Opera Review: Debussy’s Pelléas Et Mélisande
Among the productions I have seen of Debussy’s Pelléas Et Mélisande, those that best capture its elusive spirit subscribe to the “less is more” school of design. This is not for Norwegian director Stefan Herheim.
The curtain rises on designer Philipp Fürhofer’s solid facsimile of Glyndebourne’s famous organ room complete with portraits of the Christie family.
Debussy’s one opera, inspired by symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, is a tale of the imagination.
Scenes flit from forest pool to sea cave and watery dungeon, all evoked in the flowing music.
Prince Golaud, grandson of King Arkel in the mythical kingdom of Allemonde, comes across a traumatised girl weeping by a fountain while out hunting.
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She reluctantly agrees to go with him.
Eventually, they marry but when she is drawn to his brother Pelléas, Golaud becomes suspicious as to the innocence of their relationship.
Insanely jealous, he kills Pelléas and wounds Mélisande, who dies after giving birth to a baby girl.
Herheim transforms a dream-like play into a claustrophobic domestic drama but his interpretation is relevant.
Maeterlinck’s tale was always a disguised account of a hideously dysfunctional family, such as would have given Freud or Jung – around at the time – much to work on.
However, the symbolic references the director throws in puzzle rather than enlighten and visual images are gnomic.
The scene where Golaud forces his young son Yniold to spy on Mélisande and Pelléas gets extremely nasty, as Herheim has Golaud sexually assault the boy while he is watching the pair (Yniold is played by mezzosoprano Chloé Briot).
The excellent cast includes promising young Austrian soprano Christina Gansch as a lustrous and ethereal Mélisande, while baritone John Chest looks and sounds attractive as Pelléas.
But why was Christopher Purves’s Golaud made so repellent in appearance, and why so violent almost from the start?
All empathy for him is lost.
The role of repressive grandfather Arkel was sung by Richard Wiegold while Brindley Sherratt, suffering a throat infection, walked the part.
There was superb playing by London Philharmonic Orchestra under Glyndebourne’s music director Robin Ticciati.
Kasper Holten’s Rubik’s Cube staging of Don Giovanni has returned with even more technical wizardry than I remember from the 2014 premiere.
Es Devlin’s revolving block of a palazzo swirls with video designer Luke Halls’s kaleidoscope of colours.
It’s not the first production I’ve seen where, at the start, Donna Anna seems reluctant to let her would-be rapist escape.
But then for her to slide off into Don Giovanni’s bedroom after he has murdered her father, and while her fiancé Don Ottavio is singing his heart out downstairs, seems gratuitously cynical.
American soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen is a stunning Donna Anna, statuesque in Anya Vang Kragh’s glittering costumes, and rather eclipses the other seducee, Hrachuhi Bassenz’s Donna Elvira.
Mariusz Kwiecien is in lethal form as the Don, with a new Leporello in Ildebrando D’Arcangelo.
Bass Willard W White lurks as the ghost of the avenging Commendatore but there’s no hellfire ending – Don Giovanni simply expires to thundering brass and percussion from the orchestra under conductor Marc Minkowski.
The performance last Thursday will be relayed live to outdoor venues across the UK, as part of BP Big Screens: roh.org.uk/about/bp-big-screens
