Pelléas and Mélisande

Golaud finds Mélisande by a stream in the woods. She has lost her crown in the water but does not wish to retrieve it. They marry, and she instantly wins the favor of Arkël, Golaud's grandfather and king of Allemonde, who is ill. She falls in love with Pelléas, Golaud's brother. They meet by the fountain, where Mélisande loses her wedding ring. Golaud grows suspicious of the lovers, has his son Yniold spy on them, and discovers them caressing, whereupon he kills Pelléas and wounds Mélisande. She later dies after giving birth to an abnormally small girl.

Pelléas et Mélisande - illustrations by Léon Spilliaert (1903)

The main theme is the cycle of creation and destruction. Pelléas and Mélisande form a bond of love, which, step by step, cascades to its fatal end. Maeterlinck had studied Pythagorean metaphysics and believed that human action was guided by Eros (love/sterility) and Anteros (revenge/chaos). The juxtaposition of these two forces brings about a never-ending cycle of calm followed by discord and then change. Pelléas and Mélisande are so much in love that they disregard the value of marriage, provoking the ire of Anteros, who brings revenge and death, which restores order.

Several factors indicate the initial reign of Eros in the play. There is a famine in Arkël's kingdom, indicating that the time for change is nigh. The servants complain that they cannot thoroughly wash the dirt from the steps of the castle.[1]

What, however, sets this play apart from innumerable other plays that treat the familiar triangle of wife, husband and lover is the way in which Pelléas and Mélisande are drawn to each other by feelings that are opaque and indefinite and which they can neither grasp nor express. Mélisande does indeed finally in Act IV tell Pelléas that she loves him, but this is undermined in Act V where she is unaware of such feelings: when Golaud asks her whether she had loved Pelléas with a ‘guilty love’, she does not understand the question. And this may be the first play in the history of drama in which the heroine on her deathbed is unaware that she is dying. The whole play expresses a sense that human beings can understand neither themselves nor the world. This is the Maeterlinck who paved the way for the plays of Samuel Beckett.

A key element in the play is the setting, whether visible in the stage scenery or described in the dialogue. The action takes place in an ancient, decaying castle, surrounded by deep forest, which only occasionally let sunlight in, and with caverns underneath it that breathe infected air and are in danger of collapse. As numerous critics have pointed out, all this symbolizes the dominating power throughout the action of a destiny (the power of death, if you like) fatal to mankind.

Note also the role of water, which appears in several forms throughout the work: Golaud finds her by a stream, Mélisande arrived in the kingdom by sea, she loses her wedding ring in a fountain, Golaud and Pelléas discover foul-smelling waters under Arkël's castle, Mélisande is often seen crying and mentions her tears several times. Moreover, most of the characters' names contain liquid consonants: Pelléas, Mélisande, Arkël, Golaud, Yniold. She appears to be related to the mythical figure Melusine in French folklore.

Pelléas and Mélisande premiered on 17 May 1893 at the Bouffes-Parisiens under the direction of Aurélien Lugné-Poe. Lugné-Poe, possibly taking inspiration from The Nabis, an avant-garde group of Symbolist painters, used very little lighting on the stage. He also removed the footlights. He placed a gauze veil across the stage, giving the performance a dreamy and otherworldly effect. This was the antithesis to the realism popular in French theatre at the time.

Maeterlinck was so nervous on the night of the premiere that he did not attend. Critics derided the performance, but Maeterlinck's peers received it more positively. Octave Mirbeau, to whom Maeterlinck dedicated his play, was impressed with the work, which stimulated a new direction in stage design and theatre performance.[2]

The play has been the basis of several pieces of music. Perhaps the best known is the opera (1902) of the same name by Claude Debussy. In 1898, Gabriel Fauré had written incidental music for performances of the play in London and asked Charles Koechlin to orchestrate it, from which he later extracted a suite. The story inspired Arnold Schoenberg's early symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande of 1902–03. Jean Sibelius also wrote incidental music for it in 1905; the section "At the castle gate" has found fame as the signature music of the BBC The Sky at Night programme. In 2013, Alexandre Desplat, commissioned by the "Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire", composed a Sinfonia Concertante for Flute and Orchestra, inspired by Maeterlinck's Pelléas and Mélisande.