G L Y N D E B O U R N E

Opera Experience
E D U C A T I O N

Pelleas
´ et Melisande
´
Claude Debussy

Lyric drama in five acts

Libretto by the composer;
abridgement of the play by
Maurice Maeterlinck

First performed at the

Opéra Comique, Paris
30 April 1902

Written by Glyndebourne Education

This programme is generously funded by
 Pelleas
´ et Melisande
´

Preparing for a workshop

This pack contains information about the basic
storyline and characters of Pelléas et Mélisande
- it would be useful for your students to know
something of this before the workshop. The
entire pack will not take long to read.

Breaks and refreshments

There will be a break of approximately 30
minutes during the workshop, and about one hour
and 45 minutes between workshop and
performance at the theatre.

Please ensure that the students bring drinks,

snacks and a packed meal as food and
refreshments will not be available.

Parking
Please allow adequate time for parking before a
workshop as workshops must start promptly
(please make sure you check the start time of
your workshop)

Information
Students below year 10 should not attend the
workshop.
If you would like further information, please
contact Glyndebourne Education on 01273
815023 or email at [email protected]

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 Pelleas
´ et Melisande
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What will happen in a workshop

Many of the students who will attend our
workshops have never been to see an opera
before. The workshop will serve as an
introduction to opera itself as well as the
specific opera to be seen that evening.

The afternoon will consist of:

Warm up activities

Musical exercises

Dramatic exercises

Listening to singers from GOT Company

Discussing the opera

By the end of the workshop, the students

will be ready to see and hear and enjoy the
opera with genuine understanding.

Students should wear comfortable clothes

suitable for physical activities (if you would
like to please bring a change of clothes for
the evening performance).

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 Pelleas
´ et Melisande
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Characters

Arkel King of Allemonde, a mythical and now-sick

nation, struck by famine. Arkel is the ancient,
and nearly blind patriarch of the family.
Bass

Geneviève Arkel's daughter-in-law. Mother of Golaud and

Pelléas.
Mezzo Soprano

Golaud Elder grandson of King Arkel. A serious-minded

widower.
Baritone

Pelléas Younger grandson of King Arkel.

Golaud's passionate half-brother.
B a r i t o n e / T e n o r (Debussy wrote the role in his
own voice-range and can be sung by either a
high baritone or tenor)

Mé lisande Mysterious figure with undetermined royal

connections. A troubled soul, apparently
haunted by her past.
Soprano

Yniold Golaud's son by a previous marriage.

Paragon of innocence.
Treble

A Shepherd Bass

A Doctor Bass

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 Pelleas
´ et Melisande
´
Overview

The mythical kingdom of Allemonde is in decay. Famine sweeps

the land, and its ruler, Arkel, is blind and decrepit. Into this
world comes Mélisande, whose history is shrouded in mystery -
all she will tell her future husband, Golaud, is her name. Golaud
and his half-brother Pelléas are grandsons of Arkel and soon after
Golaud's marriage, his brother slides irrevocably into love with
the illusive, long-haired Mélisande.

Golaud's suspicions are first

aroused when Mélisande
confesses that she has lost her
wedding ring - in fact she
dropped it in a well when she
was fooling around with her brother-
in-law. Golaud's suspicions
deepen further when he
discovers the two having an intimate moment. When his shrouded
threats of violence fail to deter his brother, Golaud is forced to
take drastic steps and kills Pelléas after catching the lovers in an
embrace.

Meanwhile, Golaud has got Mélisande pregnant and following

Pelléas' death, their daughter is born. Prophesying a life full of
misery, Mélisande gives up on life and slips into death.

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 Pelleas
´ et Melisande
´
Synopsis
Act One
Scene One
A Forest
Golaud has lost his way in the forest whilst hunting. He finds a young woman
weeping beside a fountain. She too is lost, and is distraught at the loss of
her crown, which has fallen into the water. She is scared of Golaud's touch,
but eventually tells him her name - Mélisande. He can find out no more about
her but eventually persuades her to leave with him as darkness descends.

Scene Two
Breakfast in Allemonde, some six months later
Pelléas has given his mother Geneviève a letter that Golaud has written to
him. She reads it to Arkel who is nearly blind and we learn that Golaud has
married Mélisande, although all he knows about her is her name - she will
still not tell him where she is from, or what has happened to her. Golaud
explains that he is worried about returning home - Arkel had intended for
Golaud to make a political marriage with Princess Ursule, to end the
conflicts with their kingdoms. But he controls his anger and expresses his
awareness of a bigger picture in which destinies are controlled by fate.

Pelléas enters and asks to leave Allemonde to go to his friend Marcellus who
is dying. Arkel reminds him that Pelléas' own father is seriously ill and
persuades him to remain to greet Golaud's bride.

Scene Three
The castle grounds
Mélisande is being shown the castle grounds by her mother-in-law Geneviève.
The forests are dark around them - it is hard to find light in the castle.
Pelléas joins them and he and Mélisande watch the ship that brought her to
the castle leaving the port - sailors sing in the distance. Pelléas tells
Mélisande that he may leave the next day. She asks him why - he doesn't
answer.

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 Pelleas
´ et Melisande
´
Synopsis
Act Two
Scene One
A fountain in the castle grounds
Deep in the park, Pelléas leads Mélisande to his favourite, secret place - a
fountain whose water could once cure the eyes of the blind. The youngsters
play by the water, and as Mélisande's hair falls into a well she tells Pelléas
that it's longer that her entire body. She starts playing with the wedding
ring Golaud gave her, throwing it carelessly into the air. On her final throw,
she fumbles and the ring falls to the bottom of the water, just as a distant
clock strikes twelve. She panics, but Pelléas says they must simply tell
Golaud the truth about the ring.

Scene Two
Inside the castle
On the stroke of noon, as the ring fell, Golaud was thrown from his horse. He
is badly injured. Mélisande looks after him tenderly, but starts to cry and
confesses that she feels sad and sick in the suffocating world of Allemonde.
Golaud comforts her, but as he does so he notices that she is not wearing her
wedding ring. She lies to him and says that she dropped in on the beach, in a
grotto. He becomes incredibly angry and orders her to go with Pelléas into
the night and find it. She protests, but to no avail.

Scene Three
In the sea grotto
Mélisande and Pelléas pretend to look for the ring on the beach, even though
they both know that it is at the bottom of the well. They are alone in the
dark together and as the moon breaks through the clouds, Pelléas urges
Mélisande to take his hand. She is scared to see three starved beggars lying
asleep in the grotto. Pelléas explains that there is a terrible famine in the
land. Mélisande runs away in fear. Pelleas remains fascinated staring at the
peasants in the moonlight

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 Pelleas
´ et Melisande
´
Synopsis
Act Three
Scene One
Outside a castle tower in the grounds
Mélisande is brushing her hair, and singing to herself. Pelléas is outside and
hears her. He persuades her to let her long hair fall out of the tower. He
wraps himself in it in ecstasy, getting as close to her as he can and only
stops himself when Golaud interrupts them - he tells them off for behaving
like children and sends Mélisande off to bed.

Scene Two
The castle vaults
Golaud takes his brother into the horrible suffocating stench of the castle
vaults and terrifies him with visions of death and horror.

Scene Three
Outside the vaults
Pelléas at last escapes from the vaults and his brother and breathes the
outside air. Golaud warns him not to spend so much time with Mélisande - he
has noticed something developing between them. He also tells Pelléas that
Mélisande is pregnant.

Scene Four
Near Mélisande's window
Yniold enters and his father, Golaud pretends to play with his son, but soon
starts asking Yniold about Pelléas and Mélisande. He is desperate for his son
to confirm his suspicions that they are having an affair and becomes
increasingly furious. Yniold becomes more and more upset and admits that he
saw them kiss once, but his answers neither confirm nor deny Golaud's
suspicions. Finally in a brutal act of violation, Golaud brutally forces his
son to look through Mélisande's window to see what she and Pelléas are
doing. But once more his jealous suspicions remain unconfirmed - the couple
simply stare silently at the lamp.

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 Pelleas
´ et Melisande
´
Synopsis

Act Four
Scene One
Lunch in the castle - some months later
Mélisande, now noticeably pregnant agrees to meet Pelléas by the fountain
in the castle grounds secretly at night. Pelléas' father appears to have
made a recovery and has mysteriously told his son that he must go on a
journey.

Scene Two
Arkel approaches Mélisande and tells her how he has silently pitied her
unhappiness since she arrived. He feels that her youth and beauty
rejuvenate the castle and him, and he asks that he can touch her young flesh
to remind him of joy and happiness. Golaud interrupts in a bad mood and
picks a quarrel with Mélisande, accusing her of lying and deception. He
condemns her lack of innocence and eludes to his suspicions of her adultery.
He ends up by savagely attacking her, dragging her along the floor by her
beautiful hair. Eventually Arkel manages to stop him and Golaud leaves,
saying that he will wait for his time of revenge. Arkel declares obliquely
"if I were God I would have pity on the hearts of men" but can offer no
comfort to Mélisande.

Scene Three
Inside the castle
After realising that the ball he wants to play with is trapped under an
immovable heavy stone, Yniold happily watches the sheep at the castle.
They are silent and Yniold wants to know why - it is because they aren't on
their way to their stables, but to their deaths.

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 Pelleas
´ et Melisande
´
Synopsis

Scene Four
The fountain, outside the castle gates
Pelléas is waiting for Mélisande. He is scared that she will not come and
that he will have to leave forever without revealing his true feelings. She
arrives, straight from her fight with Golaud. They are uncomfortable
together at first, until he confesses that he loves her - she replies that she
loves him as well. Pelléas' joy at this is tempered by Mélisande's feeling of
sadness that she cannot escape. Suddenly they hear the castle gates shut and
they realise that events have overtaken them and they are locked out
together. Their ecstasy is interrupted as Mélisande sees something moving
in the shadows. It is Golaud and they momentarily forget their fear and kiss
each other in front of him. Enraged, Golaud kills Pelléas and chases
Mélisande into the darkness.

Act Five

Pelléas is dead. Mélisande has given birth to a daughter but lies as if near
death. The doctor can't understand what is wrong with her. She awakes and
Golaud asks to be left alone with her. She appears to have no recollection of
Pelléas' death or of her child. Golaud asks for her forgiveness - but demands
that she tell him whether she loved Pelléas. She says that she did but when
he asks whether the love was "guilty" she insists not. Golaud accuses her of
lying and she slips away from him when she realises that she is to die.
Arkel returns and shows Mélisande her little daughter. Mélisande
prophesises tears for her daughter. The arrival of the serving women of the
castle make Golaud realise that Mélisande is about to die, though remains in
a state of jealous suspicion. Mélisande dies leaving her child motherless to
face the world alone.

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 Pelleas
´ et Melisande
´
Achille Claude Debussy
(b. St. Germain-en-Laye, nr Paris
22.08.1862; d. Paris, 25.03.1918)
An eccentric youth
The eldest of five children, Debussy was the only child to stay with his parents - the
others, for financial reasons, were entrusted by their mother to her sister-in-law. He
never attended school and was taught at home by his mother, though with variable
success - even aged thirty, his spelling was still poor. He was not a particularly happy
or sociable child, sitting for many hours on his own, delighting in small delicate
ornaments and engravings.

When Debussy was seven, following the death of his brother, Achille and his sister
were taken to Cannes by their aunt. It was here that the young Achille had his first
piano lesson. Within a year, Debussy was receiving lessons from a former pupil of
Chopin who believed that he should become a musician. Debussy's father soon gave up
the idea of sending his son into the Navy and instead instituted a strict regime of daily
practice.

11 years’ hard labour

So it was that in 1873, an introspective and awkward 11 year old, Debussy entered the
Paris Conservatoire, where he was to remain for the next 11 years. He was rigorously
trained in piano, singing at sight, transposing, analysing and reproducing harmonic or
contrapuntal texture, before learning how to actually construct music himself. During
this time, the fledgling composer changed his name from Achille (which he found
ridiculous) to Claude and became a very able, though not brilliant pianist. His use of
consecutive fifths and octaves and non-resolved sevenths, all avoided by classical
composers, caused a stir within the Conservatoire. When asked by the Registrar what
rule he followed, he replied "Mon plaisir".

The Italian Job

In 1885, Debussy won the Prix de Rome for his cantata L'Enfant Prodigue. As part of
his prize, he was to spend three years at the Villa Medici in Rome. However, he was
not happy there and left after only two years, though not before meeting Verdi and
Liszt and immersing himself in Wagner, the composer who dominated cultural Paris in
the 1880s. Back in Paris he formed a life-long friendship with Erik Satie.

The French Revolution

Debussy had long struggled to find an operatic subject capable of stimulating him and
wrote sketches for several potential texts. In 1889 he mapped out his ideal opera -

The ideal would be two associated dreams. “No place. No time. No big scene. Music in
opera is far too predominant. Too much singing and the settings are too cumbersome.
The blossoming of the voice into true singing should occur only when required.”
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 Pelleas
´ et Melisande
´
Achille Claude Debussy
In 1892, aged 30, Debussy read Maeterlink's symbolist drama Pelléas et Mélisande and
realised he had finally found the basis for his opera. This project was to occupy him
for the next ten years (during which time he also wrote his famous orchestral piece,
the Prelude a l'Apres-Midi d'un Faune).

The work's understated and subtle interpretation of opera (there are only four
fortissimos) offered a truly revolutionary alternative to the thundering passions of
late nineteenth-century opera. Indeed, there is really no "action" to speak of - hardly
anything happens in Pelléas except in the sense that memories happen. "I shall always
prefer a subject where, somehow, action is sacrificed to feeling" Debussy once wrote.

A Belgian Uprising
It would not be unfair to suggest that more drama surrounded the creation of the
work, than the piece itself. On hearing the score, Georgette Leblanc, Maeterlinck's
mistress, was extremely keen to sing the role of Mélisande. Maeterlinck suggested it
to Debussy who was delighted by the idea.

Maeterlinck then read in a paper that another singer had been engaged to sing the role
and was already rehearsing with Debussy. Enraged, Maeterlinck jumped into the street
through a window and set off to beat Debussy with a cane! Although the fault lay
mostly with the theatre and not with Debussy himself, the row between the two men
escalated until there was even talk of a duel, with followers of Debussy volunteering
to fight for him. The affair eventually blew over, but Maeterlinck refused to see the
opera. And on the night of the Dress Rehearsal, he was responsible for distributing
satirical pamphlets to the waiting audience, which ridiculed Debussy's work and
resulted in outbursts of laughter during the performance.

Critical Reception
The critics were divided over the opera's merits. During one rehearsal a
Conservatoire professor berated the "filthy score" for its "errors of harmony"
(unbelievably, a conservatoire pupil was later expelled for having been found in
possession of Pelléas). Yet the first performance went off without too much trouble
and many of the critics hailed it a masterpiece, albeit a perplexing one. Gustave Bret
said "This music overwhelms you, drives deep into your heart with a power of
inspiration that I admire but cannot fully understand".

Joining the dark side...

During the gestation period of Pelléas, Debussy's music finally gained critical
recognition and he became music critic for the Revue Blanche. It was also during this
period, in 1899, that he married Rosalie (Lily) Texier. He was earning practically
nothing from composing and had to give a piano lesson on the morning of his wedding
so that they could pay for a wedding breakfast.
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 Pelleas
´ et Melisande
´
Achille Claude Debussy

In 1902, the year that Pelléas finally opened, Debussy was awarded the Croix
d'Honneur but found life in the public eye extremely distasteful. The following
year, he travelled to London to review Wagner's Ring Cycle at Convert Garden and
worked on his three symphonic sketches, La Mer, which were finished in 1905 at
Eastbourne.

Family Affairs
In 1904, Debussy left his wife for Mme Emma Bardac. Devastated, Lily Debussy
shot herself and was taken to a nursing home, wounded near the heart. Mme Bardac
was the wife of a prominent financier and the mistress of Gabriel Fauré. She was a
well travelled woman, with a sparkling and a delightful singing voice. In the
Autumn of 1905, a daughter, Claude-Emma, was born. Her parents married some
time later. Debussy wrote the piano pieces Children's Corner for her, with the
dedication "to my dear little Chouchou, with her father's affectionate apologies for
what follows". Claude-Emma was to die in 1919 aged only 14.

After the scandal of his marriage breakup, the critics were out for his blood. In the
Le Temps’ review of La Mer, the critic concluded with "I neither hear, nor see, nor
feel the sea".

Increasingly withdrawn...
With rivalry growing between the followers of different composers in France,
notably Ravel, Debussy tried to distance himself, both mentally and physically. He
travelled extensively, conducting his own works. But he was sick and on a trip to
England, he had to cancel work in Edinburgh and Manchester due to the onset of
cancer.

His last stage work was the ballet Jeux, for Nijinsky. It was performed by
Diaghilev's Russian Ballet in 1913, the same year as Stavinsky's The Rite of Spring
and Ravel's Daphnis et Chloë.

Indian Summer
During the First World War, he had a brief period of productivity, but was becoming
ever thinner and weaker. His last work was the sonata for piano and violin. On May
5 1917, he performed for the last time, playing this same piece, but was clearly
extremely unwell.

He died on 25 march, 1918, while Paris was being shelled by the Germans. The
funeral was a small affair, with only one oration, before the body was removed to
the cemetery at Passy.
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 Pelleas
´ et Melisande
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Opera Glossary
a r i a A song for solo voice reflecting how the character feels (usually miserable) about what
has just or is about to happen.
a u d i t o r i u m Space within the theatre occupied by the audience.
b a r i t o n e Middle-range man's voice, lurking somewhere between bass and tenor.
b a s s Lowest male voice. Often plays characters with dubious moral fibre.
c h o r u s A body of singers who (mostly) sing and act as a group to make the crowd scenes a bit
more plausible. Also the term used for any musical number sung by this group.
c o n d u c t o r Hand-waving-head-honcho, positioned to obscure the view of the lady sitting in
the centre of the front row. Makes sure everyone is performing the same piece.
c o n t r a l t o (or alto) Low-pitched woman's voice. Not to be confused with... counter tenor High-
pitched man's voice. Nearest we have nowadays to a castrato (from the verb to
castrate...ouch...)
e n s e m b l e From the French word for "together". When two or more soloists try to have their
say at the same time (can get rather messy...). Ensemble for two is a duet, three is a trio, four
a quartet and so on.
f i n a l e The final number of an act - sung by an ensemble (see above).
i n t e r m e z z o A piece of music played between the acts of an opera (usually just long enough
for the prima donna to put on her sixth frock of the show).
i n t e r v a l A (welcome) break between the acts of an opera.The lights go on and the audience is
free to move around, catch up on what's been happening, join the chorus at the bar...
l i b r e t t o The text of an opera. Written by a librettist.
m e z z o - s o p r a n o Female singer who can't quite reach those top notes. Not much glass-
shattering action here.
o r c h e s t r a Group of musicians found in the pit.
o v e r t u r e Music at the start of the show. Sets the scene, warms up the orchestra and reminds
the audience that the performance is about to begin.
p r i m a d o n n a The leading woman singer in an operatic cast. Not to be confused with
Guy Ritchie's wife...
p r o p s Mobile pieces of the set which help to make it all a bit more believable.
p r o s c e n i u m a r c h Wall in front of the curtain, dividing the stage from the auditorium.
r e c i t a t i v e The bits which aren't the songs. Closer to the rhythm of speech and often
accompanied by just a harpsichord or piano. Used to further the action of the story (we'd never
get home if the plot was told through the arias...).
r e p e t i t e u r from the French for to repeat. This tortured soul sits in on rehearsals and
pretends to be an orchestra at the piano.
s c o r e The full score contains all the sung and orchestral parts in the opera. The vocal score
has the voice parts and a piano reduction of the orchestra (for rehearsals - see repetiteur).
s o p r a n o High female voice. Watch out for those delicate window panes...
s y n o p s i s Outline of the plot. Especially useful during the interval when it is once more light
enough to find out what on earth is happening.
t e n o r A high male voice. The good guy, pure of heart and all that.
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