Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) was the composer's only completed excursion into full-fledged operatic form. Pelléas is the fulfillment of a creative urge going back to Debussy's youth as early as 1889, when he saw and was much impressed by a production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth. After a fairly successful premiere in Paris, Debussy continued revising his opera until 1907, by which time it was becoming known throughout Europe. Pelléas is not at all in Wagner's vein of music drama. Like Tristan, however, it presents upon the lyric stage a page out of the literature of medieval courtly love. Pelléas has a not-so-courtly extramarital affair with the wife of his own much older brother.

The libretto of Pelléas et Mélisande was derived from a stage play by the controversial Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, who was a contemporary of the composer. Maeterlinck's tragic drama is set forth in the sweetly haunting melodic phrases and pastel tonal colorations so characteristic of Debussy's impressionistic style. Debussy also took great care to fit his music to the phrasing of the French language.

This Sunday will be the fifth time over a span of three decades of opera broadcasting when I have presented Debussy's drame lyrique. It has a considerable discography. There's the live taping of the production of Pelléas from the 1963 summer opera festival at Glyndebourne in the UK, issued on compact disc in the twenty first century under the opera house's own proprietary label. That Glyndebourne Pelléas, with Vittorio Cui conducting the Royal Philharmonic, I broadcast on Sunday, October 25, 2010. Before that, on Sunday, September 22, 2002 came a Naïve recording of a live concert performance broadcast over Radio France from the Theatre des Champs Elyssés in March of 2000. Bernard Haitink was conducting the National Orchestra and Chorus of Radio France.

Today, however, we reach even farther back into lyric theater programming history on WWUH with a studio recording of Pelléas et Mélisande made by EMI in 1969/70. I have aired this particular Pelléas twice, first on EMI/Angel LPs on Sunday, October 13, 1985 and again when it was reissued on compact disc through Sony Classical on Sunday, September 27, 1992. Pierre Boulez was a renowned interpreter of the classical repertoire of the twentieth century. Boulez leads the Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Our Pelléas is English tenor George Shirley. Mélisande is the Swedish soprano Elizabeth Soderstrom.