Pelléas et Mélisande

Golaud… is perfect for Gerald Finley’s vocal weight and dramatic edge. The Philadelphia Inquirer
With his potent, incisive baritone, Mr. Finley’s Golaud was the most fully realized character—sexual, male and raging against fate and death. Wall Street Journal
He is that rare operatic artist who even when singing lyrically, sounds like he is speaking with the directness of a great actor. New York Times

Composer: Claude Debussy
Librettist: A slight alteration of Maeterlinck’s tragedy
Venue and Dates:

New York Metropolitan
17, 20, 23, 29 December and 1 January 2011 (mat)

Conductor: Sir Simon Rattle
Production: Jonathan Miller
Set Designer: John Conklin
Costume Designer: Clare Mitchell
Lighting Designer: Duane Schuler
Performers:

Mélisande : Magdalena Kozena
Geneviève : Felicity Palmer
Pelléas : Stephane Degout
Golaud: Gerald Finley
Arkel : Willard White
The Doctor: tba
Yniold : tba

Notes:There will be three broadcasts of this production on Sirius Radio (the Met Opera station): Thursday 23 December, 8:00pm, Wednesday 29 December, 8:00pm, Saturday 1 January, 12:00pm

From the New Yorker

People used to complain that the Met was leery of bringing in superstar maestros to share the schedule with James Levine. Now, they don’t. Jonathan Miller’s production of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” returns with a new conductor, Simon Rattle, who, in an overdue Met début, leads a distinguished cast—Magdalena Kožená, Stéphane Degout, Gerald Finley, Felicity Palmer, and Willard White.

Photo Gallery

Courtesy of Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

What the critics say

Mike Silverman, Associated Press, 18 December 2010 (various papers)

Simon Rattle leads ‘Pelleas’ in Met debut
Add Simon Rattle to the list of eminent conductors who have made belated debuts at the Metropolitan Opera.

The British maestro, his trademark mop of frizzy white hair bobbing enthusiastically above the orchestra pit, led the company in a revival of Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande” on Friday night.

Setting an unusually leisurely pace that stretched the performance, including intermissions, to more than four hours, Rattle drew some magnificent playing from the orchestra. The crystalline textures of Debussy’s impressionistic score stood out with clarity and precision, and the dramatic tension grew steadily as the opera headed toward its tragic climax.

“Pelleas” is a one-of-a-kind work, adapted by Debussy from a play by Maurice Maeterlinck and written in the composer’s style of ever-shifting chromaticism. The elusive score is perfectly suited to the story, a timeless, symbol-laden love triangle about unhappy people trapped in an ominous world of shadow and foreboding.

Most mysterious of all is Melisande, who in the opening scene is abandoned and weeping in a forest. She is found by the much older Golaud, a prince who marries her and brings her home, only to see her apparently fall in love with his half brother Pelleas, another figure of immense melancholy. Goaded by jealousy, Golaud kills Pelleas, and Melisande dies in childbirth, leaving her guilt-ridden husband uncertain whether she had been unfaithful.

For the opera to weave its fragile spell, it needs vocally and dramatically charismatic performers, and the Met production met that test in the three key roles.

Mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena, who is married to Rattle, captured the look of the lovely, doomed Melisande with her tall, willowy figure. She sang with haunting allure, especially in her unaccompanied song as she sits by her window combing her hair – though when she let it hang down, it was too short for Pelleas to caress as called for in the text.

With his strong, at times achingly beautiful baritone sound, Gerald Finley made Golaud’s transition from tenderness to rage painful to witness. As the wistful Pelleas, baritone Stephane Degout radiated a diffident charm and sang with growing romantic fervor.

There was strong casting in supporting roles, from baritone Willard White as the men’s grandfather, King Arkel; mezzo Felicity Palmer as their mother, Genevieve; and boy soprano Neel Ram Nagarajan as Golaud’s son, Yniold. The latter plays a vital role in the opera’s most disturbing scene, when the tormented Golaud lifts the boy up to Melisande’s window and forces him to spy on her and Pelleas.

The production, by Jonathan Miller, updates the action from vaguely medieval times to an oppressively grand 19th-century manor house and gives us glimpses of numerous members of the household who aren’t in the original libretto. Despite the use of a turntable for quick scene changes, there are seemingly unnecessary delays in both the first and third acts.

Whatever the longueurs of the evening, it was good to see the Met engage Rattle, who is chief conductor and artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic. Under general manager Peter Gelb, the company has opened its arms to a number of famous conductors who previously had not appeared at the house.

Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, 19 December 2010

Real Strangeness in Imaginary Kingdom

It took until he was 55, but Simon Rattle finally made his Metropolitan Opera debut on Friday night. Mr. Rattle, who has been a major conductor for 30 years and the artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic since 2002, led the season premiere of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” a revival of Jonathan Miller’s gothic 1995 production. At the end of this four-hour evening, some of the most ardent participants in the ovation for Mr. Rattle were the musicians in the orchestra pit, who stood and heartily applauded.

In perhaps the most impressive performance I have heard Mr. Rattle give, he drew lush and plangent yet clear-textured and purposeful playing from the great Met orchestra. He was blessed with what he described in an interview on “Charlie Rose” on Thursday night as a “dream cast”: the elegant French baritone Stéphane Degout as Pelléas, the alluring Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena (Mr. Rattle’s wife) as Mélisande, and the intelligent Canadian baritone Gerald Finley as Prince Golaud.

Debussy’s mysterious opera, first performed in Paris in 1902, is an elusive and unconventional music drama. Adapted from the Symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck about the troubled family of an aged king in an imaginary realm, “Pelléas et Mélisande” is a masterpiece of ambiguity. Some conductors bring out the Wagnerian harmonic textures and dark orchestral colorings of the work. When called for, there was Wagnerian richness and impressionist fluidity in Mr. Rattle’s performance.

Yet, in the manner of Pierre Boulez, an acclaimed exponent of this work, Mr. Rattle kept the textures lucid and focused, even when Debussy’s chords were thick with notes. Debussy tucked some piercing dissonances inside these milky harmonies, and Mr. Rattle brought them out through the pinpoint accuracy he elicited from the inspired Met players.

For all his intelligence, though, Mr. Rattle is an intensely dramatic musician. I have never heard a “Pelléas” in which the extremes of the score came through so vividly. You could sense the simmering below the deceptively subdued surface.

In the first scene the melancholic middle-aged Prince Golaud, who is lost in a forest, chances upon Mélisande, a weeping young woman full of fears and secrets. Mr. Rattle conducted the parallel orchestra chords that open the opera and the modal themes that slowly unfold with haunting serenity at a daringly slow tempo.

In an impulsive act that is neither depicted nor explained, Mélisande marries the older Golaud. Yet, from the time they meet, Pelléas and Mélisande are drawn to each other, a sensual current that runs through this restless score. In Act IV, when they can no longer constrain their illicit attraction and confess their love, Mr. Rattle brought out all of the music’s teeming intensity and fitful shifts.

Mélisande is a good role for the lovely Ms. Kozena. The tenderness of her singing could not disguise the inner emotional chaos of this strange young woman: a victim, yes, but also a compulsive liar who remains an enigma to the end. Mr. Degout brought a warm, youthful voice and stylistic insight to Pelléas, conveying the character’s tragic path from the uptight younger half-brother of an imperious prince to a hopeless romantic with uncontrollable longing for his brother’s wife.

Mr. Finley, who triumphed at the Met in the title role of John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic,” was superb as Golaud. While not overpowering, his voice is dark, virile and generous. He is that rare operatic artist who even when singing lyrically, sounds like he is speaking with the directness of a great actor.

The bass-baritone Willard White made a poignant Arkel, the old king. The mezzo-soprano Felicity Palmer gave a wrenching performance as Geneviève, the mother of Golaud and Pelléas who is helpless to prevent their fratricidal passions. And the excellent boy soprano Neel Ram Nagarajan was heartbreaking as Yniold, Golaud’s son by his first wife, whose is forced by his bullying father to spy on his Uncle Pelléas and his new mother Mélisande.

Mr. Miller’s production, with sets by John Conklin, fashions a visual symbolism to match the thematic symbolism of the opera. This royal family, in vaguely Victorian dress, lives in a run-down mansion, which rotates onstage to reveal stuffy rooms, forbidding exteriors and marbled arcades.

The Met has scheduled only five performances of “Pelléas et “Mélisande” with this cast and Mr. Rattle. Now that he has arrived at the Met, he must come back.

Martin Bernheimer, Financial Times, 20 December 2010

“Gerald Finley, unusually yet persuasively youthful, brought brooding sympathy to the unsympathetic stances of Golaud.”

Ronni Reich, NJ.com, 21 December 2010

Even to its defenders, Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” is a peculiar opera.

It unfolds almost entirely through recitative, with the singing kept to a fairly narrow range to mimic that of speech — without the climactic notes or melismatic singing that even aria-shy contemporary operas usually employ. The musical language in the orchestra, too, is colorful and evocative but relatively subtle.

Yet with the right team, its story of doomed romance can be grippingly realistic and affecting, the way certain dreams are. At the Metropolitan Opera at its opening Friday night, it often was — and it would have been throughout, were it not for a production well past its expiration date.

Most enthusiastically received — and rightfully so — was conductor Simon Rattle, making one of several recent notable (and belated) Met debuts. He lavished attention on the music’s rich textures as well as its brooding passions. Orchestral interludes were imbued with foreboding.

Mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozená was ideally cast as Mélisande. Hers isn’t a conventionally beautiful voice. But from the first time we see Mélisande, there’s something extraordinary about her. Her character is often linked with water imagery — she’s found near a fountain crying, she dips her Rapunzel-like hair into a deep well. A program note likens her name to that of a siren.

Kozená’s clear, malleable voice took on many hues as the mysterious Mélisande. One heard dark, smoky tones as she confesses her unhappiness to her husband Golaud. Later, she imparted warmth to a scene where she sits on a window combing her locks while Golaud’s younger half-brother Pelléas watches. Most vocally attractive in this scene, baritone Stephane Degout offered a sympathetic portrayal of Pelléas throughout.

Bass-baritone Gerald Finley gave an ardent performance as Golaud, who is consumed by jealousy as he watches his childlike bride bond with Pelléas, who is her own age. He was especially compelling as he tried, with much exasperation, to wring secrets from his son Yniold, excellently played by boy soprano Neel Ram Nagarajan. Willard White and Felicity Palmer brought dignity and gravitas to the roles of Arkel and Geneviève.

The music isn’t quite as strong in the two outer acts (not unreasonable, as they’re basically exposition and epilogue). It’s possible that here, no amount of effort on the performers’ parts would compensate the dullness of the production.

The opera hinges on the dichotomy between the stifling, death-filled home of Golaud and the world Mélisande finds outside of it. Tearful and timid at the beginning of the opera, she initially fits into the former setting. But she soon craves love and the animated life she sees outdoors — even as she shivers through her final moments, she wants the window open to watch the sun sink into the sea.

Both the musical language and the libretto feature surreal, sensual qualities that contrast with the starkness of the castle. But the current production (a Jonathan Miller revival) shows only half of the opera’s world. The sets are little more than bland castle walls, and with direction that could hardly have been more minimal, the stage was almost painful to look at.

The only bit of imagination was seeing Yniold’s Act IV mini-aria delivered from his bed, as a dream. But even this was disappointing, as it compromised and minimized the odd symbolism of the song he sings — about a heavy stone in his way — delivered just before the title characters appear together in their climactic love scene.

David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer, 21 December 2010

Rattle leads ‘Pelléas’ in his debut at the Met

Simon Rattle didn’t make a grand entrance at his Metropolitan Opera debut Friday. Unobtrusively, he materialized in the orchestra pit – garnering no applause – and commenced one of the quietest-ever operas, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

That was only the initial tipoff of his uncompromising stance with an opera that insistently inhabits its own world and doesn’t leave any wide-open doors for listeners. With a fairy-tale aura that curdles into breathtaking cruelty, the music’s mellifluousness is so easily mistaken for dramatic inertia that the opera has a high walkout rate (most notoriously in 1986 at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, where only a smattering of listeners remained at the end of a concert version conducted by Dennis Russell Davies).

How ironic that Rattle is using what has been, in past years, a winter guest-conducting residency in Philadelphia to conduct Pelléas in New York through Jan. 1. His cast is close to ideal: Magdalena Kozena (Rattle’s wife) is Mélisande, the woman without a past who is found weeping in the woods. Golaud, who finds and marries her, is perfect for Gerald Finley’s vocal weight and dramatic edge. As his brother, Pelléas, who falls in love with Melisande, Stéphane Degout sang beautifully, even if his presence suffered compared to Kozena and Finley.

The Jonathan Miller production is sort of a Jungian version of The Matrix. Though much of the opera takes place outside, the sets are all interiors of an ornate but scantly furnished mansion, suggesting that the characters are possibly imagining their own reality or giving us a tour of their psychic caverns.

Rattle embraced Debussy’s quietude. Rather than solving the mysteries, he lived in them. Though few conductors so clearly chart the progression of leitmotifs, Rattle let listeners interpret their meaning. The opening moments did telegraph the profound weariness of Mélisande – even as she’s about to be adapted into an exhausted culture that has outlived its own era. From there, Rattle downplayed rhythmic propulsion (in comparison to James Levine) and, rather dangerously, expanded the estimated four-hour running time by 15 minutes.

Rattle has often been a conductor to realize the power of a score while trusting that the music’s pace and architectural functions will take care of themselves. That approach didn’t fully succeed Friday; the opera wasn’t as entrancing as it could be – which may change in later performances.

Luckily, the singers projected such a strong sense of inner life, you couldn’t pass them off as mere French symbolist shadows. Mélisande is often played as a serial victim, and in the past Kozena has portrayed her as a Zen-like tabula rasa. Now, her Mélisande is not to be crossed. At the first hint of mistreatment, her unhappiness is articulated as a warning. She goes on to demolish Golaud’s world, even if her loss – both she and Pelléas die – is greater.

No matter how assiduously one adds up the pieces of this opera, no wholly coherent picture emerges – a reason why Pelleas maintains its experimental status, even if it’s also a grand opera. So how do you know if a revival has been successful? Well, this one was a vivid encounter with the piece. Beyond that? Ask my hypnotist.

Heidi Waleson, Wall Street Journal, 21 December 2010

A Light in the Forest of This Debussy Work
The conductor Simon Rattle, making his long-overdue debut at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, brought an unusual sense of structure to Debussy’s “Pelléas and Mélisande” in a revival of the 1995 Jonathan Miller production. This lengthy 1902 masterpiece of Impressionism, based on an inscrutable Symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck, can feel like an excursion into the dark, trackless forests so often invoked in the opera, but Mr. Rattle’s masterly shaping of its flowing melodies and shifting harmonic landscape turned it into a drama. This reading had both spine and direction, heightening the beauty and danger in Debussy’s music. It was less mysterious, perhaps, but more gripping.

The outline of the story is simple. Prince Golaud encounters the weeping Mélisande in a forest. He marries her, and takes her back to the castle of his aged grandfather, King Arkel. She and his much younger half-brother, Pelléas, become close. Golaud grows jealous and, catching the two together, kills Pelléas. Mélisande gives birth to a baby girl, and dies.

However, the play, and Debussy’s setting of it, are anything but simple. Mélisande is a mystery—no one knows who she is, or where she came from. The actual relationship of Pelléas and Mélisande is not clear. The atmosphere of the castle itself, permeated with age and death and surrounded by dark forests where no one can see the sky, is as much of a character as any of the humans. There are continual references to blindness.

This performance took a stand on what it might mean. Mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená offered a bracing departure from Mélisande as childlike innocent. With her covered, sometimes tremulous sound, her strange stare, and her deliberate performance of actions that are supposedly accidental, this Mélisande was like a demon, the agent of the unavoidable fate so often invoked in the text. She tossed, rather than dropped, Golaud’s ring into the well; she sang loudly from her tower window, a siren attracting the impressionable Pelléas, and flung her hair down, Rapunzel-like, so that he could reach it; she insisted that he kiss her in full view of the castle—and Golaud. Yet none of these actions appeared personally motivated, but rather the working out of a predetermined destiny. It made perfect sense that when Golaud begged her forgiveness at the end, she asked, “For what?” One didn’t feel pity for this Mélisande, but she was certainly interesting.

With a succubus for a wife, surrounded by old people who have given up, Gerald Finley’s jealous, furious Golaud was all the more believable. With his potent, incisive baritone, Mr. Finley’s Golaud was the most fully realized character—sexual, male and raging against fate and death. His attempts to be gentle, reflected in the orchestra, were destined to fail; his aggression was present from the beginning, and the scenes in which he threatened Pelléas, manhandled Mélisande and, most horrifyingly, enlisted his young son, Yniold, to spy on the two, were raw with emotion and intensity.

The light-voiced baritone Stéphane Degout was his opposite as the hapless, boyish Pelléas, who keeps trying to escape from the castle, but to no avail. Bass-baritone Willard White started out raspy and dry as King Arkel, but he delivered the final scene, at Mélisande’s deathbed, with warmth and gravity. Felicity Palmer was reserved and resigned as Golaud’s mother, Geneviève, and the bright-voiced boy soprano Neel Ram Nagarajan was remarkably poised and believable as Yniold.

Under Mr. Rattle’s baton, the orchestra vividly depicted the sea, the infrequent light, Mélisande’s weeping, and the dark weight of death in the castle. The voices became part of the orchestral texture, and the subtext of each character’s emotions flowed out of the pit: For example, the erotic awakening of Pelléas as he played with Mélisande’s hair was voiced most volcanically in the orchestra, describing feelings that the character doesn’t quite understand. With Mr. Rattle’s superbly controlled direction, the orchestra was subtle and evocative. Its few loud outbursts were over almost as soon as they began, contributing to the tension and clarity of the storytelling.

Mr. Miller’s production (Paula Williams was the stage director for the revival) removed the opera from its medieval roots and placed it in the 19th century. Designer John Conklin’s decaying castle, arrangements of white walls set on a turntable so that scenes flowed seamlessly together, was a vast, empty place, in which humans huddled together; Clare Mitchell’s buttoned up, formal costumes suggested the Victorian constricting of passion (only Mélisande wore timeless, flowing dresses); and Duane Schuler’s lighting contributed to the atmosphere of mystery and sudden illumination. Such moments of light seemed all the more ironic in a place where blindness is all: The sightless Arkel sees “a great innocence” in Mélisande, and the shattered Golaud says, at the end, that Pelléas and Mélisande kissed “as children do.” In this production, it is clear that they are mistaken.

Arlene Judith Klotzko,ConcertoNet.com

Once again, for the third season in a row, a principal cause of excited anticipation followed by thrillingly revelatory musical performances has been the debut of a conductor who, by all rights, should have appeared at the Met many years ago. In November, 2008, there was (Daniel Barenboim). Riccardo Muti arrived in February, 2010.

The most recent representative of this group of conductor luminaries is Sir Simon Rattle, the 55 year old Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Berlin Philharmonic. When asked what work he would most like to conduct for his Met debut he chose Pelléas et Mélisande. Rattle has said that his main requirement for appearing at the Met was adequate time to work with the orchestra. He was granted the time and the result was nothing short of magnificent. This marvelous ensemble, honed with such loving care by James Levine, played for Sir Simon as if they were one enormous musical instrument. And they played gloriously for him. This was a gripping and enthralling performance. And it was not only the audience who were enthralled. After almost four hours of intense music making, the musicians remained in the pit to applaud him.

Debussy was a master of the creation of mood through harmonic shifts and the repetition of often haunting musical motifs. Rattle’s Pelléas was often breathtakingly luminous and always sensuously beautiful. But it was also filled with dramatic tension. The story is full of mystery and metaphor and both are embodied in the orchestral tapestry with its variegated colors, particularly the shifts between light and darkness. This was a richly detailed performance. Yet there was always a sense of an organic whole – a sort of dreamscape.

There is a pervasive unreality about the story and the characters. Arkel’s kingdom is called Allemonde; it’s the whole world and yet strangely not of this world. Mélisande is a wild creature of mysterious origins and motivations. Pelléas is also not a character with whom we can identify or even understand. Golaud’s feelings and motivations are at least comprehensible, although he is a rather flat character. He is almost a caricature of the dark side of love – its needy, possessive and destructive aspects. He is both tormented and tormenting.

Usually, of course, the romantic lead is a tenor. Here, we had two baritones — the marvelously lyrical and warm-toned Stéphane Degout and the darker and more dramatic Gerald Finley. Vocally and dramatically, they were the light and dark faces of love. Indeed, because they were dressed almost identically throughout, they were portrayed as doppelganger figures.

Finley’s performance was a tour de force. He sang with a burnished beautifully colored voice, filled with emotion. And he made masterful use of his rich vocal palette to portray his character. Even his posture – particularly when he seemed to collapse into himself – perfectly reflected the emotional state of Golaud. Finley utterly inhabited this role as he lurched from towering, murderous rage to deep despair. In three key scenes – his forcing his young son to spy on Pelléas and Mélisande in her bedroom, his murder of Pelléas and the death of Mélisande – he was mesmerizing. Amid the horror and the urge to look away, it was impossible to take our eyes off him.

Although, throughout the opera, the voices were embedded in the musical tapestry, there were times when the orchestral music fell away to reveal the voice eloquent and alone. In Mélisande’s “Mes longs cheveux,” Magdalena Kozená (Lady Rattle) conveyed through her voice and her willowy physical presence the ethereal, other-worldly character of Mélisande. Her tone was rich and shimmering. Her legato was marvelous. She beautifully captured the primal, disconnected, and psychologically precarious Mélisande.

The rest of the cast was also excellent. Dame Felicity Palmer (recognized this year in Queen Elizabeth’s New Year’s Honours List), sang with a rich, vibrant, gorgeously colored voice that was steady and even. She gave a touching portrayal of the mother trying to hold her family together. Veteran bass-baritone Sir Willard White produced a wonderfully rolling deep bass sound, with excellent legato. His monologue was a highlight of a performance filled with highlights. Neel Ram Nagarajan sang with a sure sweet soprano that projected well into the vastness of the Met auditorium. His acting was a match for his voice, and he was heartbreakingly convincing as a confused and abandoned child caught up in his father’s descent into madness.

Jonathan Miller’s spare shabby production, which premiered at the Met in 1995, was subtly effective, with the vast scale of the run-down palace that dominated all the scenes serving to heighten the mounting sense of oppression and the vulnerability of the characters. The royal family lived, almost huddled, in small spaces surrounded by soaring emptiness. A revolve was used to enable a seamless transition between scenes, and the seeming constant rearrangement of the same walls to create spaces that were different, yet the same, made the characters appear trapped within those walls. Indeed, even when they escaped outside, be it to garden, seaside cave, or forest, those same walls followed, as inescapable as Golaud’s tormenting doubts and inner demons. The production at times seemed more a representation of an inner mindscape than of an actual physical setting. The evocative and mostly dim green lighting heightened the suffocating atmosphere and psychological tensions. Pelléas seemed to bring the only bright light with him, carrying about a golden glow that pushed back the prevailing gloom, but ultimately could not conquer it.

David Lavinska, Musical Criticism.com,7.1.2011

Beginning with its premiere performance of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1925, the Metropolitan Opera has consistently lavished first-rate conductors and singers on Debussy’s enigmatic masterpiece. Indeed, for the current revival, the cast was close to ideal (with one important exception) and the singing was spectacular. The biggest news, however, has been the much belated house debut of Sir Simon Rattle. Though he cleverly sought to appear from the darkness and begin the opera without any hint of entrance applause or disruption, it was clear from the outset that the audience was primed to shower him with ovations. At the close of Act 1, despite Rattle’s intention to continue directly with Act 2, some fervent listeners insisted on an ill-advised smattering of applause. And so it continued, act by act, until finally, the full-force torrent of appreciation was unleashed at the conclusion of the opera. Part of the affection emanating from the audience must certainly have been due to the cumulative total of Rattle’s distinguished career. But added to this, and taken on its own terms, his conducting of Pelléas was magnificent: rich in details, marvelously controlled, and profound in its silences. It would be impossible to ask for a conductor to highlight both the instrumental details and the impressionistic aspects of Debussy’s orchestrations. To a degree, these are opposing goals. While Rattle strove for admirable calm and precision, thereby illuminating fascinating shreds of melody and glinting tonal colors, I felt the grand sweep of Debussy’s spirit failed to come across. To use a simplistic analogy: it was like viewing a Monet up close rather than from a comfortable distance. The effect was surpassingly beautiful nonetheless, and the instrumentalists were inspired to a high level of virtuosity.

Pelléas is a difficult work – a singularly impressionist, multi-layered opera that can be interpreted along many different angles and contains so much musical and textual detail that no single production could possibly do justice to all of Debussy’s demands. Just as the composer toiled arduously to stay faithful to his own Symbolist ideals, so too must the singers delve deeply into their characters to illuminate the glowing facets of human emotion buried therein. And even when the singers successfully bring their roles to life, there are always details lost, emotions neglected, and words gone for nothing. Only the listener’s imagination can fill in the gaps and shed the light of understanding on the gloomy haze of Maeterlinck’s narrative. Debussy himself was dismissive of his own potential audience, and said that opera should be protected from “…the herd of people who treat [music] as casually as they do a handkerchief!” Some of his fears were well founded on New Year’s Day, to judge by the chuckling at inopportune moments (the dropping of the ring, the unfurling of the hair) and almost incessant coughing. But the musical value of the performance easily transcended these human distractions and confirmed the spiritual, transporting quality of Debussy’s fleeting melodies.

The only disappointment among the cast was a critical one: mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozená‘s Mélisande. Despite the audience’s thunderous applause at her curtain call, I remained unconvinced. Her singing, per se, was firm, on pitch, and intelligently phrased (her frequent use of sliding straight-tones notwithstanding). Having enjoyed several of her recordings, it was gratifying to confirm that the unique, instantly recognizable timbre of her voice remains intact. It’s an affectingly warm sound, and she is able to vary the tone through a wide range of colors, giving vibrant life to many of her words. Her French diction was passable, but not in the same league as Dessay on the recent Virgin DVD (reviewed here). For my own preference, a lighter vocal palette – more soprano-like – suits the character better, but there is no denying Kozená’s musical mastery of the role. As an actress however, she nearly sabotaged the entire spectacle. There are many different ways to depict Mélisande: naïve, otherworldly, innocent, weird, sullen, flighty, and so forth. Kozená seemed to lack any kind of commitment to the character: she was simply blank for much of the opera. Thus, the critical chemistry between Pelléas and Mélisande was all but nonexistent (despite the sincere efforts of superb baritone Stéphane Degout). Only in the final two acts did Kozená start to imbue Mélisande with anything resembling a point of view. Unfortunately, her laughably stock gestures (e.g., hands to neck when being threatened by Golaud) were also a significant detraction. She was at her best in the final scene when, confined to the bed, she sang a stylishly diaphanous death scene.

Baritones Stéphane Degout (Pelléas) and Gerald Finley (Golaud) are likely the finest current interpreters of their roles. This was ultra-luxurious casting: it was a marvelous pleasure to hear so much elegant, yet characterful, full-blooded baritone singing. Degout is what one might call the ideal ‘baryton Martin’ with a gorgeous, tenorial high register coupled with a slender, reedy low voice. Armed with rock-solid technique, he mastered every vocal hurdle with élan and managed to seem utterly relaxed and thoroughly immersed in his character. Both he and Finley used the French language to expert effect, with impeccable enunciation and vowels tinted to suit the emotional currents of Debussy’s ever-shifting tonalities. Compared with his impressive turn as Pelléas on DVD, Degout seemed slightly hampered by Kozená’s reticence in their scenes together. Nevertheless, his dashing, conflicted young man looked handsome, moved gracefully, and made the perfect foil for Finley’s equally outstanding Golaud. Golaud is arguably the most complex and challenging role in the opera, requiring extreme emotional shifts and significant character development over the course of five acts. As with his previous roles in this house, Gerald Finley once again offered a thrilling impersonation of the tragically heart-broken, semi-crazed older brother. Among recent interpreters of Golaud at the MET, stands the great José van Dam. Finley must be counted as equal to his esteemed forebear – perhaps even surpassing the Belgian by virtue of his richer tone and slightly more volatile physicality. With blazing vocalism, refined phrasing, and self-contained dignity – even during Golaud’s most pathetic ramblings – Finley managed to elevate his character’s plight to almost mythic proportions, garnering the fullest sympathy (and gratitude) from the audience throughout.

Felicity Palmer offered a thoroughly convincing Genevieve, with her customary attention to textual detail and touching maternal warmth. Willard White (also a previous Golaud at the MET) started rather stolidly, but proved tremendously effective in all his scenes with Mélisande – the final act in particular. He is a handsome man, and unfortunately didn’t look convincingly old enough to be a father figure for Genevieve and grandfather to Pelléas. His singing was rich and powerful, effectively anchoring the vocal line and helping to give credibility to his character’s patriarchal status. Special praise goes to boy-soprano Neel Ram Nagarajan who sang Yniold’s challenging music as perfectly as one could desire. The audience warmly cheered for him at the conclusion.

Since this was not a new production, it should suffice to mention that John Conklin‘s rotating unit set is holding up quite well since it’s initial unveiling in 1995. Pelléas involves fifteen scenes spread over five acts, and the associated set changes are daunting to say the least. The single, architectural set was designed to faithfully depict the interior of a vast, country estate. Thus, such settings as cliffs, a cove, a forest, and so on demand a good deal of imagination from the audience. The visual effect failed only once: the scene in Act 3, when Golaud threatens Pelléas in the vaults below the castle was utterly unconvincing. Jonathan Miller‘s direction gave the singers plenty of latitude for natural movement and freedom on the stage. There were certainly awkward moments: the fratricide didn’t work very well, for example, with Finley slowly sneaking up on the lovers. I must also mention that Kozená was extremely ill at ease in the scenes where she drops the ring into the fountain and where she lets down her hair from the terrace. The latter, in particular, seemed clownish to the point of eliciting widespread laughter throughout the audience. The costumes by Clare Mitchell fit the mood nicely, even if Mélisande’s rather ugly black dress might have found a better home elsewhere. Duane Schuler‘s lighting was ideal – no small feat in such a gloomy opera where it would be easy to shroud the singers in darkness much of the time. In sum then, my reservations are quite minor in view of the overall achievement. Pelléas et Mélisande is an amazing testament to Debussy’s intellect and talent, and should always be presented with such high standards of artistry.