120 Years of ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’
On 30th April 2022, we celebrate the 120th anniversary of Debussy’s opera, ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’, which had its first performance at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1902, conducted by André Messager, with Jean Périer and Mary Garden in the title roles. This premiere was one of the great scandals of operatic history, and to this day the opera provokes wildly different reactions. Love it or hate it, there are few responses which are ambivalent. For me, it is one of the greatest works of art ever produced, on a par with Michelangelo’s David, Monet’s Water Lilies and Chartres Cathedral, and it has played a crucial part in my life and career since I first saw it in a production by Colin Graham for Scottish Opera in the 1970s. I saw it at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh, conducted by Sir Alexander Gibson, with George Shirley, Anne Howells, John Shirley-Quirk and Joseph Rouleau in the principal roles, and I loved it so much that I persuaded my parents to buy me a seat for the next performance too! Scottish Opera had included Debussy’s opera in its first season in 1962, incidentally with my old singing teacher, Laura Sarti, as Geneviève, and Sir Alec loved it dearly. Those two shows at the King’s Theatre started my life-long love affair with the opera, an affair which I will chronicle here later.
Debussy used Maeterlinck’s 1892 play, ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’, as the basis for his opera, setting large parts directly to music, without any editing or additions. Interestingly, this process was remarkably similar to the way Britten and Pears adapted Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ to fit their new opera in 1960. It has only just occurred to me that these two operas are perhaps my favourites and they have certainly both played an immense part in my career. Is this just a lovely coincidence? Who knows?
Maurice Maeterlinck was born into a wealthy family in Gent in Belgium in 1862. Although Gent was in the heart of Flemish Belgium, Maurice was a French speaker, and his writings were in French. While obtaining a Law Degree at the University of Gent, he wrote poems and short novels, and, when he went to Paris after graduating, it was as a writer. There he met members of the Symbolist School, and began to write plays, mostly about death and fatalism. His first play, ‘La Princesse Maleine’ won praise from the critic of Le Figaro newspaper in 1890, and ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’, written in 1892 and premiered at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens on 17th May 1893, was a smash hit with the Paris avant-garde. It was anti-realist and revealed its characters’ secrets in symbolic expression rather than clear dialogue; in other words, nobody had much idea what was going on at any time. Much was left unsaid, and what action there was, took place in a shadowy half-light in settings littered with symbols.
All this appealed deeply to the Gallic sensibility. I experienced something similar nearly 120 years after Maeterlinck’s play, when I was engaged to sing in the world premiere of Oscar Bianchi’s first opera, ‘Thanks to my Eyes’, at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2011. The opera, like Pelléas, was a direct setting of a play, ‘Grâce à mes Yeux’ by the contemporary French dramatist, Joël Pommerat. Originally in English translation, it evolved into a bilingual piece, as the actors in the production couldn’t say their lines in understandable English. The plot involved a father (me) and a mother, living half-way up a mountain, who wanted their son to become a great comic actor. They had told the son that the father had, in his heyday, been the greatest comic actor in the world, and the father was desperate for his son to follow him. They kept the boy hidden away in training. Women kept arriving on the mountain to meet the son, one in particular extremely persistent, allegedly there to watch an eclipse. Crazy for love, she watches without protection, and becomes blind. At the end, we discover that the whole story of the father as a great actor was false. Why? Who knows? What’s it all about? Not a clue. Deeply meaningful? Your guess.
The reaction to the opera must have been similar to the reaction to Maeterlinck’s play. The English-speaking press and audiences were mystified/bewildered. The French press and audiences were rapturous, loving the lack of clarity in the plot and wallowing in the obscurity of it all.
The important thing was that Debussy saw Maeterlinck’s play and loved it and decided to acquire the rights to turn it into an opera. Here, the story becomes more and more complicated and fascinating, leading up to that famous first night in Paris in 1902. After seeing the play in May 1893, the composer wasted no time in following up his interest, and in November, he visited Maeterlinck in Belgium, and received permission to create an opera. By 1895, he had completed the short score, using only Maeterlinck’s words but cutting several scenes and stripping away some of the descriptions in the text. He wrote in a controlled but unusual fashion, for example completing Act 4 Scene 4 first, and spent a long time bringing his opera to life. The composer and conductor, André Messager was a fan of Debussy, and when he became chief conductor of the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1898, he persuaded the Director of the house, Albert Carré, to hear extracts played on the piano by Debussy. Eventually, in 1901, Carré gave written permission for the opera to be premiered the following year.
During this long creative process, Maeterlinck had fallen in love with the famous French actress and singer, Georgette Leblanc, who played roles in several of his plays and was a sort of muse to Massenet as well, singing Fanny in his opera, ‘Sapho’ at the Opéra-Comique in 1897. She was engaged for three seasons as a company singer at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, singing the title roles in Massenet’s ‘Thaïs’ and Carmen in Bizet’s opera. Maeterlinck heard her and was smitten by this larger than life creature and was determined that she would sing Mélisande in Debussy’s forthcoming opera. A hundred years later, I too sang several roles at La Monnaie, but failed to find a composer to take me up as a muse, much to Fran’s relief, no doubt!
Albert Carré was strongly opposed to Leblanc singing Mélisande, having hated her Carmen, and Debussy was not keen. He had told a friend that Madame Leblanc not only sang out of tune, but even spoke out of tune! When Carré persuaded the composer to hear the new Scottish soprano, Mary Garden, who had caused a sensation taking over as Louise in Charpentier’s eponymous opera in 1900, Debussy was initially resistant to the idea, but when he heard her, he realised that this was the voice of his dreams. Photographs of the period show Mary Garden to have looked perfect for the role as well.
However, when Maeterlinck discovered that Garden and not Leblanc was to sing Mélisande (apparently only at a press conference in 1901), all hell was let loose! He threatened legal action, and indeed visited Debussy’s home, intent on “giving him a few whacks to teach him some manners!” Two weeks before the premiere, he had a letter published in Le Figaro, publicly dissociating himself from the opera, describing it as “a work which is strange and hostile to me. I can only wish for its immediate and decisive failure!” There were reports of discontent in the cast, and problems with the part for the small boy, Yniold, who found the role impossible. The Opéra-Comique crew could not cope with the quick scene changes, and so Debussy had to compose, at extremely short notice, some of the extraordinary interludes between scenes, which now seem such an integral part of the score. They show the unconscious influence of Wagner, who Debussy had idolised before coming out in opposition to the German composer. Somehow, Debussy managed to infuse his own Gallic sensibility with lashings of quasi-Wagnerian orchestration, to produce an entirely new sound, both ethereal and highly charged. The interlude after the horrific scene when Golaud abuses Mélisande on stage, incidentally a scene which completely disproves the stupid criticism of the opera as obscure and unrealistic, is one of the most emotional pieces of music imaginable, following on directly from my character, Arkel’s, phrase - “si j’étais Dieu, j’aurais pitié du coeur des hommes”. (If I were God, I would pity the hearts of men.) The fact that this interlude was written to fill in a scene change is remarkable.
The Dress Rehearsal on 28th April was apparently a bit of a bun fight. Someone had distributed a cruel parody of the libretto, and many of the scenes caused laughter and mockery in the audience, almost certainly deliberately planned beforehand. They laughed at the boy, Yniold’s, naive lines and apparently, made fun of Mary Garden’s Scottish-sounding French accent. The First Night, two days later, was less rowdy, although as André Messager wrote later, it was hardly a triumph. The sets and costumes were designed in the pre-Raphaelite style, popular at the time, a style that lent itself naturally to the opera and its ambience. Mary Garden was deemed a perfect Mélisande, and, astonishingly, there is a recording extant of her singing the beginning of the famous Tower Scene, with Debussy at the piano. There are also a couple of interviews, which you can find on YouTube, of Mary Garden in her old age, speaking with precision and a forthright manner about Debussy and the creation of Pelléas. It is utterly amazing, and you can hear the awe in the voice of the interviewer as he tentatively asks his questions. There is only a tiny trace of Scottish (a faint Aberdeenshire burr) in her voice, but she speaks with the authority of someone from another era altogether. She reminds me of Dame Eva Turner, one of the very first, and certainly one of the finest, interpreters of Puccini’s Turandot, who I was lucky enough to meet and talk to in the 1980s. These great divas had an aura that is difficult to describe now. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Galina Vishnevskaya (two grandes dames from a slightly later era, who I also had the privilege of knowing) possessed this same power. After spending much of her life in Paris and America, Mary Garden retired back to Inverurie in Aberdeenshire for her last 30 years.
Her co-star in the opera was Jean Périer, who sang mainly baritone roles in his career, which was almost exclusively at the Opéra-Comique. Apparently renowned for the clarity of his diction, and the rather dry quality of his voice, he took on a few roles in the exclusive French repertoire of the bariton-martin, a sort of in-between voice, neither tenor nor baritone. This is the voice for which Pelléas was written, and it has caused problems ever since. It is too low for a tenor, but seriously high for anyone but a very high baritone. In my lifetime, the best interpreters I have heard were Thomas Allen and Russell Smythe (my Scottish compatriot, who deserves a much higher profile than he has had), Francois le Roux and more recently Stéphane Degout. The first one I heard, all those years ago at the King’s Theatre, was the low American tenor, George Shirley, who recorded the role in the famous 1970 set with Pierre Boulez, which also featured the great Scottish bass, David Ward, in my role of Arkel. It is one of my regrets that I never got to record Arkel, as I have always felt it is the part that has suited me best over the 40 years of my career. I have sung it at Aldeburgh, Strasbourg, Holland Park and Garsington, but would love to have sung it more.
Arkel is the aged King of the fictional mediaeval realm of Allemonde, the patriarch of a somewhat dysfunctional family, 90 years old and blind. We see him first in the second scene of the opera. In the opening scene, hunting in the forest but lost, Golaud, the king’s grandson, discovers a young woman weeping beside a spring. She reveals her name to be Mélisande but won’t let Golaud touch her (her famous line “Ne me touchez pas” (don’t touch me) is often said to sum up the wonder or the uselessness of the text, depending on one’s point of view!), but eventually agrees to follow him out of the forest. In the second scene, Geneviève, mother of Golaud and Pelléas, by two different fathers, is reading a letter sent by Golaud from abroad, telling her that he has not married the princess he had set out to wed, but has married a girl he met in a forest, of whom he knows nothing. She asks Arkel what he thinks about this, and he answers, over a chord located somewhere in the bowels of the earth, “Je n’en dis rien”(I don’t say anything), but then proceeds to give his opinion, basically that one must trust such things to Fate. This is very much a marker for Arkel’s character throughout the opera; he makes grave pronouncements, which are largely sung in a slow beautiful melodic line, but which fail to get things done. Everyone is rather afraid of him, both because he is king and because he is very old. I firmly believe that he tries to be a force for good at every turn, but somehow, the forces of Fate and the tragic undercurrents of the story combine to thwart him. Productions which portray him as a monster, a paedophile, a mad dictator (all recently seen on some stages), these are profoundly wrong. You only have to listen for a moment to his vocal line and the harmonies playing with him, to realise that this is a most sympathetic character, whose tragedy is his inability to halt the inexorable drift to family disaster.
The last pages of the opera, when Mélisande lies dying in bed after the birth of her child, watched over by Arkel and the family doctor, are among the most beautiful pages of any operatic score, and to be able to sing those warm phrases has been the high point of my career. In my last production, at Garsington in 2017, directed by Sir Michael Boyd, with the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Jac van Steen, I was able to fully realise my portrayal of the old king, and Michael and I were totally in agreement about every facet of this noble character. The warmth of the audience’s reaction was very humbling, and I felt I had come to the satisfactory conclusion of my journey through this marvellous opera, which had started all those years before in the King’s Theatre. The very first orchestral rehearsal with the Philharmonia revealed to me a sonority I had never heard before, and the superb cast was united in our vision of what Debussy’s masterwork is about.
As we approach the 120th anniversary of that astonishing first night on April 30th 1902, may I invite all our readers to find a recording of ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ and luxuriate in the sound world created by the genius, Claude Debussy. The recordings of the opera are a bit of a minefield, fluctuating wildly in quality and taste, but I can recommend the 1951 Ernest Ansermet version with Pierre Mollet and Suzanne Danco (who I studied with at Aldeburgh), with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and the 1970 Pierre Boulez recording with the Covent Garden Orchestra, with George Shirley and Elisabeth Söderström (and our own David Ward). The Ansermet is impeccably French (even with a German Golaud) and seems to me perfectly judged by a conductor who knew the score intimately, and the Boulez, although with a cast sadly imprecise in their French diction, triumphs through the sheer will of its conductor, who seems to understand all the intricacies of Debussy’s score, as if he had written them himself.
