Pelléas et Mélisande, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 3 July 2026

Images: Tatjana Dachsel (from an earlier revival, with a different cast)

Golaud – Simon Keenlyside
Mélisande – Magdalena Kožená
Pelléas – Thomas Blondelle
Geneviève – Anne Sofie von Otter
Arkel – Stephen Milling
Yniold – Henrik Brandstetter
Doctor, Shepherd – David Oštrek

Director – Ruth Berghaus
Revival director – Katharina Lang
Designs – Hartmut Meyer

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

When, all too briefly, I lived in Berlin Mitte, I would regularly take a short walk, often mid-afternoon, to the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof. Taking their place in the firmament of great Berliners buried there, from Fichte and Hegel onwards, are Ruth Berghaus and Paul Dessau, director and composer in a properly Brechtian line. (From the house next to the cemetery, Brecht looked down at the graves of his predecessors, later joining them, and being joined by Helene Weigel.) It is little exaggeration to say that Berghaus saved the Berliner Ensemble from the mortmain of Brecht’s heirs, only to be replaced with their connivance and that of the ruling Socialist Unity Party. Berghaus’s most celebrated or at least most concentrated work in opera followed that period, when she worked with Michael Gielen in the 1980s at the Frankfurt Opera. Sadly, almost nothing of her opera work survives on film, but three or four productions remain in the repertoire: this Berlin Pelléas et Mélisande, her delightful Barber of Seville (also Berlin), Tristan und Isolde (Hamburg), and possibly Elektra (Mannheim).

The Pelléas was seen first in 1991, conducted by none other than Gielen; subsequent conductors have included Daniel Barenboim, Simon Rattle, and now François-Xavier Roth. This was its forty-third appearance performance at the Staatsoper: perhaps less than one might expect for so enduring a staging – compare that with over 350 for the Barber – but then the subtlety, depth, and absolute refusal to play to the gallery of Debussy’s opera have never appealed to sections of the operatic masses. (I once heard someone dismiss it as ‘boring’.) So much the worse for them. If they would not have been converted by this, then I suspect it would ever elude them; after all, we all have blind (deaf?) spots. The only sense in which Berghaus’s staging seems a little dated is perhaps in aspects of Hartmut Meyer’s designs: on reflection, not so much ‘dated’ as not quite of our time. Had I looked at them innocently, I might have guessed early twenty-first century rather than 1991. But they still function with great power as part of a musicodramatic whole, as if Roth and his cast had been involved from the outset: an astonishing achievement, when you think about it.

Like her fellow directors Harry Kupfer (now also in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof), Götz Friedrich (across the city in Zehlendorf), and Joachim Herz (in Leipzig, as one might expect), Berghaus was a student of that great adoptive Berliner Walter Felsenstein (miles away at Kloser, on the Baltic island of Hiddensee). They may have departed from Felsenstein in post-Brechtian interpretation, but they all built upon his equal concern for musical and dramatic elements (insofar as they may be separated at all). It is perhaps no coincidence that their stagings, where they survive, have often proved especially enduring. Or perhaps it is, for the sell-by-date of a staging stands in a complex relationship to its initial qualities. Nothing, ultimately, is forever—and some wonderful things can prove ultimately ephemeral.

 

Not this, in any case—and there must surely be something in the production, as well as in the intelligence and craft of those reviving it, that enables such integrated results even now. One certainly notices the stark colours, quasi-abstract yet never cold, from the outset, and one soon becomes emotionally and intellectually involved in the Allemonde they create. The lighting, for whom I can find no one directly credited, is at least as important and, if anything, still more powerful. The shadows it creates are terrifying, and all will attest to the dramatic role, literal and metaphorical, of shadow worlds in this opera. The near-stratospherically vertiginuous staircase, representing Mélisande’s tower far more directly than any more realistic attempt I have seen, provides sceno-dramatic focus for so much and offers terror of its own. Much is invested in every walk up and down, every place and occasion to take a seat, and the rest. Likewise Yniold’s ball: a childish toy, an object of motion, and something to follow Mélisande’s ring into the menacing well. Her deliberate, not careless, tossing of that ring early on into those depths offers a rare, momentary instance of lightness, even humour, albeit set within the ever-ominous, increasingly terrifying workings of Fate. 

Costumes and their apparent meaning, or at least amenability to be read, play intriguing balancing acts: a hint, perhaps of the Brechtian commedia dell’arte we know from Berliner Ensemble and Barber alike, but turned both early-French and symbolist. At times, Pelléas and Golaud appear almost interchangeable; at others, characters and situations win through and make their similar costumes irrelevant. The role of letters, their reading, and their consequences, becomes more concrete when they appear in large form, passed from character to character, and at times pinned on the wall (again, perhaps a Brechtian inheritance, but one transformed by another great artist at work). There is a strong feminist element too: Golaud’s rape of Mélisande horrifying, her pregnancy almost intolerably vivid (without male-gaze exploitation); and at least as disturbing as anything else, Arkel’s pursuit and lying with her, founded in the text but extended with well-nigh perfect directorial judgement.

The Staatskapelle Berlin has long experience of Debussy under Barenboim in particular. Roth’s reading brought similar structural virtues and alertness to colour, the later inevitably of a somewhat different nature, founded in his work with period instruments on this work. Wisely, there was no attempt merely to replicate that; we can all do without ever hearing ‘period style on modern instruments’ ever again. But that does not mean music-making, like theatre, cannot, or should not, be in a more intelligent sense ‘historically informed’. Timbre here played as important a structural role as anything else, pointing the way forward to Boulez, as malevolent harmonies, their progression, dramatic implication, and structural role led back to multiple Wagner dramas. Throughout the playing of the Staatskapelle was at least as outstanding as one could hope to hear anywhere.

 

Simon Keenlyside made the transition from Pelléas to Golaud a while ago, and continues to excel in this music and its drama (or should it be the other way around?) His triangle with Thomas Blondelle and Magdalena Kožená was as credible, revealing, and terrifying as any I can recall. Blondelle may have been indisposed, yet his Pelléas was fresh, alert, vivid and, listening between the lines, doomed. Kožená’s typically intelligent artistry, founded in profound communicative gifts, not least in French, proved almost horrifyingly moving. Anne Sofie von Otter’s Geneviève presided with similar intelligence—and perhaps the occasional hint of her youth and its travails. Stephen Milling’s Arkel was subtly yet powerfully sketched: a fascinating, compelling move from Hunding. No wonder Henrik Brandstetter’s Yniold received such warm and vigorous applause; so excellent was this performance from a soloist of the Tölzer Knabenchor, I confess I thought he must have been an adult singer successfully aping a treble. Even the small roles of Doctor and Shepherd were memorably assumed by David Oštrek.

This, then, was a highly moving and thought-provoking night in the theatre: in itself and for the questions it posed about stagings and their aesthetics, lineage, and longevity. I must try to see that Hamburg Tristan before it is too late.

Munich Opera Festival (3) - Pelléas et Mélisande, 22 July 2024

Prinzregententheater

Images: © Wilfried Hösl

Pelléas – Ben Bliss
Mélisande – Sabine Devieilhe
Golaud – Christian Gerhaher
Arkel – Franz-Josef Selig
Geneviève – Sophie Koch
Yniold – Felix Hofbauer
Doctor – Martin Snell
Shepherd – Pawel Horodyski

Director – Jetske Mijnssen
Set design – Ben Baur
Lighting – Bernd Purkrabek
Choreography – Dustin Klein
Dramaturgy – Ariane Bliss

Projektchor der Bayerischen Staatsoper (director: Franz Obermair)
Bayerisches Staatsorchester
Hannu Lintu (conductor)

Nine years ago, in this same theatre at this same festival, I saw Munich’s previous Pelléas et Mélisande: a staging by Christiane Pohle which I greatly admired, but  everyone else seemed to loathe. I am tempted to say ‘failed to understand’, but let us move on—to its successor, directed by Jetske Mijnssen. Perhaps it was not the best time to see this, only a fortnight after encountering Katie Mitchell’s feminist rethinking of the work in Aix, in its first revival. For me, there is nothing especially wrong with Mijnssen’s staging. It does pretty much what one would expect of a Pelléas, save perhaps for presenting a greater realism in place of its Symbolism.

In that lay my doubts. Not that there is anything wrong with that in principle; far from it. Yet without a change of perspective, or some other such idea, the point remained elusive: not in the sense that Pelléas can, must remain elusive, but rather suggesting an extended bourgeois parody of Tristan und Isolde, with which it of course has much in common. That would be a point of view, though not necessarily one I should be inclined to pursue (imagining nonetheless with a wry smile what Nietzsche, in Case of Wagner mode, would have made of Pelléas). What I think Mijnssen is getting at, suggested by her final act – in which the castle, whose rooms whether in the forest, by the stagnant pool, or elsewhere have provided the setting for all that has gone before, is stripped to its foundations – is a psychological claim that we are all ultimately like Mélisande, not least in our inability to know one another. Presumably the wooden boards relate also to the forest we never really see.

Following a realistic if sparing portrayal of early-twentieth-century costumes, furniture, and so on, Arkel’s words ‘C’est un pauvre petit être mystérieux comme tout le monde’ offer the backdrop for the entirety of this act. Having moved from a (beautifully danced) ball for the first scene, to this hospital bed for the close, often viewing Pelléas’s sick father in his bed, the tragedy encompasses all of us in a metaphysical sense far from untrue to the work. The observation – and execution – of Golaud’s chess game with his son Yniold, and Yniold’s resort to playing with his toys, perhaps as a way of trying to understanding what is happening, including a similar sweeping of the board and pieces, are suggestive and accomplished. Golaud’s striking of Yniold likewise offers a powerful moment.

Much else, especially with water – seen as rainfall as we enter the theatre, yet otherwise relegated until the close to a long, thin ‘pool’ at the front of the stage – seems to sit a little awkwardly between two stools. That the pools are more evident in the final scene, presumably closing in on the very foundations – in more than one sense – of castle and family is another good idea. But Pelléas’s reappearance – a ghost, a dream, or an actual reappearance? – to show Mélisande her child seems to come less from an alternative dimension than from an alternative production or concept. Perhaps I am missing something, given what seems in many ways an intelligent attempt to construct a whole from what is viewed, curtain falling after every scene, as a quasi-filmic succession of dramatic fragments.

An effort to construct a greater whole in theatrical time from quasi-modernist fragments, as opposed to starting with a whole and carving detail from it, seemed also to characterise Hannu Lintu’s way with Debussy’s score. At its best, Lintu’s direction conjured a wonderful translucency from the Munich orchestra; it did not want for dark malevolence when called for, either. My principal reservation related to what seemed – I am unsure whether it actually was – for scenes, perhaps acts too, to slow during their course. No one wants to rush through Pelléas, of course, quite the contrary; yet there were occasions when I felt momentum was in danger of being lost. This may, however, have been as much a matter of pauses between scenes on account of scene rearrangement, especially before the fifth and final act. By the same token, losing oneself in the forest is surely part of the musical experience, perhaps all the more so when we never really see it.

There are doubtless many ways to sing Mélisande, yet during her performance, Sabine Devieilhe had me convinced hers was, if not quite the only one, then the best. Her ease of communication, not only in the French language but in Debussy’s musical style, was effortlessly communicated for all to hear; it was simply as if she were speaking, and as clear as if that were the case too. Moreover, Devieilhe’s delivery of the text seemed indivisible from dramatic situation and imperative. French is a notoriously difficult language to sing; it would be difficult, unsurprisingly, to claim that all in the cast managed with such ease. Sophie Koch’s excellent Geneviève was of course an exception, leaving us to long for more.

That said, no one made a bad job of it either, and an age of ‘international casts’ brings advantages and disadvantages. Christian Gerhaher’s Golaud was unquestionably a fine, brutal character study. Some will doubtless have taken more to his hectoring way (at times), but it was rooted in his conception of Golaud’s sadism. Gerhaher showed the courage not to try to endear his character to anyone, without in any sense rendering him one-dimensional. To that, Ben Bliss’s boyish, mellifluous Pelléas proved an excellent foil, vocal and scenic communication offering ample justification for Mélisande’s preference. The dark ambiguity of Franz-Josef Selig’s Arkel cast due shadow over all. Last but far from least, Felix Hofbauer gave an outstanding performance as Yniold: not ‘for a boy’, but for anyone. As impressively acted as it was sung, this treble’s performance offered yet another feather in the cap for the ever-lauded Tölz Boys’ Choir. So in many respects, the fragments did add up to more.

Pelléas et Mélisande, Glyndebourne, 30 June 2018

Glyndebourne Opera House

  

Mélisande (Christiana Gansch), Pelléas (John Chest), Golaud (Christopher Purves)
Images: Richard Hubert Smith

Golaud – Christopher Purves

Mélisande – Christina Gansch

Geneviève – Karen Cargill

Arkel – Brindley Sherratt/Richard Wiegold

Pelléas – John Chest

Yniold – Chloé Briot

Doctor – Michael Mofidian

Shepherd – Michael Wallace

Stefan Herheim (director, lighting)

Philipp Fürhofer (designs)

Tony Simpson (lighting)

Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach (dramaturgy)

Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus master: Nicholas Jenkins)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Robin Ticciati (conductor)

Mélisande and Golaud

What might have been? Such was a thought that came to my mind more than once during this, the premiere of Glyndebourne’s new Pelléas et Mélisande. What might have been if Stefan Herheim had not changed his Konzept so late in the day? (I had actually forgotten about that until reminded during the interval, yet had already begun to wonder whether the production had been, especially for him, unusually rushed.) What might have been, had this magnificent statement of intent – one of the greatest opera directors alive – from Sebastian F. Schwarz’s intendancy not been followed by manœuvring to ensure that something more ‘English’ would thereafter prove the order of the day? What might have been, had this Pelléas been conducted by someone with a little more feeling for and understanding of Debussy’s score – it would not have been difficult – than Robin Ticciati? What, ultimately, might have been, were operatic culture in this country not so philistine and class-ridden? The good news – our lives are at present as full of good news as those we see in Pelléas – is that leaving the European Union will only serve to make everything far, far worse. C’est au tour de pauvres petites.

Mélisande and Pelléas

I was thinking, though – which is considerably better than not. Even if I could not help but wonder what Pelléas set on a spaceship would have been like – on the face of it, it sounds a brilliant idea – Glyndebourne’s Organ Room, from time to time a salle modulable yet never escapable, turned the action and responsibility squarely upon us, the audience. (If only the worst-behaved had noticed. Some laughed at the end. Laughed! It was not difficult to think of them as Faragistes.) It is specific, yes, but not exclusivist. Indeed, with its heavy wood-panelling in Philipp Fürhofer’s outstanding set design, it might almost be the Victorianised combination room of an Oxford or Cambridge college or even something from the Hanseatic world of Buddenbrooks. Ancestry and tradition weigh down on it, though, as seen on the severe wall portraits. It is about us, then, but also about how we have become who we are.

Geneviève (Karen Cargill), Mélisande, and Pelléas

‘Us’ in this sense means taking on aestheticism, asking ourselves as well as selfish fellow audience members what we think we are doing and why. These are people engaged in fruitless, fatal pursuits – but in this case they are also aesthetic pursuits. They try to paint new pictures and cannot. Why not? On account of tradition, or account of an aestheticism that has them retreat from lives, even try to turn their lives into art? It need not be either/or; it almost certainly is not. We see through their attempts at art, though: literally, for the paintings, if they exist at all, are beyond the fourth wall. Is not Mélisande, after all, a blank canvas? Men certainly tend to wish her so – as with Lulu. It is just a hobby, though, is it not? Something for rich people to do to while away their time, perhaps like building an opera house so that ‘your’ – the possessive is important – wife might sing in it. Pelléas might seem different; he is, here, an artist, a younger Debussyan dandy rather than the elderly huntsman trying to be something he is not and certainly was not. (Are Golaud and Pelléas to be identified with the composer? Perhaps, perhaps not. If you do not want ambiguity, this is not the opera for you.) But is he? Is he really? Or does he just wear summer clothes in a darkened room? Perhaps his aestheticised life is still more dishonest; perhaps ours are too. Perhaps, peut-être. ‘Je pars peut-être demain.’

We do that to children too, especially those of us who claim to be shocked by the very suggestion. Germaine Greer has fallen off the rails spectacularly in recent years, but her insight that we are all paedophiles still holds; indeed it holds more strongly than ever, if less so for those of us unburdened by ‘family’. And so, when Yniold – yes, I too had been mumbling that I should have preferred to hear a treble – is unmasked as a woman all along, with locks aspiring to those of Mélisande, we are obliged to ask ourselves questions. The violence we see, feel aestheticised and sublimated all around us suddenly becomes, as the interval comes, something we can no longer ignore. Those blows that never quite led anywhere come to seem something more than ‘boring’.

By the same token, however, should they perhaps not have become something a little sooner? When does representing boredom become merely boring? I am not sure that Herheim, usually a master at treading of multiple lines, does not trip, even fall, in this case. An object lesson in that respect was Christiane Pohle’s revelatory post-Beckett staging for the Bavarian State Opera. Meaninglessness was the thing there, not ennui as such; the production was all the better for it. I cannot help but wonder whether the negative reaction it received was laced with misogyny – and/or perhaps a journalistic lack of understanding of ‘modern’ theatre. It was, at any rate, difficult not to ask such a question in a work that focuses on abusive behaviour and yet here, at least, attempts to avoid addressing that behaviour.

Golaud and Mélisande

Later on, when it becomes more explicit, when we see that Pelléas and Mélisande literally stage their own death – is it actually a real death at all, or just an act – everything falls into place. Mélisande has already – in fact she did so straight away – ease(le)d out Geneviève. The family, closing ranks, would clearly avenge itself, so perhaps playing at Tristan and Isolde is all that it is left. It has not been an easy road; nor, surely, should it have been. However, just a little relief from the claustrophobia might actually render it more powerful. As things stand, there remains more than a little suspicion that earlier tedium is a handy, even suggestive excuse, yet perhaps nevertheless an excuse in part. Bloodied clowns certainly make their point; this sick Liebestod from the Theatre of the Absurd has still not left my imagination. Yniold, now herself, visits the Organ Room as a guest, an opera-goer. It makes the point, yes, but might it not be better left unmade?

Tradition is, after all, sometimes necessary, or at least helpful – as the Roman Catholic Church would rightly tell us. It often provides an important counterweight to literalism, to fundamentalism. Collective wisdom enables development; each one of us need not re-invent the wheel. (Aesthetes breathe a collective sigh of relief.) As Pierre Boulez pointed out in challenging – though not, as some have claimed, denying – tradition, ‘a strong personality will inevitably transform it [tradition].’ That still leaves the problem, of course, of what to do about personalities that are not ‘strong’ or do not wish to be. ‘Ne me touchez-pas! Ne me-touchez-pas!’ Is the conclusion here bleak or weak? Is it too easy to say that it is what we want it to be? Doubtless. Is it what we will make of it? By definition it more or less has to be, but is that simply to evade the question? And is that wrong? Debussy, after all, is the unsurpassed master of musical ambiguity.

Tradition, or at least learning, would certainly have benefited the conducting, at best featureless, at worst frankly jejune, we heard from Ticciati. Debussy’s genius shone through, although more the debt to Wagner than what distinguished him from the old Klingsor. That, however, was surely the doing of the London Philharmonic, drawing when it could on its vast reserves of operatic and symphonic experience. Alas, such uninspired musical direction – bleeding titbits of Wagner for people who dislike Wagner – did not help the singers either. Christopher Purves was presented as an older Golaud and sang as such: nothing wrong with it. His anger was wonderfully sublimated until it was not. It would have gained greater musical context, though, as would the rest of the cast’s, had there been – well, greater musico-dramatic context. Christina Gansch and John Chest likewise offered good vocal performances as the doomed lovers, but something seemed to be missing. (Should something be missing? Perhaps. Again, however, it is a fine line.) Richard Wiegold was an undoubted hero of the evening, singing from a box whilst an indisposed Brindley Sherratt acted out the role of Arkel below. Karen Cargill offered rich-toned benevolence – I think – as Geneviève; as so often in this role, one wished there were more to hear.  There was much to admire from Chloé Briot, Michael Mofidian, and Michael Wallace, although it was difficult not to think that all concerned might have benefited from greater certainty and clarity elsewhere.

Was it worth it, then, to have annoyed the right people, bluff English purveyors of ‘common sense’? Of course. They will not like Pelléas anyway; if they think they do, it is because they have not remotely understood it and think of it as vaguely ‘beautiful’. Is it enough to have annoyed them? Of course not. Does this represent Herheim’s best work? No. Does the production stand in need of revision? Very much so. Does it also need a conductor with a little more idea what might be going on and what might be at stake? Still more so. And yet, I have been thinking about it ever since, and show no sign of stopping. In the meantime, hasten to see Barrie Kosky’s Berlin production and, should it ever be revived, Pohle’s Munich staging. There are always, as we æsthetes/æstheticists will tell you, great recordings too. Desormière or Karajan? Boulez or Abbado? Why choose? With Boulez, you can even see Peter Stein before he lost it. ‘What,’ you might ask, ‘is “it”,’? Such is surely part of what Herheim’s production is about – perhaps, peut-être, still more so than he intended.

Pelléas et Mélisande, Komische Oper, 15 October 2017

Komische Oper, Berlin

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Mélisande (Nadja Mchantaf)

Arkel – Jens Larsen

Golaud – Günter Papendell

Pelléas – Domink Köninger

Geneviève – Nadine Weissmann

Yniold – Gregor-Michael Hoffmann

Mélisande – Nadja Mchanthaf

Doctor, Shepherd – Samuli Taskinen

Barrie Kosky (director)

Klaus Grünberg (set designs, lighting)

Anne Kuhn (set designs)

Dinah Ehm (costumes)

Johanna Wall (dramaturgy)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin

Jordan de Souza (conductor)

Mélisande

And still they come. I went a good few years, a good few too many years, without seeing Pelléas et Mélisande in the theatre. More recently, I have seen several productions, every one of which has had something different to tell me, some different way of moving me – whilst all remaining very much faithful to what, in idealist metaphysical mode, I might term the inviolate spirit of the work. I might not, of course, but perhaps the temptation to do so tells us something about Pelléas and not just about me. Like Tristan und Isolde – another of the relatively small number of works Barrie Kosky said he was determined to direct, and has also ticked off – there seems to be no point in trying to turn Pelléas into something that it is not; like Tristan, there seems relatively little to do; like Tristan, it seems quite resistant to many typical directorial interventions. None of those is necessarily a categorical statement; such would be bizarre. (Indeed, such might make me something akin to a fevered writer for the Revue wagnérienne. Whatever my failings and/or eccentricities, I am not sure that I am quite there yet.) If something works, it works; and, like many, I can hardly wait to see what Stefan Herheim, present in the audience last night, will do with Debussy’s sole completed opera next year at Glyndebourne.

I shall have to, though, as shall we all. Barrie Kosky’s new production for the Komische Oper certainly proved plenty to keep us going in the meantime. Not, of course, that we should view it in anything other than its estimable own right. At its heart stands Arkel’s Allemonde castle. It is evoked clearly, claustrophobically, chillingly, and perhaps above all, simply. At the centre of the stage, concentric circles turn to reveal something that is always the same, moving yet not moving, just like the characters it transports. There is no way out; nor does anyone, save of course for Mélisande, seek one. (Whether Pelléas does in the opera is a moot point; I do not think he does here. Indeed he remains in the gallery of frozen souls, not unlike a Bluebeard collection, at the close: dead, yes, but was he, were they, always so? What on earth, or beyond, might it mean to be alive here?) Characters move simply, repetitively, if not quite so repetitively, certainly not with such meaninglessness, as in Christiane Pohle’s Munich production (roundly dismissed, I am tempted to suggest misogynistically, by ignorant journalists and audiences alike, but an unforgettable piece of post-Beckettian theatre). Parallels are drawn, easily discerned, given the essential simplicity of the pared-down action; for instance, Mélisande’s arms, her form as yet unseen, encircle – irony here, ‘Ne me touchez pas!’, doubled when it becomes clear quite how fearful she is of being touched – Pelléas at the opening of their final scene together just as they had Golaud at the start. She touches both, though barely. What is she doing? Finding her way? Through fear? Through the forest? Through a miserable, impossible life?

Mélisande's arms encircling Golaud ((Günter Papendell)

And there is no doubting her abuse. The fear is palpable, great tribute to the extraordinary performance given by Nadja Mchantaf, a worthy successor to her Rusalka for the same company and director. In context, many similar themes emerged, for that too had proved a highly concentrated piece of musical drama on Kosky’s – and everyone else’s – part. The fear is well-founded too, for in this world of highly damaged, highly damaging people, Mélisande will suffer horrendous violence. She has done before: you can see it in her eyes. Indeed, Mchantaf’s acting alone would be worthy of any stage: not, of course, that it really makes sense here to speak of ‘acting alone’. When she and Pelléas finally have their moment of sexual congress, she shows her ‘enjoyment’; but is that just what she has learned? Is that, in a sense, what many women have learned? What does it mean to be penetrated by the male gaze, as well as otherwise, on stage? Golaud’s quite shocking violence towards this heavily pregnant woman, his wife, the mother of ‘his’ child, having discovered her with his brother, now dead, is all the more shocking for taking its leave within a general increase of violence – which here seems to mean much the same as ‘action’ – following the interval. The gears of ‘fate’ grind, following relative nothingness. Yet what does it mean for us to label them as ‘fate’? Are we not thereby abdicating responsibility? Blood tells its own story, not just, or even principally, of childbirth, although it certainly includes that. We remember that disturbing moment, earlier on, when Mélisande had laughed childishly with Pelléas, at throwing away – here swallowing – her ring. Again, we both fall upon ideas of fate, and know that we should not. The final turning of the set’s concentric circles, the final display of things just as they always were, yet worse, brings the curtain down. The curtain, having been there all along, reminds us that our aestheticisation of such deeds is at least part of the problem; or at least, it is in itself unlikely to prove to be a solution. Does a performance of Pelléas make us in the audience better people? Who knows? Probably not, however. Things carry on as they always did.

Golaud, Pelléas (Dominik Köninger), Mélisande

If Mchantaf were, perhaps necessarily, first among equals, then that should be taken in its fullest, dialectical sense. Yet again, the Komische Oper under Kosky’s Intendanz – this certainly includes the work of other directors – showed itself to be a true company. Günther Paperdell and Dominik Köninger showed a near ideal blend of similar physicality – deliriously so at one point, the one almost assuming the role, or rather the behaviour of the other – and of difference, Dinah Ehm’s splendid, simple costumes very much contributing to that dramatic end. Theirs was a dialectical relationship, more strongly so than I can otherwise recall. Jens Larsen’s Arkel proved frighteningly creepy: finely sung, and repellent in his assault of Mélisande, all the more so for his grandfatherly concern. We knew whose rules, doubtless inherited, prevailed in this hopeless patriarchy. Nadine Weissmann’s Geneviève proved deeply compassionate yet – quite rightly – powerless. What could she do? Samuli Taskinen, a member of the Opera Studio, impressed in his small roles. And Gregor-Michael Hoffmann offered a sensational performance as Yniold: crystal clear of tone and words, effortlessly at home, or so it seemed, in a fiendishly difficult role both in work and in performance. It was an extraordinary thing indeed to learn afterwards that this was that outstanding treble’s first role on stage; it will surely not be his last.

Golaud and Yniold (Gregor-Michael Hoffmann)

Of course, so much of the drama, just as in Tristan, in whose waves Pelléas is soaked almost as much as it is as those of Parsifal, lies in the orchestra. It was on splendid form throughout, textures admirably clear yet never too clear. I always find myself in performances of this opera asking myself whether it is a more or less Wagnerian performance; I seem unable not to. The strange thing, however, is that, however different the path taken, the balance between Wagner and not-Wagner seems to end up being about the same; or at least that is so, in a performance worth its salt. This performance certainly was, wisely led by Kapellmeister, Jordan de Souza. There was no doubting his knowledge and understanding of Debussy’s tantalising, treacherous score, nor of his ability to communicate to both orchestra and audience. Again, I look forward to hearing more from him. For ultimately, as always, it is the music of those interludes that lingers longest, most insidiously in my mind. There is something almost evil about it; for it is the music of fate, of Allemonde, perhaps even, at one remove, of the Revue wagnérienne.

Pelléas et Mélisande, Vienna State Opera, 18 June 2017

Vienna State Opera

Images: Wiener Staatsoper  / Michael Pöhn
Golaud (Simon Keenlyside)

Arkel – Franz-Josef Selig

Geneviève – Bernarda Fink

Pelléas – Adrian Eröd

Golaud – Simon Keenlyside

Mélisande – Olga Bezsmertna

Yniold – Maria Nazarova

Doctor – Marcus Pelz

Pelléas’s father – Andreas Bettinger

Marco Arturo Marelli (director, set designs, lighting)
Dagmar Niefind (costumes)

Silke Bauer (assistant set designer)

Anna-Sophie Lienbacher (assistant costume designer)

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Martin Schebesta)

Vienna State Opera Orchestra

Alain Altinoglu (conductor)

Debussy is like Gluck. No, of course he is not; he would have been mortally offended had you told him so. Indeed, Debussy regarded Gluck as having been responsible for killing off Ramellian opera, delivering a lethal injection of Teutonic poison to a flourishing genre. What does not kill you makes you stronger, of course, as Debussy himself would, on a good day, have attested concerning Wagner at least – and certainly in Pelléas et Mélisande. But to return to Debussy and Gluck, their operas do, it seems to me, have something very important in common, or at least their reception does. Pelléas and Gluck’s reform operas are esteemed by all those who take opera seriously as drama, and disdained or simply ignored by many for whom opera means something else. Their admittedly very different aesthetics are quite clear, moreover, that playing to the gallery is the last thing in which musical drama should be engaging. True, there are occasional hangovers in Gluck, although they should not be exaggerated, but there is not a single case, not one single case, in Debussy’s sole completed opera.

Golaud and Yniold 

Moreover, what Debussy said, in his article, ‘Pourquoi j’ai écrit Pelléas,’ could be taken, with a little adjustment, for what Gluck in his great reforming works was trying to do (even if, yes, we know the Preface to Alceste was written by his librettist, Calzabigi). Debussy explicitly praised the symbolism of Maeterlinck’s play, which might seem to be – and indeed is – a very different thing, but, ‘despite its dream-like atmosphere’, he was drawn to it because it ‘contains far more humanity than those so-called “real-life documents”. Like Wagner, a mediating influence between the two in certain ways, myth was the thing. And somewhat like Wagner, if not so much like Gluck, Debussy thrived on ‘an evocative language whose sensitivity could be extended into music and into the décor orchestral’. Those of us who love it shake our heads in bafflement at its neglect. Perhaps, though, just perhaps, there is something to be said for every performance remaining a special event – just as with, say, Iphigénie en Tauride. If an opera made it on to the list of works Boulez conducted it is, after all, an unquestionable sign of quality.

 

Mélisande (Olga Bezsmertna) and Pelléas (Adrian Eröd)

Is, then, this new production from the Vienna State Opera able to live up to such expectations? (I shall pass over less quickly than I probably should a tired and emotional British tourist I overheard during the interval, boasting of having fallen asleep in such a ‘boring’ opera. ‘Can’t they just get it on?’) Musically, yes, and the production did not do too badly either; I have certainly seen much worse. (I shudder to recall the most recent, which is not to say very recent at all, production Covent Garden brought in.) Marco Arturo Marelli’s staging makes an effort, is clearly the result of consideration concerning the drama and what is going on, or what we might think is going on. If I am not entirely convinced that everything coheres, if I think that perhaps a stronger single, even if partial, line might have worked better, there is enough to make one think – and, yes, feel.

Arkel (Franz-Josef Selig)
and Geneviève (Bernarda Fink)

In what seems to me a relatively bold move, more unusual than you might think, there is a general sense of Ibsen, of bourgeois drama: not just the costumes, but the internalised, familial – and extra-familial – claustrophobia. It is not, perhaps, how one initially thinks of, or feels, the work, but it is an interesting standpoint that certainly has things to tell us. Pelléas’s father is seen on stage, initially in bed, but actually becoming more of a real dramatic character when his illness lifts. When Arkel has Mélisande kiss him, the other old man joins them, and there is something discomfitingly paedophiliac to the whole, strange episode. Whether it quite fits with the rest of what we see and hear is another matter; the attribution of darker desires to Arkel, at least in that particular case, is becoming a little clichéd by now. An important, indeed the important, focal point to much of the action is a boat. Not only do Pelléas and Mélisande go sailing in it, Mélisande lies in it when she sings her extraordinary song; it becomes the ladder Yniold climbs; Golaud hurls it away in jealous anger; and, in the strange ending, Mélisande sails away in it with womenfolk seemingly transformed from servants into spirits. Again, the almost Lohengrin­-like (although not in gender!) conclusion intrigues, and offers an important contrast with the important stage roles played earlier by Golaud’s henchmen, who clearly threaten Pelléas during their walk. But the bright skied conclusion sits a bit oddly, again, with the rest. Is it just death? If so, would it not, especially in this context, be better just to leave it as death? Marelli’s staging is at least having one ask such questions, although I found the 2015 Munich production from Christiane Pohle – universally and, to my mind, quite bafflingly condemned – a stronger, more coherent treatment, hauntingly provocative in its Beckettian inheritance.

Perhaps, however, I am wrong, for, in an interesting programme interview, conductor Alain Antinoglu, having acknowledged – and how could one not? – the darkness in the piece, describes the story as a ‘path from darkness to light’. Perhaps. I suppose there is something to be said for that musically, and Altinoglu certainly imparted a Lohengrin-without-the-tragedy sense to the conclusion. More importantly, he judged the ebb and flow, the colours and the shadows, very well indeed. Those raw Wagnerian moments made their Tristanesque and Parsifalian points, not only musically, but the phrases, the paragraphs, and indeed the nature of the musical language quite rightly developed differently too. The playing drawn from the Vienna State Opera Orchestra (the Vienna Philharmonic in all but name) was quite outstanding, colours shifting as imperceptibly as the ebb, the non-ebb, the flow and the non-flow, of the drama – and non-drama.

 

Arkel, Geneviève, Golaud, and Pelléas's father
(Andreas Bettinger)

With no disrespect intended to the rest of the cast, a particular cause of interest here lay in Simon Keenlyside’s transition from Pelléas to Golaud. He managed it as expertly as you might imagine – if anything more so. The jealousy, the vulnerability, the flawed masculinity, and the way with both the French language and the specific quality of Debussy’s lines: all were there, as if he had been performing the role all his life. Keenlyside is not one, of course, only to concentrate on his own part, so in a sense one might argue that earlier performances had helped prepare him, but this was a splendid achievement by any standards. Adrian Eröd made for a well-contrasted Pelléas: again, clearly flawed, but more mysteriously so. As with all of the cast, the style of vocal delivery was spot on: doubtless testament both to individual artistry and to Altinoglu’s overall control. As Mélisande, Olga Bezsmertna judged the fine balance between wide-eyed ingénue and the merely annoying with great skill, the competing demands of character development and character stasis equally well balanced. I am not sure that I had heard Franz-Josef Selig in French repertoire before; his wise humanity shone through just as clearly, if, appropriately, with a different touch of ambiguity, as if he had been singing Gurnemanz or Sarastro. I often tend to forget how small the role of Geneviève actually is, so important is she to the drama. Bernarda Fink nevertheless shone, in the most un-showy of ways. My preference for a treble Yniold is not ideological, and in practice, it can go horribly wrong. Nevertheless, I find, on stage, a woman impersonating a child like this a bit odd (especially when I have known it done otherwise). Yniold here had a considerably greater, more peculiar role than usual: hyperactive, damaged, and very interestingly, consoling Golaud at the close and preventing him from taking his life. Maria Nazarova did an excellent job at all of that. This is no criticism of her performance as such, but I wish I had not been made to think of Janette Krankie.

Pelléas et Mélisande, LSO/Rattle, 10 January 2016

Barbican Hall

Mélisande – Magdalena Kožená

Pelléas – Christian Gerhaher
Golaud – Gerald Finley
Arkel – Franz-Josef Selig
Geneviève – Bernarda Fink
Doctor, Shepherd – Joshua Bloom

Peter Sellars (director)

Hans-Georg Lenhart (assistant director)
Ben Zamora (lighting)

London Symphony Chorus (chorus director: Simon Halsey)

London Symphony Orchestra
Sir Simon Rattle (conductor)

When, o when, will someone put Peter Sellars and his compendium of clichés out of our misery? His doubtless ‘well-meaning’ productions may have reached their nadir with ENO’s The Indian Queen; but we can nevertheless do without a Pelléas et Mélisande which exchanges metaphysics and textual subtlety for EastEnders-style melodrama. The plot really is not the thing here, and it certainly does not benefit from absurd exaggeration. Entirely ignoring the work, Sellars has Mélisande and Pelléas all over each other at an early stage; their kiss therefore counts for little. Arkel seems primarily to be a pervert who cannot keep his hands off his grandson’s wife. Many seem to be convulsed by trembling, indicating ailments about which I should rather not speculate; poor Mélisande’s death is more graphic than any semi-staging is likely ever to attempt again. For some reason, all of this takes place in an environment marked out by multi-coloured neon lights: how Debussyan! And yes, you have doubtless guessed: the lights eventually all go off.

 

All of the cast throw themselves into Sellars’s bizarre vision with admirable dedication. If it could work, they would have made it do so. One could hardly not respect their artistry, even when, as in Magdalena Kožená’s case, the artist seemed miscast. At her best, she showed up intriguing, twitching correspondences with Kundry. Her flagrantly sexual performance of ‘Mes long cheveux’, however much it adhered to Sellars’s apparent concept, could hardly convince, given the doubtless frustrating presence of the opera ‘itself’. Christian Gerhaher and Gerald Finley both gave ardent performances, Finley’s sadism as Golaud especially chilling; again, though, I could not help but think that, however beautifully he sang, Gerhaher was not ideally cast in the role, or at least in the production. His conception certainly seemed more Romantically poetic than that of Sellars; admittedly, it would be difficult not to be. Franz-Josef Selig gave a wonderfully compassionate performance vocally; what a pity he was saddled with such incongruous acts to perform on stage. Bernarda Fink and Joshua Bloom were both very impressive in their smaller roles too, as was the Yniold (not credited), quite the best I have seen and heard.

 

I was surprised, especially before the interval, by Simon Rattle’s conducting. There could be little doubting the excellence of the LSO’s performance, although I should have expected Rattle to draw at times softer playing from them. Yet Rattle, whose Debussy has in my experience always been very much Debussy to be reckoned with, too often left phrases hanging, seemingly reluctant to insist upon a longer, Wagnerian line. He certainly brought out Wagnerian echoes, as much of Tristan as of Parsifal, much to the score’s benefit; yet they did not always come together as tightly as they might; it was almost as if he wished to portray Debussy as negatively Wagnerian (that is, an heir to Nietzsche’s ‘greatest miniaturist’). Coherence was greater later on, although I could not really reconcile myself to the almost Puccini-like vulgarity of the climaxes. Surely if there is one thing Debussy avoids at almost any cost, it is playing to the gallery. Perhaps, though, Rattle was, not entirely unreasonably, offering an interpretation tailored to his director’s concept. His 2007 Pelléas for the Royal Opera was nothing like this at all. I hope we shall have chance to hear him – and indeed the LSO – in this opera again in better circumstances.

 

 

Rattle spoke movingly at the beginning of his esteem for Pierre Boulez, to whom the performance was dedicated.