The other production so far I've seen is the 1987 production with Jose Van Dam as Golaud and Francois Le Roux as Pelleas. Outside of the musical values and Van Dam's performance, I didn't care very much for the rather visually unattractive and dramatically remote production on the role. This Pelleas Et Melisande though I just loved. The opera doesn't have the most involving story in the world, but Debussy's music, which has Debussy's style but has a Wagnerian touch to it I think, is enough to haunt you for days. Now after this performance, I think my appreciation for Pelleas Et Melisande has just gone up a notch. The production visually does look stunning. The time and place of the performance is not clear, but you don't care when you see the striking blue, black and white costumes and the hypnotic, dream-like sets. It was almost as if you were watching a production of Wagner's Parsifal or something. The staging moves seamlessly from one scene to another and is overall thoughtful and heartfelt. The direction of the singers is also noteworthy. As is the lush orchestral playing and Pierre Boulez's beautifully judged and somewhat innovative. The performances are beyond praise. Alison Hagley, a wonderful Susanna in Le Nozze Di Figaro, takes your breath away as Melisande. She is young and attractive with a beautiful voice to match. Neill Archer's Pelleas is played with a lot of sincerity and I liked the youthful vigour in his sound. Kenneth Cox makes for a wise and gentle King Arkel and his deep sonorous voice just pours out of him with no extra effort. The Yniold of Samuel Burkey has some very difficult music to sing and does really wonderfully with it as well as with some convincing acting. Penelope Walker's Genevieve is excellent as well. But my top plaudits have to do to Donald Maxwell, whose Golaud is superb. His heavier and darker sound contrasts really well with the more youthful timbres of Archer and Hagley, and he makes this character really multifaceted, the love, jealousy and remorse of this character come through flawlessly in Maxwell's performance. Overall, this is an outstanding production. Okay the fact that the DVD has the production on two discs mean that the flow is broken, but you judge it solely on the quality of the performance, there is nothing really to criticise. 10/10 Bethany Cox
3 Reviews
Near Perfection
Colin-2356 January 2007
A small provincial Opera House asks a great conductor to put on his ideal production of the work which meant most to him. The result was a landmark in performance of this Opera that few were able to attend, but those that did were very privileged. The staging under Peter Stein is subtle and clever; It's realistic in the detail, acknowledging its 19th century foundations, yet set in a beautifully realised symbolic decor. The cast looks good and sounds good. Samuel Barkey as Yniold brings of the most challenging role for a child soprano in all of Opera. The only let down is that this is a transfer of a TV recording and the video quality is not of the best. The sound quality however is fine.
Mellow-Drama truned bitter satire
Dr_Coulardeau16 February 2021
Warning: Spoilers
CLAUDE DE BUSSY - PIERRE BOULEZ - PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE - 1992-2002
A classic in the operatic world, a classic of Debussy's period, a French composer of the end of the 19th century, and the beginning of the 20th century. The Third Republic, the full swing of imperial colonialism, and triumphant bourgeois capitalism. Opera was for the economic elite who tolerated more than liked the intellectual elite. They wanted in their Opera Garnier that had just been built very meshy dramatic, even mellow-dramatic stories to make them cry and be proud in their boudoirs or other drawing rooms when they could say they had cried in their opera boxes at this particular scene now and then in the fifth act, for example, the presentation of the baby to the dying mother.
It is amazing that some composers, who were under such enormous social pressure to produce such sad stories to make the bourgeois cry in his or her opera box, considered that living was more important than the rest. Some of them produced amazingly brilliant operas, not by the plot or story but exclusively by the music and the tempo of their storytelling. We have here such a classic that was able to go beyond the blasé, déja-vu, melodramatic subjects they had to deal with. Tearful fairy tales for wealthy and self-satisfied adults.
Debussy manages first of all to have some incredible politically-not-very-correct scenes. First the two scenes with the child who is a real boy and not a girl in disguise. The first scene in this production of a child just playing around a fountain is naïve and even innocent and pure. They have the young boy in some bathing trunks for this scene so that we know he is a boy. The second scene is very strong too because the child is used as a spy by his own father and at least brutalized a couple of times, and the child protests. This is good to deepen the character of the father, but it is also good to remind us children were manhandled all the time a century or more ago and that it was normal: "He who loves well punishes well," or if you prefer the English version: "Spare the rod and spoil the child." I also like the Jewish version: "Beat your children every morning before breakfast, if you don't know why they will." Today of course it has a completely different meaning, but a strong resurgence of such mistreatment of children was observed during the confinement periods over the last year and a half.
Another very strong element is the allusion to Samson and Delilah, but it loses all Biblical value due to the reversal of the hair story, and it becomes just funny strange more than funny ah-ah. But it is of course an allusion to Rapunzel, a Germanic fairy tale that gives to this scene an absolutely hilarious dimension, especially with the overdoing of this production, though it is in the text that her hair gets entangled in the bushes. We can also think of Pierre Abélard and Héloïse which is a standard reference in France for excessive romantic infatuation. And that's where the melodramatic tale has to be saved by the music and the singing. After all, they will all die as prey or predator, but the tempo is so slow, the singing is so stretched out in time that sounds like a lazy purring cat, and yet it finds some vigor in the words that come out of this continuously flowing leisurely and measured dirge, even in the most intense and dense scenes. The whole expressivity and art of this music and singing is this way some words are jumping out of the elegiac lament from all the characters.
To this particularly great conducting - thanks to Pierre Boulez - this production adds a setting that is mechanically evolving from one scene to the next with some moving panels, curtains, and eventually, stairs to go up or down, little more. Practically no furniture, no decoration, no props of any sorts. The setting is entirely based on such moving panels and backdrops that change the scene, though before each scene we have a projection of the score telling us the acts and the scenes, and the whole opera is practically always in dark shady atmospheres with an entirely black set with very little lighting and very little color. It is a descent to hell for the three main characters, but it is the other side of Hell, the backside of Hell; the side through which Dante came out of it. It is black inside, black outside and there is never any sort of light that could maybe show us the world also has daytime periods. Only one scene is on a sunny terrasse, but the sun is so ridiculously reduced to a big flashy yellow disk up in the sky at the back of the stage, held there by visible cables to let us know it is entirely artificial.
It is such scenes and such situational processing that make this opera redeemable. It has to be transcended from bourgeois Saturday night emotional outing to some bleak vision of what love, jealousy, hatred, and death mean in such an elite aristocratic bunch of monsters while peasants are dying on their beach, and in their caves, dying of starvation, mind you. And they tell us they are proud of being rich. The treatment of such scenes and the various situations turn - "Three old people dying in our cave. Don't make any noise lest you may wake them up!" - what was careless selfishness into discreet satire, but no more than a satirical tie pin on a rich tailored three-piece Sunday suit of a shopkeeper on Champs Elysées.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
A classic in the operatic world, a classic of Debussy's period, a French composer of the end of the 19th century, and the beginning of the 20th century. The Third Republic, the full swing of imperial colonialism, and triumphant bourgeois capitalism. Opera was for the economic elite who tolerated more than liked the intellectual elite. They wanted in their Opera Garnier that had just been built very meshy dramatic, even mellow-dramatic stories to make them cry and be proud in their boudoirs or other drawing rooms when they could say they had cried in their opera boxes at this particular scene now and then in the fifth act, for example, the presentation of the baby to the dying mother.
It is amazing that some composers, who were under such enormous social pressure to produce such sad stories to make the bourgeois cry in his or her opera box, considered that living was more important than the rest. Some of them produced amazingly brilliant operas, not by the plot or story but exclusively by the music and the tempo of their storytelling. We have here such a classic that was able to go beyond the blasé, déja-vu, melodramatic subjects they had to deal with. Tearful fairy tales for wealthy and self-satisfied adults.
Debussy manages first of all to have some incredible politically-not-very-correct scenes. First the two scenes with the child who is a real boy and not a girl in disguise. The first scene in this production of a child just playing around a fountain is naïve and even innocent and pure. They have the young boy in some bathing trunks for this scene so that we know he is a boy. The second scene is very strong too because the child is used as a spy by his own father and at least brutalized a couple of times, and the child protests. This is good to deepen the character of the father, but it is also good to remind us children were manhandled all the time a century or more ago and that it was normal: "He who loves well punishes well," or if you prefer the English version: "Spare the rod and spoil the child." I also like the Jewish version: "Beat your children every morning before breakfast, if you don't know why they will." Today of course it has a completely different meaning, but a strong resurgence of such mistreatment of children was observed during the confinement periods over the last year and a half.
Another very strong element is the allusion to Samson and Delilah, but it loses all Biblical value due to the reversal of the hair story, and it becomes just funny strange more than funny ah-ah. But it is of course an allusion to Rapunzel, a Germanic fairy tale that gives to this scene an absolutely hilarious dimension, especially with the overdoing of this production, though it is in the text that her hair gets entangled in the bushes. We can also think of Pierre Abélard and Héloïse which is a standard reference in France for excessive romantic infatuation. And that's where the melodramatic tale has to be saved by the music and the singing. After all, they will all die as prey or predator, but the tempo is so slow, the singing is so stretched out in time that sounds like a lazy purring cat, and yet it finds some vigor in the words that come out of this continuously flowing leisurely and measured dirge, even in the most intense and dense scenes. The whole expressivity and art of this music and singing is this way some words are jumping out of the elegiac lament from all the characters.
To this particularly great conducting - thanks to Pierre Boulez - this production adds a setting that is mechanically evolving from one scene to the next with some moving panels, curtains, and eventually, stairs to go up or down, little more. Practically no furniture, no decoration, no props of any sorts. The setting is entirely based on such moving panels and backdrops that change the scene, though before each scene we have a projection of the score telling us the acts and the scenes, and the whole opera is practically always in dark shady atmospheres with an entirely black set with very little lighting and very little color. It is a descent to hell for the three main characters, but it is the other side of Hell, the backside of Hell; the side through which Dante came out of it. It is black inside, black outside and there is never any sort of light that could maybe show us the world also has daytime periods. Only one scene is on a sunny terrasse, but the sun is so ridiculously reduced to a big flashy yellow disk up in the sky at the back of the stage, held there by visible cables to let us know it is entirely artificial.
It is such scenes and such situational processing that make this opera redeemable. It has to be transcended from bourgeois Saturday night emotional outing to some bleak vision of what love, jealousy, hatred, and death mean in such an elite aristocratic bunch of monsters while peasants are dying on their beach, and in their caves, dying of starvation, mind you. And they tell us they are proud of being rich. The treatment of such scenes and the various situations turn - "Three old people dying in our cave. Don't make any noise lest you may wake them up!" - what was careless selfishness into discreet satire, but no more than a satirical tie pin on a rich tailored three-piece Sunday suit of a shopkeeper on Champs Elysées.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
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