Claude Debussy
Pelléas et Mélisande

I approached Pelléas et Mélisande almost completely blindly, with little specific information and an extremely vague idea of who its composer was, of whom this is the only successfully completed opera; more than anything else, I was drawn by the idea of venturing into completely new territory; new and unique. Even before listening to it, therefore, P&M conveyed an irresistible sensation of charm and mystery, something that remained even after listening.

Pelléas et Mélisande is an opera that plays "dangerously" with the glorious traditional superstructures of the genre: no arias, no chorus, no prolonged instrumental passages, and no tenor. The latter might seem marginal, yet it is not: I have learned that, if you want to give an opera an "experimental", unconventional characterization, one of the most effective ways to do so is to eliminate or at least marginalize the tenor voice; it's a bit like removing the brass from the orchestra, losing power and immediacy, the atmospheres become more nuanced and rarefied. And this contributes greatly to the success of Debussy's very ambitious project, which aimed for the pure open form with Pelléas et Mélisande; much more than any other opera I've heard, including Salome and Bluebeard's Castle, this is truly a continuum, a single block, in which the tension is consistently and uniformly maintained from the first to the last note. Achieving something similar without falling into boredom and style exercise for its own sake is a very arduous task, yet Claude Debussy succeeded, moreover with an opera that approaches three hours in length.

Listening to Pelléas et Mélisande is a bit like wandering in a dimension of constant twilight, a perpetually dark and at the same time ethereal atmosphere hovers over the entire opera; the setting is completely out of history, landscapes whose wild desolation is repeatedly emphasized by all the main characters, who are heavily marked by it. There is nothing simple in this work, with its deceptively linear structure, no mystery is ever fully revealed, few moments of candor and sincerity get lost in a sea of allusions, crypticism, and almost total incommunicability. All this can only lead to tragedy, which is reached not with a crescendo of pathos but by gradually slipping into it, in an inevitable drift; an alternative title for this opera could have been "The Force of Destiny", if it hadn't already been taken.

Apparently, the most alien character would seem to be Mélisande, appearing from nowhere, closed in on herself, enigmatic to the end, but in reality, the true outsider, the soul in pain condemned to unhappiness, is surely Golaud, a concrete, realistic character in a parallel world where nothing is clearly defined, and everyone expresses themselves with their own poetics. He has no poetics at all, his search for a secure and linear horizon makes him paranoid, violent, oppressive, and the more he tries to impose himself, the more he sinks into the quicksand of despair. For this reason too, Pelléas et Mélisande is the triumph of decadence over romanticism, the operatic equivalent of a still life.

It cannot be denied that, without Tristan und Isolde, Pelléas et Mélisande (like many other things) probably wouldn't exist, but a Wagner so sparse, so intimate, so alien to any concept of redemption has never been heard: Debussy uses the orchestra in a completely different way, as a simple accompaniment, a background, which does not produce melodies but a dilated, abstract tide of sound, inseparable from the landscapes and emotions of the characters, and even in the interludes never assumes a protagonist role. It is useless to speak of this or that scene, to try to separate and analyze individually the sadness, sensuality, anger, melancholy, desperation, and all the other nuances that at times emerge from the score and the libretto. Pelléas et Mélisande is a whole, a total work of art. A total work of art, that is what Claude Debussy managed to achieve.