A Study on Hysteria: Reinterpreting the Heroine of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande

"I'm head over heels in love with a young lady (a blonde, naturally) with the most beautiful hair in the world and eyes that defeat even the most extravagant comparisons…. In short, she's good enough to marry!"¹ These few lines are from a letter of Claude Debussy's, sent to his publisher Georges Hartmann in July 1899. Cast adrift of context, one wonders first whether an episode from Debussy's notorious love life is here described—for it was around this time that he had forsaken one young lady, the dependable Gaby, to wed another, the exciting fashion model Lilly. One has a fleeting glimpse too, perhaps, of la fille aux cheveux de lin, to be immortalized at the piano a decade later, or of the women of the poems of Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, or the famous blonde nudes of Cézanne, Manet, and Renoir. But actually, the letter speaks—directly, at least—of none of these. In 1899 we also find Debussy in the midst of work on his operatic setting of Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande, and it is Mélisande to whom he refers: a clear, if cliché, mental image of her, a droll picture of desire.

But here lies hidden a curious fact. Searching through the libretto or score of the finished opera, one could easily find references to stunning eyes or enchanting hair, and it is these, of course, that charge the work's potent erotics. Even so, in these sources, Mélisande is never once described specifically as blonde. Yet a century and more of directors and designers—whether working on the play or the opera—have agreed with the image Debussy's letter draws. From classic productions starring, as one example, Irène Joachim, to more recent ones with Natalie Dessay and Magdalena Ko•ená, to countless DVD and CD covers, this particular characteristic holds sway. Indeed, it is such a commonplace image that the simple contradiction of it can be a powerful, and controversial, statement. I think, for example, of the recent and much-maligned Covent Garden staging that allowed Angelika Kirchschlager to keep her own shoulder-length dark hair as Mélisande (with swirling spotlights, in the famous hair scene, to compensate for the lack of blonde effulgence)²; or Pierre Audi's decision to make his Mélisande—until the last act, at least—entirely bald.³

In one obvious sense, this ingrained blondeness is no surprise. For Mélisande displays a fine pedigree from the locus classicus of the blonde, the European fairy tale. As she lets down her hair in the opera's most famous scene, one thinks of the Grimms' Rapunzel, of course, but equally we might delve deep into folklore and find Mélisande's near namesake, the fair mermaid Melusine. It might be said, indeed, that Maeterlinck based an entire literary career on the symbolic potential of such fairy-tale characteristics: running throughout his turn-of-the-century stage plays is a bright seam of similar names—Maleine, Méléandre, Méligrane—and identical hair. In his Soeur Béatrice (1901), for example, the veil of the eponymous nun is removed by her secret lover Prince Bellidor, revealing a cascade of golden curls akin to those of the convent's statue of the Virgin. ("Oh!" exclaims Bellidor, literally dazzled—ébloui. But these blonde locks will later turn a dismal gray when Béatrice's life of indiscretion is revealed).⁴ And eventually Maeterlinck spelt out the same for Mélisande. Though Debussy, preferring the 1892 first printed version, chose to omit the pertinent lines, the playwright's 1898 revised edition of Pelléas is as specific as his symbolist aesthetic will allow. Suddenly inundated by the erotic stuff of Mélisande's hair in the tower scene, Pelléas succumbs to synecdoche and alights on what he sees as her very essence: "I embrace you whole as I kiss your hair, and I suffer no more from within its flames…. Can you hear my kisses...