AVA's "Pelléas et Mélisande' (2nd review)

Since Plato, two visions of human love— Eros and Agape— have competed in the Western world. Eros is sexual love, fecund but also violent and destructive— the way of Dionysos, of the grape and the orgy. Agape is love as inspired by and directed toward virtue: for Plato, the abstract vision of the good, and, for his Christian redactors, the charitable love of one's fellow man. Jesus is the ultimate exemplar of Agape, as both the source and object of all love.

Subtract personhood from this equation and you get Spinoza's amor intellectualis, the mind's love for itself. But incest is the hidden root of both Eros and Agape; and the lover, whatever his motive or object, is apt to find himself confronting his own reflection— a point the Greeks took as well in the myth of Narcissus.

The decay of Christianity in the 19th Century produced an erotic crisis as well. Science reconfigured divine love in the terms of physical "force," the universal conduit of impulse and action; but what of the human passions themselves?

In Wagner, especially the Wagner of Tristan und Isolde, the erotic drive is all suffusing and therefore apocalyptic: It can finally take no object but itself, and thus culminates in the love-death of the composer's protagonists.

Freud would try to disentangle this conundrum 60 years later in positing Eros and Thanatos as parallel drives in the psyche, but— in our genuine age of apocalypse, where we pile up redundant forms of self-extinction, atomic, biological and ecological— Thanatos would seem to be in the driver's seat, if it doesn't swallow Eros whole.

What, though, of Agape? In a post-religious age, does it hold any prospect for us? Can it restore some balance to a death-driven world, and help us to survive ourselves?

This is the question posed, or half-posed, in Debussy's only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande.

Maeterlinck's snub

The story, as retold by the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, would prove remarkably attractive to turn-of-the-20th Century composers, including Faure, Sibelius and Schoenberg. Debussy secured the initial rights to set Maeterlinck's play to music. He worked on it intensively between 1893 and 1895 but didn't orchestrate the short score until several years later.

The premiere was delayed until 1902, at which time Debussy insisted on replacing Maeterlinck's girlfriend Georgette Leblanc with Mary Garden in the role of Mélisande. This substitution led to a violent rupture with the playwright, who refused to attend the premiere and expressed the wish that the opera fail.

The Pelléas story goes back to Arthurian legend. It was reworked as a tale of chivalric love in the Middle Ages, and appealed again to the medieval revival of the 19th Century, of which of course Tristan und Isolde and The Ring of the Nibelungen were also part.

Like Tristan with King Mark, Pelléas is bound by fealty to his elder half-brother Golaud, who has married Mélisande, a mysterious girl he finds wandering in a forest. Pelléas and Mélisande are drawn to each other much like Tristan and Isolde; but whereas Wagner's lovers will joyously if guiltily consummate their passion— the supreme 19th-Century affirmation of Eros— Maeterlinck's (and Debussy's) pair remain chaste and, to all appearances, innocent.

Golaud, however, maddened by jealousy of a relationship he can interpret only in erotic terms, kills Pelléas, whereupon Mélisande, weakened by childbirth, dies as well.

Intimacy without sex?

The story turns on the credibility of the relationship between Pelléas and Mélisande. Can two young adults of the opposite sex enjoy a spiritually intimate relationship without physical love— in short, can Agape prevail in the bower of Eros?

Pelléas and Mélisande are not disembodied spirits; their mutual attraction and delight in each other's company is transparent. How can such lovers not end in each other's arms? And is their restraint triumph, folly or some tertium quid?

I think Debussy had Wagner squarely in his sights here. Debussy was no prude himself— and, in Pelléas et Mélisande, he was still heavily influenced musically by Wagner— but he seems to have wished to set a more reticent aesthetic against Teutonic carnality.

There was a bit of a precedent here in Bizet's Carmen, in which Don José's despairing desire for Carmen— which must end in love or death (or, as in Wagner, both)— is set against the Agape of his abandoned fiancée, Micaela, whose love for José is unimpaired by betrayal and who seeks, in good Platonic fashion, only his welfare.

Bizet had succeeded in making Micaela's sacrifice credible. But could Debussy depict such a love between two partners?

Lost wedding ring

The answer is: partly. Mélisande is no longer innocent; she's a wife, and a pregnant one. We see nothing of her intimate life with Golaud, but outwardly she's deferential and submissive. Perhaps, being physically given, she feels free to indulge a fraternal affection for someone more nearly her age; but there are unmistakable signs of something riskier.

In the pivotal Act II scene by the well outside the palace, Mélisande tosses her wedding ring up and down in front of Pelléas until it falls into the water; then she lies to Golaud about its loss. We may give her the benefit of the doubt here, for her initial wandering in the forest suggests some imbalance or trauma. But whether she's consciously aware of it or not, there is obvious erotic provocation in her behavior (and guilt in her dissimulation).

Pelléas is the more problematic case. If he were younger, we might accept his relationship to Mélisande as adolescent infatuation. But he is, as Golaud reminds him, actually her elder. He should not only know his place, but also hers.

In short, even if we're willing to suspend disbelief and regard the young lovers as fulfilled by each other's company alone, Golaud's jealousy makes it impossible for them to maintain their innocence; the thorn in his flesh must make them aware of their own.

Date with manhood

For all his considerable dramatic skill, Debussy is unable to resolve his problem. Mélisande is a haunting creation, but Pelléas is ultimately a hollow one, no matter how gorgeous the music that wreathes him.

When, at the end, Pelléas finally resolves to leave the royal castle, it's not clear that he fully understands either his own peril or the reasons for it. He seems merely a boy who has missed his date with manhood.

The attraction of the Pelléas and Mélisande story for so many gifted composers attests to the late 19th Century's need to find a niche within Romantic love— and culture generally— for a secular notion of Agape. Debussy gave it as good a try as any.

In the 20th Century, we tended to invest certain charismatic political leaders— Gandhi, King, Mandela— with this elusive quality. But politics is a worldly business, and the cult of personality has proven a fatal snare. We're still looking for a way to love without possession or dominion. It just may be that our skins are riding on it.

From wrath to repentance

The Academy of Vocal Arts production of Pelléas was a valiant effort. A single piano— Debussy's own reduction of his score, performed by Luke Housner— stood in for the rich tapestry of the composer's orchestra. A pair of revolving walls evoked interior and exterior settings on the small stage of the Helen Corning Warden Theater. Lighting and costumes did the rest. One was soon immersed in the production, with no sense that Debussy's vision was being stinted.

The major roles themselves were alternated by performance, with mezzo-soprano Bettina Schweiger the fine Mélisande of my evening, and baritone Wes Mason the rather less successful Pelléas— if a successful one is indeed possible.

Golaud, the one character who truly develops as he moves from suspicion and wrath to anguish and repentance, was well played and sung by baritone Zachary Nelson, and bass baritone Patrick Guetti was a suitably patriarchal King Arkel. The prevalence of lower voices is a striking feature of Pelléas, and the Academy's performers demonstrated heft without heaviness. Judicious compression kept the drama moving, a few awkward moments notwithstanding.

Skeptic's conversion

Pelléas is rarely produced outside France. It's long and largely static, and it eschews arias and set pieces. The casting requirement is special, and an intense commitment to Debussy's vision is required to project it credibly. In certain respects it's a noble failure.

But it contains too much sheerly beautiful music to put it on the shelf, and one skeptical listener at least was fully taken by it. Maeterlinck, finally persuaded to attend a performance 18 years after the premiere and two years after Debussy's death, acknowledged, "In this affair I was entirely wrong and [Debussy] a thousand times right. For the first time, I understand my own play." ♦


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