In Debussy’s opera, more empha­sis is placed on sym­bols than on plot, and nat­ur­al speech is more impor­tant than melody. The result: deeply human music, surg­ing with indi­vid­ual inter­pre­ta­tion.

Debussy wrote in April 1902, “I have long been exper­i­ment­ing with the writ­ing of stage music, but I have imag­ined it in such an unusu­al form that after var­i­ous attempts I have almost giv­en it up”. At the same time, his lyri­cal dra­ma Pel­léas and Mélisande in five acts and thir­teen pic­tures was pre­miered in Paris. There was a divid­ed audi­ence at the pre­mier. The author of the play on which the script was based, Mau­rice Maeter­linck, who lat­er won a Nobel Prize, did not even appear at the pre­miere, where­as, the hired heck­lers did. It remains a mys­tery whether it was the music itself that upset the philoso­pher-poet, or the fact that his wife did not sing the role of Mélisande, which she had been promised.

Debussy’s work breaks with sev­er­al French tra­di­tions: there is no bal­let and no major choral scenes in it. There is, how­ev­er, a lot of recita­ti­vo: singing speech adapt­ed to the French lan­guage. Instead of catchy melodies, the vocal parts only move out of their monot­o­nous rhythm when the emo­tion calls for it. But even at the emo­tion­al cli­max­es, the com­pos­er pre­scribes a pianis­si­mo vol­ume and keeps the orches­tra low, cre­at­ing an inti­ma­cy that is quite unusu­al on the oper­at­ic stage.