Vienna Opera Tickets

Given that he could abide neither Wagner’s theatrics nor Puccini’s bravura, we are fortunate that Claude Debussy still felt that opera was an idiom he could write in. Based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist play of the same name, Pelléas et Mélisande, which debuted at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 30 April 1902, is still thought by many to be the only impressionist work in the genre. Its story begins with the discovery by Golaud of the mysterious Mélisande who cannot, or chooses not to, tell Golaud who she is. The couple marry, but Mélisande spends more time with Golaud’s half-brother, Pelléas.

When Golaud confronts Pelléas over the nature of his and Mélisande’s relationship, tragedy and death follow but with a twist from the narrative conventions of opera as Arkel, Golaud and Pelléas’ grandfather, declares that the responsibility of caring for Mélisande’s child demands that life must go on.

By emphasising the ephemerality of things, Debussy created music that, to this day, seems to occupy another plane altogether. Pelléas et Mélisande anticipated the mesmerising whole scale polyphony of his tone poem, La Mer, while the melodies the composer created for its characters contain echoes of the restraint of the major seconds that so often appear in his preludes.

Unlike any other art form, Debussy understood the freedom inherent in music and found means of expressing emotion in sound that had never been heard before. Pelléas et Mélisande, at times, is like a pebble being dropped in the middle of a pool of water, its ripples eluding us just before the point at which we think we might be able to grasp their full beauty.

Debussy was one of the first composers to interpret the world not as we see it but the way we feel it. For those enamoured of his symphonic works and extensive oeuvre for the piano but who have yet to discover Pelléas et Mélisande, the Vienna State Opera’s performance this season is a dream come true.