Pelleas and Melisande Suite Op.46

At the Castle Gate

Melisande

At the Seashore

A Fountain in the Park

The Three Blind Sisters

Pastorale

Melisande at the Spinning Wheel

Entracte

The Death of Melisande

Reading Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama Pelleas and Melisande today it is difficult to believe that it was such a powerful source of inspiration for some of the greatest composers working    during the ten years round the turn of the 20th century. Fauré wrote characteristically sensitive incidental music for an English version in London in 1898;    Debussy completed his epoch-making opera to his own adaptation of the play in 1902; Schoenberg took it as the basis for a superbly realised symphonic poem in 1903; and Sibelius furnished an extensive score of incidental music for a production at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki in 1905. Compiling a Pelleas and Melisande suite later in the same year Sibelius found that he liked the incidental music so much that he left out only one interlude.

One of the things that interested Sibelius in the play was the sombre atmosphere of the medieval castle in which the action takes place. That much is clear from the inspired first movement of the suite, At the Castle Gate, which had originally served as the prelude to the play and which reflects in its sonorous string scoring not only the gloom of the place but also its solemn stature. Melisande enters this world as Golaud’s bride in the first act of the play as the poetic and yet mysteriously sad figure who inspires the lovely cor anglais solo at the beginning and the end of the second movement of the suite. At the Seashore is a short impressionist episode designed to accompany the observation by Pelleas, Golaud’s younger half-brother, that “there is nothing more to be seen on the sea”.    The Fountain in the Park,    where Pelleas and Melisande begin to fall in love and where she loses here wedding ring in a childish game, is a charming waltz that outshines dark murmurs from the lower strings to let in some light at last.

The Three Blind Sisters is a transcription, mainly for woodwind, of a song vaguely in the style of a medieval ballad from the third act to which, in the incidental music, the delightful Pastorale acts as a prelude. Melisande at the Spinning Wheel is nothing like the innocent Fileuse, the equivalent movement in Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande Suite: it is more, as the opening drum roll and the threatening gesture on lower strings indicate, an expression of foreboding which, in spite of the dancing woodwind figures, becomes ever more serious as it goes on. Her premonitions are not misplaced since, after the deceptively cheerful gavotte-like Entracte from before the fourth act,    she meets her end in the intimate, tenderly elegiac music of The Death of Melisande.

Gerald Larner © 2010