Royal Festival
Hall
Mélisande – Sandrine Piau
Pelléas – Stéphane Degout
Golaud – Laurent Naouri
Geneviève – Dame Felicity Palmer
Physician – David
Wilson-Johnson
Arkel – Jérôme Varnier
Yniold – Chloé Briot
Shepherd – Greg Skidmore
Narrator – Sara Kestelman
David Edwards (director)
This was an extraordinary
performance of an extraordinary work, one which has rarely been given its due
in London and which, bafflingly, our opera houses still shy away from staging.
I have only seen Pelléas et Mélisande
‘live’ once before, in a performance at Covent Garden superlatively conducted
by Sir Simon Rattle. The best that one could say about the accompanying staging
was that the excellence of the performances still shone through. Here, we had a
minimal staging from David Edwards, excellently lit (so important in Debussy,
both physically and metaphysically!), which let the opera speak for itself, but
which, having the characters seated in the Choir watching, walking down slowly
to the stage, offered something of a frame to the action. The narration, though
well delivered, seemed entirely superfluous and would have been better off cut.
That really is my one and
only cavil. Esa-Pekka Salonen led the Philharmonia in a performance as fine as
anything I have heard from him and/or the orchestra. Like Debussy’s score itself,
it drew one in to listen, rejecting ‘operatic’ gesture for symbolist drama. (Is
that, perhaps why we find it so difficult to stage the work, finding ourselves
so remote from æsthetic tenets from which it is far from readily sundered?) Debussy’s
words from his 1902 ‘Pourquoi j’ai écrit Pelléas,’
might almost have been written as a review of what we heard: ‘The drama of Pelléas, which, in spite of its dream-like atmosphere, contains far
more humanity than so-called “real-life documents”, seemed to suit my
intentions admirably. In it there is an evocative language whose sensitivity
could be extended into music and into the décor
orchestral.’ And so, not only was the performance, aurally still more than
visually, ‘lit from behind’, as Debussy so memorably claimed of Parsifal, but it seemed to emerge from
Materlinck, or perhaps even from words and a simple yet deep story that somehow
had always been there.
That emergence was the musical story offered by Salonen and the
orchestra. There is of course no one ‘right way’ to perform Pelléas. But the refusal to play to the
gallery, in conjunction with a refusal to highlight any one particular strand
or influence and a near-incredible sensitivity to the subtlest of changes, or
indeed continuities, in pitch, timbre, and any other parameter you might care to
mention made for an absorbing experience. Line was maintained without
realising: it was simply ‘there’. The drenching of the score in Tristan and, perhaps still more, Parsifal had, as with Puccini or Elgar (in
some senses, at least, closer spirits than one might suspect), no need to be
hammered home. Pierre Boulez was accused in 1969 of having ‘Wagnerised’ Debussy
at Covent Garden. (What I should have given to hear that!) He quite rightly
responded that there was no need, since Debussy’s music was already ‘Wagnerised’.
Although no one now would doubt that, it is interesting to reflect that many,
especially from a French nationalistic standpoint, did so at the time. It is
also a decidedly individual variety of Wagnerism, so close to Wagner and yet so
utterly distant from Beethoven. Here, in 2014, the melos, the post-Amfortas pain, the motivic cohesion and propulsion,
the turns of orchestral phrase: all reminded us where we had come from, without
insisting that we were still there. Climaxes, as in Wagner, though not as in
his lesser successors, were sparing and carefully marshalled – but how they
registered when they came!
Such was, of course, very
much the due also of the soloists. No climax registered more overwhelmingly
than in the fourth act, thanks both to the orchestra and to the towering
portrayal of Pelléas by Stéphane Degout, every inch the equal (at least!) of
Simon Keenlyside in 2007. This Pelléas found himself, Tristan-like, in death; his
was a frank yet still subtle sexual awakening perhaps, given its pace, more
powerful still. Degout’s way with the French text was second to none; its
alchemic union with Debussy’s music was not the least of the wonders we heard. ‘Musical’
and ‘dramatic’ values were utterly as one, a hallmark of the performance as a
whole. Sandrine Piau’s pure-voiced Mélisande had her own tale to tell, or
perhaps not to tell; one was more enchanted than infuriated, but the
circularity that incites, and not always positively, was tangible throughout.
There was no need for Piau to raise her voice, no need to play the vulgar game
of so much actually-existing ‘opera’. Indeed, her ‘early music’ experience was
put to spellbinding use, for, whether it be actual influence or no, there is
also affinity in Debussy’s work with the earliest of opera. The ghosts – or prophecy
– of the stile rappresentativo made
their presence felt, without being forced upon us.
So, naturally, did the ghost
of Mussorgsky. One heard it in the bells of the fifth act, but also in the alluring,
yet slightly distancing delivery of so many vocal lines. Laurent Naouri’s Golaud
was not always vocally ‘beautiful’, but why should he have been? There was
something far more valuable here, dramatic truth: again, not in the sense of
vulgar display, but in the emergence of a tortured soul from Maeterlinck, the
vocal line, and the décor orchestral.
The modern cliché of ‘feeling his pain’ was in a better sense entirely
justified. Jérome Varnier hinted at a more interesting Arkel than one often
feels, managing adroitly the difficult balancing act between young voice and
old role. His psychological insights led nowhere, it seemed, and yet one knew
at some level their truth. I sensed grave responsibility, even if its nature
and grounding remained unspoken. Felicity Palmer’s Geneviève showed that artist’s
typically acute response to text as words and music, whilst Chloé Briot offered
a perky and, in the best sense, disconcerting Yniold.
Riddles were posed, then, yet
never answered. The ambiguity that lies at the heart of so much of Debussy’s
music, whatever ‘artistic’ label we seek to pin upon it, won out. For this was
a musical triumph through and through, reminding us of what opera might be, yet
sadly, so rarely is. Fauré was reported by Princess Edmond de Polignac as
having remarked after the premiere, ‘If that be music, then I have never
understood what music was.’ Quite.
