Hey, it's this! What's "this?" It's my two hundredth opera, that's what! Of course, it depends on what you're willing to count as an "opera," which is why this sort of effort to exactly ennumerate things like this is an exercise in foolishness, but fuck man, I can't help it. It's my generation! I think I approach operas the way some do pokémon, though I think they're more likely to actually catch 'em all.
I chose this one for the big two-oh-oh because it is considered a landmark in 20th-century music. Or so sez Wikipedia. I would've said "twentieth-century," but no doubt they know best. I would have assumed it was based on some Greek myth or other, but no, apparently the story goes back no further than the play by Maurice Maeterlinck that it's based on. We learn again from Wikipedia that Maeterlinck, after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, would go on to plagiarize a book about termites. Cool, cool.
Well, that's neither here nor there. The story, at least in outline, is pretty darned simple, as these things go: Prince Goulaud finds this mysterious woman, Mélisande, in the woods, and they get married, as you do. But then she and his brother Pélleas fall in love, so he murders him. He feels bad afterwards, but it's TOO LATE. And then Mélisande dies in childbirth, and THAT IS THAT.
You know who didn't like this opera? The Latin American dictator protagonist of Alejo Carpentier's great novel Reasons of State, who sees its Met debut. He remarks: "No one is really singing here; there is no baritone, tenor, or bass . . . there are no arias . . . no ballet . . . not a single ensemble [ . . . ] The fact is that although our friend the Academician, and that other chap, D'Annunzio, tell me that this is a masterpiece, I'd rather have Manon, Traviata,and Carmen. And talking of whores, take me to a brothel." He also complains about what he perceives as a lack of actual music; he makes the whole thing sound impossibly avant-garde, but it's really not: this seems to be illustrating his rigidly conventional thinking. I mean, I know that people have had a hard time dealing with innovations in music, so what do I know, but this ain't Berg; it ain't even Strauss at his most extreme. It's true that there are no arias here, but really, in a post-Wagner world, is that that hard to deal with?
The music, in truth, is melodious as anything; I found it quite transporting. I think one's mileage may vary as to the actual drama, though. It's very stylized; this stylization is emphasized in this production, but it's hard to imagine it could ever not basically be so. I was insistently reminded of L'Orfeo,which is similarly emotionally cool and characterized by very deliberate, mannered gestures. This certainly isn't bad--L'Orfeo is great, of course--but while there is plenty here that's striking and memorable, it did, at times, feel a bit bloodless. Like you want this romance to have more passion, dammit. But that's clearly not what the piece is going for, and I respect that. I liked it, basically. And I liked the production, basically (by our old friend Robert Wilson) about which the first and last thing you'll notice is its extreme blueness, which again--this seems characteristic of the whole thing--is striking but a bit monotonous in places. Also--speaking of deliberate gestures--at several points Pelléas does what looks to me to be exactly the gesture that the kids call "dabbing," which surely can't be deliberate. There's nothing else humorous here, and do you think anyone involve actually knows what that is? It's some kind of miracle that I do. But anyway. That's neither here nor there. It's too bad that this is Debussy's only completed opera.
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