The saddest opera ever composed, naked

Monteverdi ― Gluck ― Wagner ― Debussy: three centuries of opera are strung together in these four names, those of the great reformists and the main people responsible for its metamorphoses in as many crucial historical moments.

Claude Debussy was the only one who carried out a truly silent revolution, without the previous theoretical apparatus that supported the changes postulated by his predecessors and with a single work as an aesthetic manifesto.

It is a unique opera in every way, a prodigy without precedent or consequence that refuses to be framed in any usual category and that stands, from start to finish, as an apotheosis of dispossession, of renunciation.

Already in its preliminary stage, before composing a single note, Debussy gave up commissioning, or undertaking himself, the customary transformation of his source of literary inspiration into an operatic libretto.

With the sole split, almost surgical, of narrated phrases or scenes, Maurice Maeterlinck's drama became, without any mediation or mediator, the very text of the opera.

Beginning of Claude Debussy's handwritten text published after his death with the title 'Why I wrote "Pelléas"'.

A few weeks before the premiere of

on April 30, 1902, Debussy wrote a short explanatory text at the request of Georges Ricou, general secretary of the Paris Opéra-Comique.

It would not be published until after the composer's death under the title

In it he confesses his long-standing desire to create music for the theatre, “but the way he wanted to do it was so unusual that after several attempts he had almost given up”.

Debussy longed to imbue his music with that “freedom that it contains perhaps to a greater extent than any other art, since it is not limited to a more or less exact reproduction of nature, but to the mysterious correspondences between Nature and Imagination” .

He, who confessed in another writing to have been a Wagnerian in his youth “to the point of forgetting the most elementary principles of decorum”, now recalls how “after several years of passionate pilgrimages to Bayreuth, I began to doubt the Wagnerian formula;

or, rather, it seemed to me that it could only serve for the specific case of Wagner's genius.

[...] And, without denying his genius,

it can be said that he had put an end to the music of his time, a bit in the way that Victor Hugo managed to encompass all previous poetry”.

And, with a play on words that he himself emphasizes, Debussy concludes that the search for the way to shape his ideal had to be carried out after (

Wagner, but not inspired by him (

).

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Debussy, music without labels

His would therefore have to be an entirely new chapter in the history of the genre, not a mere appendix or corollary to the previous one.

Still, of course, Wagner left a deep mark on

, though it is not difficult to perceive or glimpse at almost every measure the reluctance with which Debussy uses himself to depart from his example, if not to refute it outright.

Already from the title, it is almost impossible not to draw parallels with

, another ill-fated couple doomed to a tragic end: the men, of violent death at the hands of Melot and Golaud, while they lose their lives

without apparent direct cause, because the doctor himself, at the beginning of the fifth act, states that it is impossible for Mélisande to die as a result of such a small wound, unable even to end the life of a little bird.

And yet, this woman "so calm, so shy and so silent", as King Arkel defines her in the last sung intervention of the opera, this volatile, almost incorporeal being, "this mysterious being" whose most visible attribute is her long hair, of Klimtian or Pre-Raphaelite stock, expires in the same way that Isolde had.

Pelléas (Julien Behr) is struck down by Golaud (Alexandre Duhamel) at the end of the fourth act of the opera.Opéra de Lille/Frédéric Iovino

Arkel's kingdom, Allemonde, a name resulting from uniting a German word,

(everything), and a French word,

(world), symbolically confirms that the universalist vocation of

is no less than that of

or

Here too there are royal characters and family ties that come between lovers, but, more than a parable of the world, which Wagner seems to want to encapsulate in the

From its origin to its destruction, what Maeterlinck and Debussy really want —their goals are indistinguishable— is to show that we are all helpless in the hands of a fatal and irrational destiny: whatever we do, it will end up imposing itself and deciding for us, no matter what. our age and condition.

It cannot be by chance that practically all human ages are represented in the drama of the Belgian writer and the opera of the French composer: the old Arkel, the adult Golaud, the young Pelléas and Mélisande, the child Yniold, the unnamed baby of the last days. of the fifth act, that girl born of love between the two protagonists whose turn has now inevitably come, as Arkel admits in the last sentence of the opera.

Her parents are dead

how Marie and Wozzeck will die a few years later, leaving an uncertain future for their son, but no one can doubt at the end of one and another opera that the future will also implacably fall on these orphans of the 20th century.

Nor is it fortuitous that Alban Berg, in the first notes he took in a small notebook, drew parallels between

and his future opera.

He approached the drama of Georg Büchner with the same respect, almost reverence, with which Debussy had used, without interference, Maeterlinck's text: the fate of one is the one that digs the abyss of the other.

Debussy's vocal and instrumental writing

it departs strongly from any opera before (and perhaps even after).

More than great singers, or consecrated names,

it needs artists who know how to say Maeterlinck's text with the musical prosody —a silk glove on a marble hand— imagined by the French composer.

This is what all the singers do who premiered, without an audience, at the Opéra de Lille Daniel Jeanneteau's staging in March last year, which is when this recording was made, which he now publishes without sparing any expense (the book that accompanies it is 250 pages) the Harmonia Mundi stamp.

Due to their specific weight within the plot, Vannina Santoni's fragile and almost spectral Mélisande and Julien Behr's confused and troubled Pelléas (a tenor, instead of the usual baritone) stand out, with an obligatory mention for Hadrien Joubert, the boy who —as Debussy always wanted, contrary to replacing him with a soprano— sings the character of Yniold.

But the jewel in the crown of this new

is the orchestral performance of Les Siècles, the formation created by François-Xavier Roth in which instruments (contemporaries of each work they perform) and instrumentalists have equal importance.

From the brief introduction of the first act, vintage bassoons, clarinets, oboes and flutes, or the gut strings of cellos and violas, produce a sonority that has little to do with that of their modern counterparts.

Debussy's transparent orchestration is heard stripped of modern adhesions in the bare and unvarnished translation of Roth and Les Siècles, which vividly and imaginatively recreate the dreamlike and shadowy outlines of the fountain, the forest, the sea or the cave of the mysterious kingdom de Allemonde, scene of the saddest operatic story ever told.

And, in its unique and visionary way, also sung.

Claude Debussy: 'Pelleas et Mélisande'.

Vannina Santoni, Julien Behr and Alexandre Duhamel, among others.

Les Siècles.

Dir.: Francois-Xavier Roth.

World Harmony.

3 CDs

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