Into Another Time: Pelléas et Mélisande

"one of the greatest rewards in opera" - Conductor Anthony Negus

Sophie Rashbrook talks to conductor Anthony Negus and director Jenny Ogilvie about their approach to Debussy’s enigmatic Pelléas et Mélisande, at Longborough 28 June – 10 July 2025...

Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is an opera that poses many more questions than it answers. On paper, the story may appear conventional, even conservative, with its fairytale tropes and quasi-medieval setting: in a mythical land, a mysterious woman attracts the attention of two half-brothers residing in a remote, decaying castle. There is a magical fountain (albeit one whose healing properties have ceased to function), a tower from which Mélisande, Rapunzel-like, lets down her hair, and an enchanted forest. Added to this is a forest of words: Maurice Maeterlinck’s Symbolist play, which was only selectively cut by Debussy, and which is utterly transfigured by the French composer’s transcendental musical setting.

For director Jenny Ogilvie, the abundance of text in the opera feels like a return to her roots – and as well as being a gift to the performers: ‘For me, because I started in theatre, it feels almost like going back to working on a play. We've got an incredible cast who are all amazing actors. The opera gives a lot of space for the singers to find the complexity within the scenes, and of course we want to lean into that, because that's what's interesting and provoking about it.’ 

Yet for an opera so richly laden with words, the phrases the characters utter are so often opaque in their meaning, or, as Jenny observes, ‘There is a degree to which people don’t understand themselves or their behaviours.’ The slipperiness of the text is echoed in the subtle effects of Debussy’s music, observes conductor and Longborough Music Director, Anthony Negus. ‘Debussy is able to set an atmosphere in a split second. In the final scene of Act One, where Mélisande and Geneviève are walking along the castle ramparts and are joined by Pelléas, they’re looking over the forests to the sea, where they can see a ship. With a G#-minor chord, Debussy tells us that there is a storm coming and that the ship might be shipwrecked. It's these suggestive things that make the atmosphere so mysterious.’

For Jenny, the subtle shifts of the music serve as a warning against an overly literal interpretation of the text. ‘As a director, part of the challenge is not to attempt to match the complexity of the sound that we're receiving – but in effect, not to get in the way of it.’ Unlike other operas, she argues, Pelléas et Mélisande resists being set in a specific locale, or, indeed, being neatly transposed to a particular era. ‘You can't translate this piece,’ she insists, ‘it’s not a metaphor, in the sense that some directors take an opera and set it in the 1940s, and say, “It’s a metaphor for fascism.” You can't do that with a piece of symbolism because the whole point is that the meaning refracts and multiplies. There is an enormous opportunity for people to take their own meaning from this piece. We don’t have to explain it.’ ‘I agree with that,’ says Anthony, ‘People have to work things out for themselves. But we will try to draw them in from the word go.’

Fortunately, as Jenny enthuses, the opera’s opening – with its extraordinary, hymnlike chords in the low strings and woodwind – does exactly that. ‘For me, those opening chords are like travelling through a vortex into another time. I wouldn't want to say when that time is, and I don't think it matters. We know that the land belongs to Arkel, King of Allemonde – of all the world – and that the action takes place in the family castle, the family seat. But in a sense we could be in any time, future or past.’

For Anthony, Debussy’s music is greatly indebted to Wagner: ‘Harmonically, it is influenced by Tristan und Isolde, and the interludes are especially closely related to Parsifal. Even in the opening scene, we hear a leitmotif of sorts,’ he reveals, referring to the Wagnerian compositional technique, whereby melodic fragments come to be associated with themes and characters as the opera progresses. ‘You get the theme of Golaud, which is simply shifting between two notes, and in fact, so much of the music is based around that motif: both Pelléas and Mélisande’s themes open with a rising second.’ Yet in other ways, Debussy’s music occupies strikingly different musical terrain: ‘The harmonisation is changing all the time, and this evokes Golaud’s lack of understanding of what is happening around him. It’s partly tonal, but it's also moving into another harmonic world.’ 

Another anti-Wagnerian device, if one can call it such, can be found in the composer’s masterful use of silence, often at the most unexpected moments. The dramatic climax of the opera occurs in Act 4, when the lovers finally declare their love for one another, shortly before Golaud takes violent revenge. ‘In contrast to the tempestuous forte of Wagner’s lovers,’ Anthony explains, ‘Debussy is deliberately seeking the quiet in that moment. He wants the absolute opposite extreme, so the lovers sing unaccompanied, and low in the voice.’

For Jenny, that scene spells Mélisande’s doom, but not in the obvious sense of Golaud’s violence. ‘I have a theory about Mélisande, that she represents the possibility of doing things differently.’ In what sense, I ask? Jenny is reflective. ‘I find it interesting that in the first scene she's thrown away a crown, which we could take to symbolise hierarchy and power. In Act 2, she throws away a wedding ring which symbolises our systems of pairing and family hierarchies. You could even say that Mélisande challenges our ideas of what is true and false. She doesn't seem to freight those terms with the same moral weight as we do. And for me, it’s telling that at the moment she says, “I love you”, and conforms to convention, it’s over for her.’

The possibility of renewal, rebirth and regeneration – squandered. And the innocence of youth, sacrificed, as seen most disturbingly in the scene where Golaud forces the child Yniold to spy on the lovers. Yet for Anthony, in some ways, the more disquieting sequence takes place later in Act 4, in the symbolic scene where Yniold has lost his golden ball, and observes a flock of sheep being led away, presumably to their death. ‘If you’re really involved at that point,’ says Anthony, ‘you get this frisson going through you, because it's unspoken.’ 

For Jenny, Yniold is an unlikely kindred spirit of the lovers. ‘The connection between Mélisande and Pelléas is found through imagination, playfulness, sensual pleasure, hyper-sensitivity and a richer inner life – something that the child shares with them. Whereas Golaud has to know: for him things must be one way or the other, there is no in-between. This is what the Golaud theme, that Anthony mentioned, means to me: it slips up and down between two notes, but it cannot rest or resolve.’

In Debussy and Maeterlinck’s symbolic universe, nothing is certain. Even Arkel is not the benevolent philosopher-King he might first appear to be. ‘There’s a temptation to see Arkel as the Wise Elder,’ says Jenny, ‘but I think we should question that because if you look at his Kingdom, there’s famine, disease and war. He’s not dealing with the problems outside, and he’s not oxygenating the society within it. His castle is like a mausoleum. It’s a microcosm of a society that is very, very stuck in its ways.’ Yet despite that, Anthony points out, ‘The characters awaken under Mélisande’s influence. Pelléas is the perfect example of that. In the third act, he has some of the most sensuously beautiful music, after Mélisande sings her song and lets down her hair. But it is only in Act 4 that he suddenly grows up and becomes aware of being in love, and all its dangers.’

In the world of Debussy’s opera, truth is illusory, and radiant hope and beauty exist alongside morbid decay. And the overall effect, Anthony says, should be one that remains with the audience long after the lights dim. ‘If we can plunge the audience into this music straight away, telling this story, then they will emerge from it as if they’ve been in an enchanted land. It's a piece that doesn't go out to people; they have to come into it, in my opinion. And if they do, they get one of the greatest rewards in opera.’ 

Born in Essex, Sophie Rashbrook is a writer, librettist and opera dramaturg. Formerly the Nicholas John Dramaturg at Welsh National Opera, she works part-time at the Royal Opera House as Opera Content Producer. Alongside this, her current/recent engagements include projects and commissions for Britten Pears Arts, Opera North and Garsington Opera Festival.