Pelléas & Mélisande by Claude Debussy

Pelléas & Mélisande

Opera by Claude Debussy

Libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck
Premiered on April 30, 1902, at the Opéra-Comique in Paris
Last performed at the Grand Théâtre de Genève in the 1999–2000 season
Revival of the 2020–2021 production (streaming)

Co-production with Opera Ballet Vlaanderen and Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg
Recommended for families

Sung in French with French and English surtitles
Duration: approx. 3h05 with one intermission*

Cast

Musical Director Juraj Valčuha
Stage direction & Choreography Damien Jalet & Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui
Scenographer Marina Abramovič
Costumes Designer Iris van Herpen
Lighting Designer Urs Schönebaum
Videos Designer Marco Brambilla
Dramaturgy Koen Bollen
Choir Director Mark Biggins
Choreographic Assistants for the Creation Aimilios Arapoglou and Leif Finhaber Pinos
Musical dramaturgy Piet De Volder

Pelléas Björn Bürger
Mélisande Mari Eriksmoen
Golaud Leigh Melrose
Arkel Nicolas Testé
Geneviève Sophie Koch
Yniold Charlotte Bozzi
A Shepherd / A Doctor Mark Kurmanbayev

Grand Théâtre de Genève Chorus
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande
Dancers from the Ballet of the Grand Théâtre de Genève and Eastman Dance Company

*Duration is indicative and subject to change.

About

Lost in a forest, Golaud meets a mysterious young girl crying by a fountain. She has fled from those who were harming her and her name is Mélisande. Golaud persuades her to marry him and come with him to Germany, where his father King Arkel welcomes them into his dark castle. Misery and famine reign in Germany, but in the castle, essential things are kept silent. Its inhabitants are prey to trauma and repressed desires. It is only with Pelléas, Golaud’s half-brother, that Mélisande finds the shared awareness that the essential is not always the visible. A fatal triangle thus develops between Mélisande and the two brothers.

Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas and Mélisande is one of the key works of the Symbolist movement, in which so many other Belgian artists such as Émile Verhaeren, Georges Rodenbach and James Ensor distinguished themselves.

Claude Debussy was one of the many musicians to succumb to its timeless mystery, and asked Maeterlinck to adapt the play into a libretto for the only true opera that he would write: “I wanted the action never to stop, but for it to be continuous and uninterrupted. I never allowed my music to hasten or delay the movement of my characters’ feelings and passions due to technical demands.” Thanks to the anti-rhetoric character of Pelléas, who carefully avoids all emphatic gesture, it has become the flagship of anti-Wagnerians, even though Debussy’s opera constitutes an audible modernist response to Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal.

Streamed on Grand Théâtre Digital during the Covid epidemic, in January 2021, this staging which unites Ballet du GTG director Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and the Ballet’s associate artist Damien Jalet with legendary visual artist and performer Marina Abramavoć, is finally arriving in front of the place de Neuve audience. In it, the creators draw their material from the continuous circle of life and its inherent link to the cosmos, following Debussy in refusing all illustration, but throwing rays of cosmic light here and there on the characters’ invisible energies and hidden emotions. Eight dancers from the Ballet du GTG accompany and express the inner feelings of the soloists, while the grande dame of avant- garde haute couture Iris van Herpen dresses their invisible meshes. Generating the mysterious frisson which makes this fragile drama so compelling is acclaimed Slovak conductor Juraj Valčuha, leading the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande for the very first time. As with the streamed 2021 production, Marie Eriksmoen with be a fragile, tender Mélisande opposite Leigh Melrose’s powerful Golaud. Björn Bürger, an outstanding Prince Andrej in War and Peace at the GTG in 2021, will bring his elegant baritone and intense stage presence to Pelléas.