Pelléas et Mélisande

Preludes and Entractes arranged by Sir John Barbirolli

Act 1

introduction to A Forest -

interlude before A Room in the Castle -

interlude before In front of the Castle

Act 2

introduction to A Well in the Park -

interlude before A Room in the Castle -

interlude before In front of a Cave

Act 4

introduction to A Room in the Castle -

interlude before A Well in the Park -

extracts from A Well in the Park

Pelléas et Mélisande is not like Carmen. It has no dances, marches, entractes or tuneful songs that can be lifted from the score and compiled into a concert suite. Debussy’s opera is not constructed like that. Each of the five acts is a continuity, their various scenes seamlessly linked together, and Maeterlinck’s words are set as heightened speech - often melodiously and sometimes dramatically but never as arias or, with one small exception, in any distinct vocal form. The exception is a song, a little ballad, sung by Mélisande alone in her room at the beginning of the crucial scene in Act 3 where she later allows her fairy-tale hair to cascade from her window in the tower into the eager embrace of Pelléas standing below.

Pelléas et Mélisande does, on the other hand, contain some of the most beautiful orchestral music written round the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Much of it is to be found in the introductions to the acts and in the more or less extended interludes that link the scenes within the acts. If the introductions and interludes were all as short as those of Act 3, highly poetic though they are, it is not likely that anyone would have been tempted to take them out of their context and arrange them for the concert hall. During the course of rehearsal for the first performance of the opera, however - at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1902 - it became all too clear that as many as five of the interludes Debussy had written for Acts 1, 2 and 4 were not long enough to accommodate the scene changes. Much against his will, the composer was prevailed upon to extend them, so adding not only to their proportions but also to their musical interest. Given these often fairly substantial orchestral pieces, several musicians have been inspired to devise means of extracting them painlessly from the opera and re-assembling them into a symphonic suite. Sir John Barbirolli’s compilation of what he calls “Preludes and Entractes” - although it is actually rather more than that - was put together (apparently for the BBC) in about 1943 and must have been one of the first, or even the very first, of its kind.

Act I

The Barbriolli sequence begins at the beginning with the introduction to the opening scene of Act 1 where Golaud, lost in the forest, finds Mélisande weeping abandoned by a well and takes her under his protection. Before the curtain rises the orchestra presents three themes of fundamental importance. The first, an ominously primitive motif outlined by muted cellos, sets the scene deep in the middle ages. The second, in whole-tone harmonies on woodwind, is associated with Golaud, virile hunter and mature grandson of Arkël the aged king of Allemonde. The third, an expressive melody for oboe and clarinet, reflects the lyrical sensitivity of the delicately youthful Mélisande.

As the introduction ends, with a triplet figure undulating very quietly on double-basses, the first interlude begins with a similar figure on violas. Suggesting perhaps the movement of the trees, that figure is sustained by strings and woodwind while Golaud (on the four horns) and Mélisande (briefly on flutes) find their way out of the forest. The extension to this interlude allows Debussy to develop the Golaud theme before the curtain rises on the second scene, set in the castle of Allemonde. As before, the figuration at the end of the extract, in this case an exchange of arabesques on woodwind, is taken up at the beginning of the next. Here, in the interlude leading to the last scene in Act 1, there is more development of the Golaud theme and a lovely recall of the Mélisande melody on oboe as, now Golaud’s wife, she appears in front of the castle. The movement is concluded by half a dozen bars from the end of the act.

Act 2

Pelléas, Golaud’s younger half brother, makes his first entry (as far as this arrangement is concerned) in the delightfully fresh introduction to Act 2, in the first scene of which he takes Mélisande to a favourite spot in the castle grounds, a well whose waters are said to cure blindness. As the supple Pelléas theme on two flutes at the beginning suggests, it is he rather than Golaud who is the natural partner to Mélisande: in the scene that follows she begins to see the truth and tacitly acknowledges the situation by more or less accidentally losing her wedding ring in the well.

There is a price to be paid for Mélisande’s carelessness. In the first interlude in Act 2 the lyrical music associated with the scene at the well merges into further development of the grim Golaud theme, anticipating his anger when he finds she no longer has the ring. Significantly, she lies to him about where and how she lost it, telling him it must be in a cave by the sea. The second interlude in Act 2 acts as a transition to the last scene where, on Golaud’s orders, Pelléas and Mélisande make a show of looking for the ring in the cave. Beginning with a sombre version of the Mélisande theme and a recall of the contrastingly bright woodwind figuration associated with the well scene, it merges into a masterly evocation of the waves rising and falling on the shore. The movement ends with a few bars from the end of the act, where Pelléas is left alone in the cave.

Act 4

As the agitated introduction to Act 4 suggests, the situation in the castle has become very much more serious during the course of the preceding act. Warned off by his jealous half-brother, Pelléas is about to tell Mélisande that he must leave for ever and she is about to be assaulted by Golaud for what he wrongly imagines to be her infidelity. The interlude which follows that violent scene is not so much a transition to A Well in the Park as a passionate reflection on what has passed. The longest purely orchestral episode in the opera, it is an expression of remorse, anger and despair based, except for the oboe’s one brief reference to Mélisande, on Golaud’s theme in a multitude of transformations.

Up to now Barbirolli has drawn almost exclusively on Debussy’s preludes and extended entractes. However, as the interlude before A Well in the Park dies away with Golaud’s theme on three muted horns, he makes a brief pause and then picks up the story in the very middle of the action. It is the scene where Pelléas and Mélisande meet under the cover of darkness to make their fatally lingering farewell and, emerging silently from the shadows, Golaud kills his half-brother. Beginning, interestingly enough, just at the point in that love scene where Debussy chose to start work on the opera in 1893, Barbirolli reduces well over two hundred bars between here and the catastrophic end of the act to well under one hundred. With surgical precision he isolates extracts as short as three or four bars in some cases and - either ignoring the ecstatic vocal parts or transferring them to trumpets - he pieces together an episode of considerable dramatic effect.