Pelléas et Mélisande, cent ans après: Études et documents Edited by Jean-Christophe Branger, Sylvie Douche, and Denis Herlin (review)

April 30, 1902 saw the premiere of one of the twentieth century’s most important operatic masterpieces, Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. In spite of some notable public successes, such as the 1901 premiere of his orchestral Nocturnes, Debussy was still relatively unknown to the French musical public when his opera was first performed at the Opéra-Comique; within days, his position as the most important and innovative new voice in French music at the dawn of the twentieth century was secure. Pelléas et Mélisande was the cause of much discussion and controversy in the weeks and months after its first performances, and it has remained a source of fascination for musicians, scholars, and audiences ever since.

Over two days in May 2002, a group of scholars met at the Sorbonne to celebrate the centenary of this momentous occasion with a conference devoted to Debussy and his sole completed opera. Most of the fifteen essays that form the core of this new book were first presented at that conference. The editors have organized the essays by topic into four sections: “From Genesis to First Performances,” “Reception and First Studies,” “Aesthetics and Analysis,” and “Posterity” (my trans.). These are preceded by an interview with Pierre Boulez that serves as a preface to the entire volume, and a brief introduction by the volume’s three editors.

Following the essays, one finds several very useful appendices: a transcription of Maurice Emmanuel’s notes on the famous conversations between Debussy and Ernest Guiraud, which took place in 1889 and 1890 and which contain many insights into Debussy’s ideas about opera; an extensive chronology of events related to the composition of the opera, beginning with Debussy’s first encounter with Maurice Maeterlinck’s play in 1893 and concluding with the 1902 premiere; a list of the 107 performances of the opera that took place at the Opéra-Comique during the composer’s lifetime, with cast information and the total of the ticket receipts for each performance; and finally, a list of performances of the opera that took place in other French cities and in other countries during the composer’s lifetime. With a couple of exceptions, all the performances listed in this appendix also include cast lists.

About forty percent of the volume is taken up by an extensive compilation of over one hundred reviews and essays about the opera published in the French press in 1902, along with an annotated list of their authors. (This latter is especially useful when the author has signed the review with a pseudonym.) There are some photographs scattered throughout the text, including several of the original production, as well as reproductions of early programs, letters, drawings, and manuscript pages. Many of the essays are illustrated with music examples, and indexes of titles and names as well as a bibliography are included.

The first group of essays covers a wide range of topics related to the genesis and first production of the opera. Richard Langham Smith discusses Debussy’s earlier aborted opera project, Rodrigue et Chimène, with an eye to correspondences between that work and Pelléas. Denis Herlin offers commentary on Debussy’s first encounters with Maeterlinck’s play, and Vincent Giroud examines Debussy’s complete short-score draft of the opera, which is currently located in the Frederick R. Koch Collection at Yale University. David Grayson discusses the problems associated with producing a definitive version of the opera for the new collected edition of Debussy’s works, a task made infinitely more difficult by the fact that the composer continued to revise the work for later performances. In light of these multiple revisions to the score, what constitutes the “definitive” version? Grayson’s discussion of this...