With each passing day, it seems ever more certain that Debussy’s
Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) will be considered not just the first
great opera of the twentieth century but also the most perfect
melding of music and drama in the modern era. There are, of
course, those who would quibble with such a suggestion, pointing
out that the work owes so much to Wagner’s chromatic harmonies
and so-called endless melody as to embrace more a Romantic
aesthetic than a modern one. But such arguments miss the larger
point: that Debussy’s only fully realized opera is far more a
harbinger of what was to come than an apotheosis of preexisting
modes, and not just musically.
Rather than suggest certainty and the triumph of various virtues,
this opera conveys doubt, impotence, confusion, and frustration.
There are no arias or set pieces here to express grand emotions;
loosely linked tableaux convey the blurry drama. Even the
love affair between Pelléas and Mélisande at the center of the
opera remains shrouded in uncertainty, unfulfilled if not
unrequited. And yet, of late, there have been those who seek to
redefine Pelléas in more concrete terms, often under the mistaken
impression that they are furthering the work’s “contemporary”
features. In this regard, Peter Sellars’s controversial L.A.
Opera production of 1995 springs to mind. Reimagining the quasi-medieval
Pelléas (which Debussy based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s
1892 Symbolist drama of the same name) as a
1990s morality play,
complete with verismotouches, Sellars basically wrecked