''Pelléas and Mélisande'' (french: Pelléas et Mélisande) is a
Symbolist
Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and real ...
play by
Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck (29 August 1862 – 6 May 1949), also known as Count (or Comte) Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was Flemish but wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in ...
about the forbidden, doomed love of the title characters. It was first performed in
1893
Events
January–March
* January 2 – Webb C. Ball introduces railroad chronometers, which become the general railroad timepiece standards in North America.
* Mark Twain started writing Puddn'head Wilson.
* January 6 – Th ...
.
The work never achieved great success on the stage, apart from in the
operatic setting by
Claude Debussy
(Achille) Claude Debussy (; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionism in music, Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most infl ...
, but it was at the time widely read and admired by the literary elite in the symbolist movement, such as
Strindberg
Johan August Strindberg (, ; 22 January 184914 May 1912) was a Swedish people, Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter.Lane (1998), 1040. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote mo ...
and
Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), shortened to Rainer Maria Rilke (), was an Austrian poet and novelist. He has been acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, and is widely recog ...
. It also inspired other contemporary composers, including
Gabriel Fauré
Gabriel Urbain Fauré (; 12 May 1845 – 4 November 1924) was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers ...
,
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was as ...
,
Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius ( ; ; born Johan Julius Christian Sibelius; 8 December 186520 September 1957) was a Finnish composer of the late Romantic and early-modern periods. He is widely regarded as his country's greatest composer, and his music is often ...
, and
Mel Bonis.
Synopsis
Golaud finds Mélisande by a stream in the woods. She has lost her crown in the water but does not wish to retrieve it. They marry, and she instantly wins the favor of Arkël, Golaud's grandfather and king of Allemonde, who is ill. She begins to be drawn to Pelléas, Golaud's brother. They meet by the fountain, where Mélisande loses her wedding ring. Golaud grows suspicious of the lovers, has his son Yniold spy on them, and discovers them caressing, whereupon he kills Pelléas and wounds Mélisande. She later dies after giving birth to an abnormally small girl.
Themes
This play treats the familiar triangle of wife, husband and lover, ending with the death of both the wife and the lover at the hands of the husband. The best known example of this triangle is the story of
Paolo and Francesca
Francesca da Rimini or Francesca da Polenta (died between 1283 and 1286) was a medieval noblewoman of Ravenna, who was murdered by her husband, Giovanni Malatesta, upon his discovery of her affair with his brother, Paolo Malatesta. She was a co ...
of Rimini, treated in two highly successful plays also dating to the 1890s by
Gabriele D'Annunzio and the English playwright
Stephen Phillips.
A brief summary of the play will concentrate best on Mélisande. At the beginning of the play she has just escaped from a failed marriage that has so traumatized her that she scarcely remembers either it or her past. She marries Golaud through no choice of her own, and remains essentially distant from him. The audience realize she is falling in love with Pelléas long before she does. On her deathbed she has quite forgotten her final meeting with Pelléas and his death, and dies without realizing that she is dying. This and the whole play -- for none of the other characters are wiser -- expresses a sense that human beings understand neither themselves nor each other nor the world. The problem is not simply human blindness, but the lack of a fixed and definable reality to be known. This is the Maeterlinck who paved the way for the plays of
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic ex ...
. It is extraordinary that he achieves this within a story whose basic plot -- that of a woman, a husband and a lover and the tragedy that results -- is itself so conventional.
A key element in the play is the setting, whether visible in the stage scenery or described in the dialogue. The action takes place in an ancient, decaying castle, surrounded by deep forest, which only occasionally lets sunlight in, and with caverns underneath it that breathe infected air and are in danger of collapse. As numerous critics have pointed out, all this symbolizes the dominating power throughout the action of a destiny (the power of death, if you like) fatal to mankind.
Note also the role of water, which appears in several forms throughout the work: Golaud finds her by a ''stream'', Mélisande arrived in the kingdom by ''sea'', she loses her wedding ring in a ''fountain'', Golaud and Pelléas discover ''foul-smelling waters'' under Arkël's castle, Mélisande is often seen crying and mentions her ''tears'' several times. Moreover, most of the characters' names contain
liquid consonant
In phonetics, liquids are a class of consonants consisting of voiced lateral approximants like together with rhotics like .
Etymology
The grammarian Dionysius Thrax used the Ancient Greek word (, ) to describe the sonorant consonants () of cl ...
s: Pe''ll''éas, Mé''l''isande, Arkë''l'', Go''l''aud, Ynio''l''d. She appears to be related to the mythical figure
Melusine
Mélusine () or Melusina is a figure of European folklore, a female spirit of fresh water in a holy well or river. She is usually depicted as a woman who is a serpent or fish from the waist down (much like a lamia or a mermaid). She is als ...
in French folklore.
Premiere
''Pelléas and Mélisande'' premiered on 17 May
1893
Events
January–March
* January 2 – Webb C. Ball introduces railroad chronometers, which become the general railroad timepiece standards in North America.
* Mark Twain started writing Puddn'head Wilson.
* January 6 – Th ...
at the
Bouffes-Parisiens under the direction of
Aurélien Lugné-Poe. Lugné-Poe, possibly taking inspiration from
The Nabis, an
avant-garde
The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...
group of Symbolist painters, used very little lighting on the stage. He also removed the footlights. He placed a gauze veil across the stage, giving the performance a dreamy and otherworldly effect. This was the antithesis to the
realism popular in French theatre at the time.
Maeterlinck was so nervous on the night of the premiere that he did not attend. Critics derided the performance, but Maeterlinck's peers received it more positively.
Octave Mirbeau
Octave Mirbeau (16 February 1848 – 16 February 1917) was a French novelist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, journalist and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, whilst still appealing to the ...
, to whom Maeterlinck dedicated his play, was impressed with the work, which stimulated a new direction in stage design and theatre performance.
[Bettina Knapp. ''Maurice Maeterlinck''. (Twayne Publishers: Boston). 67–76.]
In music
The play has been the basis of several pieces of music. Perhaps the best known is the opera
of the same name (1902) by
Claude Debussy
(Achille) Claude Debussy (; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionism in music, Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most infl ...
. In 1898,
Gabriel Fauré
Gabriel Urbain Fauré (; 12 May 1845 – 4 November 1924) was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers ...
had written
incidental music
Incidental music is music in a play, television program, radio program, video game, or some other presentation form that is not primarily musical. The term is less frequently applied to film music, with such music being referred to instead ...
for performances of the play in London and asked
Charles Koechlin
Charles-Louis-Eugène Koechlin (; 27 November 186731 December 1950), commonly known as Charles Koechlin, was a French composer, teacher and musicologist. He was a political radical all his life and a passionate enthusiast for such diverse things ...
to orchestrate it, from which he later extracted a suite. In the same year
Mel Bonis wrote a piano piece named 'Mélisande'. The story inspired
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was as ...
's early
symphonic poem
A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source. The German term ''T ...
''
Pelleas und Melisande
''Pelleas und Melisande'', Op. 5, is a symphonic poem written by Arnold Schoenberg and completed in February 1903. It was premiered on 25 January 1905 at the Musikverein in Vienna under the composer's direction in a concert that also included th ...
'' of 1902–03.
Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius ( ; ; born Johan Julius Christian Sibelius; 8 December 186520 September 1957) was a Finnish composer of the late Romantic and early-modern periods. He is widely regarded as his country's greatest composer, and his music is often ...
also wrote incidental music for it in 1905; the section "At the castle gate" has found fame as the signature music of the BBC ''
The Sky at Night
''The Sky at Night'' is a monthly documentary television programme on astronomy produced by the BBC. The show had the same permanent presenter, Sir Patrick Moore, from its first broadcast on 24 April 1957 until 7 January 2013. The latter dat ...
'' programme. In 2013,
Alexandre Desplat
Alexandre Michel Gérard Desplat (; born 23 August 1961) is a French film composer and conductor. He has won many awards, including two Academy Awards, for his musical scores to the films '' The Grand Budapest Hotel'' and ''The Shape of Water'' ...
, commissioned by the "Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire", composed a Sinfonia Concertante for Flute and Orchestra, inspired by Maeterlinck's ''Pelléas and Mélisande''.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pelleas and Melisande
1893 plays
Plays by Maurice Maeterlinck