On a Saturday afternoon in late April 1971, Metropolitan Opera General Manager Rudolf Bing addressed the radio audience during the season’s final Texaco Saturday afternoon broadcast, offering a preview of the upcoming season, which would be his last in the role. He reassured listeners that the Met was fundamentally “an Italian house” and announced that the final new production of his tenure would be Verdi’s Otello. Additionally, he highlighted two other new productions for 1971-72: a new Tristan und Isolde, featuring Birgit Nilsson reprising her 1959 debut, and the long-missing Pelléas et Mélisande. Bing candidly predicted that Pelléas would likely struggle at the box office, a prediction that proved accurate.
When the production ran the following winter, it sold poorly. According to one observer, so few remained after the second intermission that anyone could have taken a seat on the stage. Bing’s prediction was partly realised by a dreary, uninspired production that seemed almost to apologise for the opera itself. It took a quarter-century for a new Pelléas to appear at the Met, rectifying that unfortunate precedent and helping to alleviate audience scepticism and indifference towards the work. The elegant and beautiful Jonathan Miller/John Conklin production, with its strong casts and conductors (Levine, Rattle, Nézet-Séguin), most recently revived in 2019, made it easier for some to assert that if Tristan is the greatest opera ever written, Pelléas is the second greatest.
The plots of the two operas are strikingly similar. A bride married to an older man falls in love with someone closer to her own age and level of desire, and the story ends tragically. If Pelléas is dramatically unthinkable without Tristan, it is musically unthinkable without Parsifal. (We can set aside the notion that Wagner’s influence on Debussy is negligible.) Like Wagner, Debussy seeks a music that creates transparency and authenticity of mind and emotion. Unlike Wagner, Debussy benefits from a librettist, Maurice Maeterlinck, who provides a text imbued with the same values of transparency and authenticity. The result, appreciated by audiences after a century and through productions that celebrate the opera rather than apologise for it, is a musical, dramatic, and linguistic clarity that honours the principles espoused by the opera’s hero Pelléas himself: clarity (clarté) and truth (vérité).
Pelléas and Mélisande are characters in search of light. Unlike Tristan and Isolde, they embrace their desire without seeing it as problematic. They do not romanticise the darkness (l’obscurité) that surrounds them but acknowledge and succumb to it. This darkness is an integral part of their existence. They are not fully transparent to themselves, which means they each possess an unconscious. The concept of the unconscious, central to psychoanalysis, was mapped by Sigmund Freud between 1895 and 1896 and detailed in The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, paralleling the timeline from the composition of Pelléas (1893-95) to its premiere (1902). The unconscious represents the innermost dimension of the individual mind and collective culture, accessible yet unknowable.
Freud posits that the unconscious cannot be fully known because it contains raw violence—violence born from the unmediated desire and boundless selfishness of the infant, whose primary concern is nourishment indistinguishable from possessive love. Possessive love, even when socially sanctioned as sexual fidelity, harbours inherent violence, especially when repressed. Pelléas et Mélisande delves into this dynamic with a distinctive blend of ambiguity and precision, unique in the realm of music drama.
This brings us to the 2024 revival of Katie Mitchell’s production of Pelléas et Mélisande at Aix-en-Provence, first staged in 2016. In an interview for the programme book, Mitchell explains that her production features a feminist perspective, reorienting the opera around Mélisande. Initially taciturn and enigmatic, Mélisande is “discovered” alone in the forest in the opera’s opening scene. Like Parsifal, she lacks a clear origin, identity, or destiny; unlike Parsifal, the opera does not provide these. Traditionally, Mélisande remains a passive object of desire, control, and violence. The challenge of transforming Mélisande from an object to a subject requires a critical reassessment of the opera’s fundamental logic and arguments. Mitchell’s production successfully addresses this challenge while preserving a sense of recognition, homage, and affection for this remarkable work.
Mitchell’s interpretation of Pelléas et Mélisande involves recentering the opera as an extensive dream experienced by Mélisande. This might be seen as an over-rationalisation of her own achievement. The surreal elements of the unfolding action would prove fascinating and credible without the framing device of a dream. However, it must be noted that the initial framing device of the production—the opening set-up—is disastrous.
The director’s clichéd approach of raising the operatic curtain onto a silent opening pantomime seems outdated, particularly because it inherently distrusts the music as the guiding narrative authority. In this case, the clichés escalate to the level of farce. The curtain rises on a generic hotel room where a distressed bride, clad in a gown, enters and proceeds to the toilet. The sounds of plumbing—both her own and that of the toilet—are audible. The bride administers a pregnancy test and then throws herself onto the bed.
Despite this initial “you gotta be kidding me” moment, the production recovers efficiently. This recovery begins with the enveloping sonic sensuality of Susanna Mälkki’s orchestra, guided by the low strings. Mélisande, who is found by her (presumably already) husband Golaud, then moves to the dinner table scene with the Golaud family. This scene includes both the nervous and alienated young Pelléas and a silent double of Mélisande herself, an added figure who appears convincingly at various moments throughout the opera.
Lizzie Clachan’s impressive set design merges a sleek, modernist villa exterior with fin-de-siècle furnishings and the associated haute-bourgeois formal servant culture and porcelain table manners. The double-Mélisande serves as a point of entry into the surreal aspects of the staging, which are marked episodically by the appearances of people, bodies, and embodied memories that transcend their empirical presence. Pelléas will appear following his death, Mélisande following hers, and the family members (Arkel, Geneviève, and Golaud) will wander zombie-like, replacing the silent figures indicated by the libretto. For example, the three homeless people who give Mélisande a fright at the conclusion of the crucial Act II finale in the grotto. The chorus is omitted entirely. The dream gloss is not necessary for this spectral world to be understood as a series of perceptions, projections, and involuntary memories.
Mélisande-as-subject implies Pelléas as object, and certainly as an object of Mélisande’s desire. The explicit sexual consummation occurs early in the production. This explicitness inevitably adds complexity to Mélisande’s final assertion that the love between her and Pelléas remained “innocent.” This argument may involve redefining innocence and guilelessness, moving away from concepts of sexual abstinence, repression, and fidelity, and towards the ownership and fulfilment of genuine desire. The love scene, which in the text focuses on Mélisande’s hair, instead highlights Pelléas’s eroticized body, aroused by Mélisande as she moves her hair back and forth over his torso.
The erotic energy is further enhanced by Huw Montague Rendall’s physique and manner, which are both imposing and delicate. His performance is complemented by his costuming—two layers of light linen that both protagonists spend considerable time unbuttoning and rebuttoning. The sensuality of Montague Rendall’s portrayal is primarily assured by his singing, which combines style, diction, timbre, technique, range, and lyricism in a manner that distinguishes him as the Pelléas of his generation.
Montague Rendall was well supported but not equalled by his fellow cast members. Katie Mitchell credits the 2016 Mélisande, Barbara Hannigan, with a significant role in shaping the production’s concept. Hannigan’s eagerly anticipated 2024 successor, Julia Bullock, was replaced by Chiara Skerath, whose performance was vocally competent and dramatically convincing. Laurent Naouri, the one notable veteran from 2016, provided a dark and powerful sonority in the role of Golaud. While he lacked the nuance that others have brought to the character, his qualities accentuated the cruelty and sexual violence demanded by the production. Vocally and generationally, he seemed to resemble less his younger half-brother Pelléas and more their mutual grandfather, the old Arkel, as portrayed mournfully by the veteran Vincent Le Texier. Lucile Richardot (Geneviève) and Emma Fekete (Yniold) rounded out the cast, with the latter depicted as a backpack-wielding teenager seemingly eager to escape this troubled family.
In a French house, there is an added emphasis on the clarity of the text and the parlando vocal style it requires. This demand, coupled with the opera’s fundamental principle of clarté, places a high premium on diction. Here, I must shift from admiration to a critical polemic: can the opera industry urgently address the issue of French diction? Over the past thirty years, a troubling decline has occurred, affecting every singer on this Pelléas stage, despite the generally refined and clear diction from most native French speakers.
The issue revolves around the consonant “r” and the distinction between speech and song. In modern spoken French, especially in Parisian and northern regional speech as well as among certain social classes, the “r” is pronounced glottally and with a gargled quality. In classical vocal style, however, the “r” is articulated forward by the tongue and palate, less rolled than the Italian “r” but similarly forward in production, making it more conducive to fluid vocal production and pronunciation. Consider the exemplary diction of Martial Singher or Gérard Souzay and their contemporaries, or listen to Huw Montague Rendall’s flawless rendition of “Phidylé” on the recent recording of Henri Duparc’s songs.
It seems that a subconscious desire to align French sung diction with everyday speech, including the realism of film and the diction of prominent chansonniers like Serge Gainsbourg and Edith Piaf, has negatively impacted the French “r” in singing. This shift has consequently affected French vocal style more broadly.
Photos: 2024 Festival d’Aix-en-Provence © Jean-Louis Fernandez
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