (he enjoyed annoying his teachers by playing series of parallel fifths on the piano for minutes on end – an absolute no-no in composition rules at the time), and French music life, vacillating between the old Grand Opéra and the ever-growing influence of Richard Wagner was a single declaration of artistic bankruptcy. Not that Debussy, born in 1862, did not hold Wagner in high esteem. On the contrary, initially he was completely infatuated with his music, played and knew Wagner’s operas as few others did and naturally also made pilgrimages to Bayreuth. Later, however, this love cooled noticeably.

For example, he called the Ring des Nibelungen “a musical address book” for its use of leitmotifs. However, this did not prevent him from working with character and scene motifs in Pelléas et Mélisande, albeit in a quite different, subtle manner.

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THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS

Anyone familiar with Tchaikovsky’s biography will be amazed to find the name Nadezhda von Meck connected to Debussy too. The Russian composer’s patron also supported the French oddball who was not financially well placed when he was a student. He accompanied her for weeks on end all over Europe as her children’s piano teacher and as musical entertainer (and in the process also learned more about Russian music).

The contradictory nature of his character is seen nowhere as clearly as in his attitude to French music. On the one hand he was not merely interested in all kinds of Eastern European and non-European music traditions, but clearly used them as a source of inspiration (he became more familiar with them at the Paris World Exhibition, amongst other places). On the other, it was important to him to cleanse French music of “foreign”, and especially of harmful German influences.

For him, the only exception to this was Bach. Otherwise his motto was: Back to Rameau, whose French style of composition had in his opinion been crushed at the latest by Gluck. (For Debussy, Giuseppe Verdi and verismo – of which Verdi was a part – was as much an abomination as, on the French side, Massenet, especially his Werther, which he criticized for the old cliché that the singer carries on singing for minutes after being fatally wounded.)

He expounded many of his musical visions and ideas, and his artistic visions and ideas in general, in fictitious discussions with his invented discussion partner, Monsieur Croche, and the reviews that he wrote as a critic for various newspapers reveal much about his own views. In connection to this, it is

important to note that he vehemently opposed being called an Impressionist, which is surprising in that generally he liked being called the French Impressionist composer together with Ravel.

However, Debussy did not see himself as a portrayer of reality, but rather as a mediator of the unspeakable, the mysterious found behind words and things.

With regard to Pelléas et Mélisande, this means: through his music, Debussy is an interpreter, a translator of the psyche of actors.

If it is at all possible to pigeon-hole Debussy, then it would be in that of Sym bolists (a circle of writers and painters whose company he enjoyed).

No wonder that he chose Maeterlinck’s Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande as the source material for his only completed opera. At the same time he was vehemently opposed to analysing works of art to death. Just as the composer should compose with his heart, inspired by nature, the listener too should receive the music with their heart. Or, as Debussy put it: “People in general forget that as children they were forbidden to dismember their puppets (it was even then a crime of lèse-mystére). But they still persist in poking their aesthetic noses where they are not wanted. If nowadays they have ceased to split open their toys, they still explain, dissect and put an end to all mystery. That is easier and furthermore offers material for discussion.”

Following his own personal testimonial, Debussy certainly realized his basic intentions with Pelléas et Mélisande, so that this work provides an example of true French opera executed in keeping with his ideals, both in terms of dramatic pattern and music.

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MARCO ARTURO MARELLI

PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE If one wanted to assign an element to this opera, which premièred in 1902, that element would certainly be water. Even in Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1893 play, which supplied the libretto for Debussy’s opera, there is hardly a scene in which water is not mentioned: its inscrutability, its mystery, its variability.

Very simplistically, one might regard Pelléas et Mélisande as a rather naive parable, an almost mundanely quintessential love triangle. But beneath the deceptive surface, almost from the very first bar of music, a second, virtually fathomless, inexplicable dimension gleams through, from which the piece draws its deeper significance.

All the characters in the opera are drawn to this mysterious and inexplicable world of water from which Mélisande seems to have emerged. They all try to get there, where the key of life lies, hidden deep in the inscrutability of the water. But access to this deep secret, to the truth of human existence, seems to be essentially denied to mortals.

From the second scene on, this opera plays out exclusively at Allemonde Castle – in other words: Everywhere Castle. People only arrive and remain there, no one departs, no one escapes. Once the voices from the last receding ship have died away, the people are left as if trapped there. Externally and internally.

The focal point is the family story at the moment of their demise.

Four generations are closely bound by love, illness, death and stagnation.

Everyone pins their hopes on the newcomer Mélisande. But the two brothers become enmeshed in a deadly struggle for the love of this woman who remains an enigma to her husband Golaud. Pelléas is almost afraid of Mélisande and doesn’t know that he loves her. When he becomes aware of it, he tries in vain to flee.

Previous pages: KS SIMON KEENLYSIDE as GOLAUD CHRISTIANE KARG as MÉLISANDE

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PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE

For me, this inner sense of imprisonment, the loneliness of the characters, their isolation is the decisive factor for the stage. So I came up with a room flooded with water, a haven, a kind of bunker, full of diffuse depth. A secluded place where the “world” stays somewhere outside.

I decided first to tell the external happenings in this story completely realistically. The characters seem to be helpless about facing their fate and reality and bringing about a liberating change. Apart from this first narrative level, the second level, which depicts the unconscious, the poetic, is very important to me; however it can only develop if realistic circumstances are created for the piece. Arkel outlines this in the second scene: “Nous ne voyons que l’envers des destinées….” (“We only ever see the reverse side, the side of fate that is visible to us.”) With this, he means the impossibility of our seeing the undivided, complete truth.

The challenge in producing this opera is that everything that happens, all the images and emotions are reflected in the profundity of the unfathomable. Everything in this opera always has a second meaning, one that is hidden beneath the surface.

And so Debussy makes water a characteristic trait of his work.

The decision to make water the determining element in this production is supported by the calm flow, the pausing or sudden faltering, the eddy at the deceptive surface, the invisible and dangerous currents in the depths, the slight rippling in the smallest nuances, the play of the colourful reflections, the breaking of light and darkness, as well as the abyss of bottomless darkness in Debussy’s musical language.

For me, water is also an image for the affliction of things that have been suppressed, of unknown, impending catastrophes. It is the medium of dreamlike perception.

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PETER DUSEK

“THE PUBLIC IN THE STALLS AND BOXES

DID NOT APPLAUD AT ALL” ON THE HISTORY OF PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE IN VIENNA Claude Debussy’s opera with its libretto

by Maurice Maeterlinck was long regarded as a “precious jewel” in the long series of masterpieces, as the essence of intimacy, secret fantasies and late Romantic worlds of sound. A piece at the start of the Modern era with the highest ambitions – although not a piece for box office record setters. However, this was not always the case. It started with the term “sin of omission”. This was the term used by Marcel Prawy in his magnum opus Die Wiener Oper (1979, pp. 158 et seq.) to criticize the programming policy of Gustav Mahler and Felix von Weingartner – the two directors of the Vienna Court Opera who ensured that Debussy’s “drama lyrique” was not performed at the Haus am Ring until May 1911, nine years after its première at the Opéra Comique. This was, incidentally, after the death (unexpected, despite everything) in Vienna at 51 of Previous pages: SCENE

Gustav Mahler, who, as composer and pioneer of “New Music” was the logical choice to promote works like Pelléas.

However, in defence of the two composer-conductors Mahler and Weingartner, the première of Pelléas et Mélisande was anything but a triumphant success.

According to Die Chronik der Oper (1980, p. 300) there were loud outbursts and expressions of displeasure during the dress rehearsal, which were repeated during the première; in addition, Debussy was still revising his opera during rehearsals, supplementing the interludes (required for scene changes).

Pelléas et Mélisande – almost a forceps delivery! So how did the first performance at the Vienna Court Opera come about? In 1911, 45-year-old Hans Gregor took over as successor to Weingartner. In contrast to his two predecessors, he was a manager and box office bean counter. After studying engineer-

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“THE PUBLIC IN THE STALLS AND BOXES DID NO T A PPL AU D AT A L L”

ing, he had started as an actor and director in Görlitz and Barmen-Elberfeld, finally founding the “Komische Oper” in Berlin in 1904, which he headed until 1911, until taking up the position in Vienna. He himself had performed Pelléas several times, both in Berlin and in the provinces. So he produced Debussy’s opera in the first year of his seven-year term, not in order to score financially, but to succeed as a stage director. His choice paid off: however savage the critics were, Hans Gregor’s direction was praised. Furthermore, his technical background was helpful to his success: Hans Gregor worked with novel lighting effects, darkened the auditorium and even reduced the orchestra lighting.

As theatre director, he assembled a stellar cast. How did the costs work out?

Gregor was lucky: the Viennese première of Rosenkavalier in early 1911, just a few months after the première in Dresden, was a sensation, not least thanks to Richard Mayr and Marie Gutheil-Schoder.

And Gregor staged the opera by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal 37 times in 1911 alone. As he had a second hit with 52 performances – Jules Massenet’s Le jongleur de Notre-Dame – he was able to devote 40 days of rehearsal to Pelléas et Mélisande. In total, Debussy’s opera had 12 performances in the first Viennese run, not least because the new Octavian – Marie von Gutheil Schoder – was also universally praised by the critics for her Mélisande. The verdict on Debussy-Maeterlinck was ambivalent, ranging from total rejection to cautious praise. In the Reichspost of 24 May 1911, Maximilan Münz delivered an annihilating verdict on the new piece: “Debussy’s setting is as impossible as the poetry is beautiful, lacking rhythm and com-

pletely void of melodic content. The eight interludes, which are unmusical, uncharacteristical, vapid, and offer only sophisticated instrumentalization, increase the listener’s boredom. There is very little to be said about Debussy’s music, since you forget it as soon as the last note dies away.”

He went on to praise the conductor, Bruno Walter, the cast with Rudolf Hofbauer (Golaud) and the “wonderful Mélisande”, Marie Gutheil-Schoder.

Finally, he wrote: “The weak applause from the gods, and the standing area at the back of the stalls was solely for the performers. The public in the stalls and boxes did not applaud at all.”

In the Neue Wiener Tagblatt (24 May 1911) Ludwig Karpath is not quite so merciless. However, while the rejection is full of praise, it is still ultimately negative. He also praises the rich atmosphere of Hans Gregor’s staging. “We should simply like to say that the nature of the staging made the events on the stage seem like a fairy tale … Bruno Walter conducted, but the music gave little scope for winning laurels. At the same time, the score is dangerous, its interpretation unusually difficult … Madame Gutheil appeared as Mélisande, and with her mature artistry happily steered through all the reefs of the ambiguity.”

Even so, there are also articles – to save the honour of the tribe of critics – recognizing and praising the novelty of the score. For example, Richard Robert wrote in the Wiener Sonn- und Montagszeitung of 29 May 1911: “Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is not an opera or a music drama in the conventional sense, but a hybrid of spoken and sung drama for which we currently lack a suitable name. The music of the

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PETER DUSEK

brilliant Frenchman does not seek to deepen emotions psychologically, but to … idealize them. As Mélisande, Madame Gutheil-Schoder presented the charming picture of a stylized fairy tale queen.

Kapellmeister Walter, who rehearsed the subtle novelty with extraordinary delicacy again proved his outstanding qualities as a conductor.”

The time was obviously not yet ripe for a “subtle novelty”. This was apparently also true in May 1928, when there was a celebrated guest appearance of the Cologne Opera under its general music director, the Hungarian conductor Eugen Szenkár. The successor to Klemperer brought Così fan tutte (and Helge Roswaenge as Guglielmo) with Giulio Cesare in Egitto and – Pelléas et Mélisande. The ensemble at the Cologne Opera – with Helge Roswaenge as Pelléas and Lotte Schöne as Mélisande – presented a piece that was obviously not yet ready for repertoire, and not only in Vienna. In his memoirs Szenkár recalled later: “In autumn 1927 I resumed my position in Cologne.

I was able to present my beloved Pelléas et Mélisande at once. It was a marvellous performance, with an outstanding cast … Unfortunately, we were unable to present the opera often, as the German public is also unable to take this sensitive music to heart, as I often had to discover in other opera houses. I still love this wonderful piece, a gift of a spirit of God’s grace!” (Eugen Szenkár, Autobiographie, Frank & Timme, p. 94) After the guest appearance by the Cologne Opera – where it had presented the German language première long before the Vienna Court Opera in May 1911 – it took over 18 years before the Viennese public could experience Pelléas et Mélisande again. This time, finally

in French, given that this masterpiece fairly screams for the original version.

In November 1946 there was a guest appearance from Paris in the bombedout State Opera’s temporary quarters at the Theater an der Wien, under the patronage of the High Commissioner of the French Republic, which was naturally only conceivable in the original French. The three performances centred on the famous French soprano Irene Joachim, and were clearly – according to the Weltpresse on 9 November 1946 – received by the public with enthusiasm and numerous curtain calls. “The Paris ensemble presented a performance of great consistency, both in the exemplary clarity of the French Sprechgesang and in the style of presentation of grand opera. Unfortunately, the planned new sets and costumes were not ready in time, and those used required imagination to link them with the Impressionist sphere.” That was the everyday state of things in the direct post-war period!

The first Vienna première of Pelléas et Mélisande without any restrictions on the public and critics was on 6 January 1962. Herbert von Karajan, who had already directed a production of the piece in 1954 at la Scala, wanted to pay tribute to the Debussy commemorative year (100th anniversary of his birthday). He engaged an ideal ensemble with the enchanting “mermaid” Hilde Güden as Mélisande, the boyish Frenchman Henri Gui and the phenomenal Golaud – Eberhard Waechter. In addition, there were Elisabeth Höngen and Nicola Zaccaria – who could ask for better! Karajan also loved to work with “mood lighting” in his productions, and nothing was more suitable for this than Pelléas et Mélisande. The irony of

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“THE PUBLIC IN THE STALLS AND BOXES DID NO T A PPL AU D AT A L L”

history: the rehearsals for this production – together with Günther Schneider-Siemssen – were almost the cause of the first Karajan crisis in 1962, complete with resignation and his return by the Minister of Education.

The controversy was about technical staff overtime, but Karajan cut the Pelléas rehearsals and surprised all his opponents. In the great Jubilee volume Die Wiener Staatsoper – 50 Jahre, Leo Mazakarini gave the critic Wilhelm Sinkovicz the last word. “The result was a universally admired, scenically magical performance, where even the harshest critics admitted that Karajan had, for the first time as a director, found the level of conviction and artistic magic that he had always indisputably had as a conductor.” And Mazakarini then quoted an original Presse critique from 1962: “Karajan takes the treasures of the score in his hand with incredible tenderness, caresses it, breathes in its life, and lets it float away in a calm, gliding flight.” (p. 128) However, the greatest praise comes from Joseph Wechsberg, the notorious/ famous New York critic. In 1962, he judged in the magazine Opera: „For the first time in my experience, I was shaken by the power of Debussy’s music; priviosly I had only been moved by its beauty. This is a lyrical and a dramatic interpretation and when the inexorable climax comes towards the end one sits sbellbound. Karajan opens the delicate texture of the score, lovingly displaying its beauty...and always painting, painting with music.”

Pelléas et Mélisande, with the ideal casting of 1962 under Herbert von Karajan with Hilde Güden, Henri Gui and

Eberhard Waechter, was performed eight times in all.

In 1966 there was a revival of the Karajan-Schneider-Siemssen staging under Andre Cluytens. This time, the central trio were Jeannette Pilou, Henri Gui and Gabriel Bacquier.

The latest new production – before the current staging by Marco Arturo Marelli – dates from June 1988. Directed by Antoine Vitez (sets by Yannis Kokkos), the musical quality under Claudio Abbado dominated. Once again, there was an ideal Mélisande with Frederica von Stade, other lead artists were François Le Roux, John Bröcheler, Christa Ludwig and Nicolai Ghiaurov. Up to January 1991 there were 14 performances. The technically elaborate staging was occasionally criticised, but the cast were universally praised. Reportedly, the decision was taken the day after the Pelléas première not to extend the term of Drese-Abbado as directors …

However, the Vienna opera public did not have to wait for 26 years for Claude Debussy’s masterpiece. Besides a coolly modernistic Pelléas guest performance from Hanover in 2004, the Theater an der Wien team centred arount Roland Geyer showed in January 2009 how exciting the Debussy opera can be. In the stylish production of Laurent Pelly and under the baton of Bertrand de Billy with the magnificent Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Natalie Dessay, Stephan Degout and Laurent Naouri as Mélisande, Pelléas and Golaud showed how badly mistaken the early critics had been. Sometimes it takes decades until quality triumphs. Pelléas et Mélisande is the proof!

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CLAUDE DEBUSSY

WHY

I WROTE PELLÉAS I first read Pelléas et Mélisande in 1893. Despite my enthusiasm upon my first perusal and perhaps the furtive thought of possible music for it, I did not start working on it in earnest until the end of that same year.

It had long been my desire to write music for the theatre, but the form in which I wanted to do it was so unusual that after various attempts I almost gave up this plan. Earlier forays into the field of instrumental music had instilled in me an aversion to classical performance methods, the beauty of which is purely technical in nature and interests no one other than the mandarins of our caste. I was intent on achieving freedom for music which it harbours perhaps more than any other art form, a freedom that is no longer restricted to the more or less faithful reproduction of nature, but should rest on the mysterious correspondence between nature and imagination.

After several years of passionate pilgrimages to Bayreuth, I started doubting Wagner’s solution, or rather, it seemed to me that it only applied in the special case of Wagner’s genius. Wagner was a great collector of musical formulae, he condensed them to an overall form, which seemed an original achievement because people did not have a very in-depth knowledge of music. And without denying his genius, it can be said that he set the capstone for the music of our day, similarly to Victor Hugo who incorporated all earlier poetry in his oeuvre. As a result one should carry out one’s reconnaissances beyond Wagner and not in his tow.

Previous pages: KS SIMON KEENLYSIDE as GOLAUD OLGA BEZSMERTNA as MÉLISANDE

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WHY I WROTE PELLÉAS

Despite its dreamlike atmosphere, the Pelléas drama contains more humanity than all the so-called “trueto-life” stories, and it seemed to me to correspond quite wonderfully to what I wanted. A magically evocative language predominates, the sensitive nuances of which could be carried through into music and orchestral tone colouration. I have also attempted to obey a law of beauty that seems to be strangely forgotten when it comes to music for the theatre. The characters in the Pelléas drama try to sing quite naturally and not in an arbitrary language made up from antiquated traditions. That earned me the reproach of having gone over to monotonous declamation with absolutely no melody whatsoever. For one thing, that is not the case. For another, a person’s emotions cannot be expressed incessantly in melody. Thirdly, the dramatic melody must be constituted completely differently from melody in general. People who want to hear music at the theatre can be compared to those who stand around street singers. Here you can find your soul stirred for two sous; these listeners even demonstrate far greater patience than many subscribers to our subsidized theatre. One might even call it a “willingness to understand” that is completely absent in highranking audiences.

The unique irony is that the same audiences that demand “something new” completely lose their composure and tut-tut any attempt to entice them out of their habits and their ingrained complacency. That may seem incomprehensible to some, but we should

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WHY I WROTE PELLÉAS

not forget that a work of art, an attempt to create beauty, seems to affect many people as if it were a personal insult.

I do not presume to have discovered everything in Pelléas, but I have tried to pave a way that others can follow and that they can expand with their own finds that will perhaps liberate dramatic music from the oppressive constraints under which it has lived for so long.

An initial version of Pelléas was complete in 1895.

I then undertook revisions, modifications, etc., and all that took nearly twelve years of my life.

Debussy wrote this note at the beginning of April 1902 at the request of Georges Ricou, secretary general of the Opéra-Comique.

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MARCUS PELZ as DOCTOR

FRANZ-JOSEF SELIG as ARKEL

KON R A D PAU L LIE S SM A N N

“ONWARD, INTO THE DARK, THE ALIEN, AND THE HIDDEN” ON THE AESTHETICS OF SYMBOLISM At the start of the first act of Pelléas et Mélisande, Golaud, grandson of King Arkel of Allemonde, finds a young, fearfully, trembling woman in the forest, beside a spring. Everything about this scene, which on the level of reality is an accidental meeting between two people of unequal status, is characterized by a pregnant mystery. Golaud is hunting, the boar that he thought he had fatally wounded escapes, leaving a trail of blood, but his hounds can’t find it, and the woman-child he comes upon speaks in riddles. He asks how old she is, and she replies, “I’m cold”. This could be evasion, ignoring the question, or even the answer. There are questions which make you shiver.

Who Mélisande is, how she arrived in the wood, why she is shivering with fear – none of these questions are answered in conventional sense; nor are we told what the gleaming crown means which fell in the water and which she doesn’t want taken out. None of these riddles is answered in the course of the opera, none of the secrets surrounding the young woman hinted at at the beginning are revealed.

However, all the elements of this scene

indicate more than they seem, an additional and different meaning, a play with double levels. Nothing is simply what it seems, everything can be interpreted in a different way, every object, gesture, conversation can be deciphered as a symbol.

Pelléas et Mélisande is a triumph of Symbolism. That’s so easy to say, but just the term “symbol” has enough to keep you thinking. The word “symbol” is derived from the ancient Greek sýmbolon, a token. In this sense, a symbol enables you to compare things or bring them together. The right symbol, for example half a broken bone, made it possible e.g. to identify a party to a contract, if they have in their hands the right other half, which can be fitted together with the first half seamlessly. Symbols were features which referred to each other, revealed matches and made clear correspondences. Symbols are signs which play on an intimate connection but which can only be deciphered if you know and understand the underlying code.

For the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who wrote a three-volume philosophy of symbolic forms in the 1920s, symbols

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were the means with which humans present and recognize their world, through language, myth, religion, art and science. Symbols allow us to go beyond the sphere of sensory impressions, and give objects, colours, sounds, tones a meaning that goes far beyond what is directly present. Or, in Cassirer’s words: “A ‘symbolic form’ is that spiritual energy through which a spiritual meaning is tied to a concrete sensory sign and allocated to this internally.”

If the meanings the symbols refer to are left unclear or simply open, the game of interpreting them begins. In our usage, for example, a crown is a certain form of authority. But what if this crown is given to a young woman, who throws it into the water? Is this a sign of illegitimacy or the rejection of a suspicion, perhaps only a mood, perhaps a hunch, perhaps a game? Only in the context in which such symbols appear can their indications be queried, if not deciphered.

The poet Stéphane Mallarmé, a prominent representative of Symbolism, pointed out that a principle of symbolic assignments can be seen at work in Pelléas et Mélisande in a particular form. He wrote that the drama is characterized by a “silent atmosphere” of fear, hopelessness, uncertainty, which is strengthened by literary and musical means through the principle of repetition, doubling of specific motifs and scenes. Not only is the crown lost in the water, Mélisande offers up her wedding ring to this element; previously, she threatened Golaud that she would throw herself into the water. When Pelléas confesses his love and Mélisande tells him she loves him, he banishes his doubts with the words, “Oh! How you say that! … Your voice! Your voice! … It

is fresh and stronger than the water! …

Like pure water on my lips.” But the water itself is an equivocal symbol, which can stand for clarity and life as well as inscrutability, cold and death. Repetitions, duplications, revenants and doppelgänger always raise the question of what is hiding behind such an echo, return, shadow or after-image. The water, the sea, the well, the dark park and the tower are all elements of poetic reality, which by their dense interrelationship of references and the metaphorical meanings which these terms have acquired in other context generate a symbolic order which registers a simple action in a dark, ominous cosmos. This is no longer a matter of Richard Wagner’s monitory love triangle in Tristan und Isolde, but of existential issues and spiritual abysses which from the start showed all the signs of impending disaster. Everything about the action and the music is foreboding, premonition, quiet, uncertain dread.

Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande is not only rich in symbolic signs, it is also regarded as a paradigm of the aesthetic-literary movement which named itself Symbolism. This is by no means easy to grasp, as its representatives are too different, its appearances in the various art forms, literature, painting and music, are too heterogeneous. In addition, you can also distinguish between a French and a Belgian form of Symbolism, which would put Maeterlinck in the latter category, which was both more individualistic and more political than its counterpart in France.

Then there are several historical features which make it possible to get closer to the meaning of Symbolism as a term. In 1886 the lyricist Jean Moréas

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KON R A D PAU L LIE S SM A N N

published the Manifeste du Symbolisme in Le Figaro. In an era of aesthetic manifestos, this defined an artistic movement and issued an implicit appeal to join it. In this piece, Symbolism is characterized very aggressively as an “enemy of instruction, of promulgation, of false sensibility and objective description”. By contrast, Symbolism seeks to “clothe the idea in a sensory form”. In addition, Symbolic poetry may not show “the images of nature, the actions of humanity, all concrete phenomena” as such, but only in an “indirect sensory appearance”. The mystery and ambiguity evoked by such art is intentional. The aim is to achieve this diversity of meaning through a new, bold language, an “archetypal and complex style”, through “significant pleonasms” and “strange ellipses”.

Passages in Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande read like an implementation of this programme. The ominous scenery, the dark castle, the old, sick king, the starving population, the dark passions and structures, the deep water, all appear not as concrete manifestations of a historical place or time, but, like the vague “Allemonde”, as a sensory representation of archetypal social and psychological constellations, imaginations of partly unconscious mental states which appear in an only supposedly fairytale guise.

In his Manifeste Jean Moréas indicated how such Symbolist scenarios can arise: “Soon an individual figure moves in environments which are distorted by their own hallucinations, their temperament. This distortion is the only true reality.” This is a decisive thought: instead of reality being presented in a specific way, the form of the presentation generates the poetic reality. The Symbolists’

symbols may be taken from reality, but rather than reflect it, they constitute another separate world which is subject to entirely different laws. “Soon, people, superficially affected by everything happening at the same time, alternating between collisions and deadlocks, turn to actions which remain incomplete.

Sometimes individual statements of intent emerge, gain force, collect, agree on a goal which, achieved or not, scatters them into their original elements.”

An aesthetic attitude like this has a clear adversary from which it tries to distinguish itself. Moréas pulls no punches on this. Symbolism “despises the childish methods of Naturalism”.

Symbolism sees itself as opposing Realism and Naturalism, as an aesthetic programme which establishes art in its own right, rather than as downgraded to the status of a servant of reality. There is no social reality which can allegedly be objectively portrayed, Symbolism sees itself as the advocate of subjectivity, the expressive presentation of states of mind which can also lie below the threshold of consciousness.

A dream, with its bizarre logic and world of imagery, often serves as a source of inspiration and an aesthetic model for Symbolist art.

Symbolism appealed to Charles Baude­laire, Edgar Allan Poe, the Nordic apparitionist Emanuel Swedenborg, and above all Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner – however inadequate and superficial their reception in France may have been. Symbolism emphasized the power of the unconscious, the sensuousness of drives, the subtlety of souls, the dark sides of life, the imaginary in shifting form. In his 1892 essay, Hermann Bahr summarized the essence of Symbolism neatly. “Art is turning away

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from Naturalism and seeking something new. Nobody knows yet which it might be; the compulsion is shapeless and confused, groping without council for many things and finding itself nowhere.

For many artists today, the confessed solution is to escape at any price from clear reality, into the dark, alien, and the hidden.” The Symbolist poet, according to Hermann Bahr, “wants to force the nerves into moods where they reach for the asensuous, and he does this through sensuous means”. In this way, Symbolism becomes the prelude to the “war on the nerves” of the fin de siècle, in which a radical aestheticism joins with the sense of decadence inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner.

In its ambiguity, the end of Pelléas et Mélisande can be read and heard as confirmation of this intent. Mélisande, the “small, poor being, full of mystery like everyone”, dies. But the child she bore lives. And King Arkel speaks the last, dark words: “The child must live, here, in her place. Now it is the turn of the poor small ones.” Will the misery continue? Is something new beginning? Will the cycle of desire and violence go on, or has the birth of the new person put something new in motion?

What does the child stand for, since it is more than just a newborn baby?

For the repetition of calamity? For hope? We know it, and we know it not.

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Following pages: BERNARD RICHTER as PELLÉAS CHRISTIANE KARG as MÉLISANDE

IMPRINT CLAUDE DEBUSSY

PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE SEASON 2025/26 R E V I VA L OF T H E P ROD U C T ION 2 7 O C T OB E R 2 0 2 5 (PREMIÈRE 18. JUNE 2017) Publisher WIENER STAATSOPER GMBH, Opernring 2, 1010 Wien Director DR. BOGDAN ROŠČIĆ Administrative Director DR. PETRA BOHUSLAV General Editors ANDREAS LÁNG, OLIVER LÁNG Design & concept EXEX Layout & typesetting MIWA MEUSBURGER Cover image concept MARTIN CONRADS, BERLIN Printed by PRINT ALLIANCE HAV PRODUKTIONS GMBH, BAD VÖSLAU TEXT REFERENCES All texts were taken from the première programme of the Vienna State Opera 2017. IMAGE REFERENCES Cover image: © Dominik Friess: Untitled, 2021. Performance photos: Michael Pöhn/Wiener Staatsoper GmbH ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS Andrew Smith.

Reproduction only with approval of Wiener Staatsoper GmbH / Dramaturgy. Holders of rights who were unavailable regarding retrospect compensation are requested to make contact.

produced according to guideline Uz24 Austrian Ecolabel, Print Alliance HAV Produktions GmbH, UW No. 715

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