The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (59 page)

Charlotte and Albert duly marry.
Werther is plunged into despair, and despite the efforts of Charlotte’s chirpy younger sister Sophie, he leaves the town contemplating suicide.
Charlotte begs him not to return until Christmas.
Albert guesses that Charlotte is still in love with Werther.

On Christmas Eve, Charlotte secretly rereads Werther’s letters. Sophie pleads with her to cheer up, but she breaks down in tears.
Werther duly returns and, after a vain attempt at ordinary conversation, Charlotte cannot resist falling into his arms.
She hurriedly leaves the room, insisting that they should never meet again.
Albert is suspiciously questioning his wife when a message comes from Werther asking to borrow Albert’s pistols, ostensibly to protect himself on a journey he is about to take.
Albert orders his wife to hand the pistols over.
After her husband has left, Charlotte rushes out to find Werther.

But it is too late: when Charlotte arrives at Werther’s house, she finds that he has indeed shot himself.
They remember their first meeting and Charlotte admits that she has always loved him.
As Werther dies, children are heard singing a carol outside.

What to listen for

For all its occasional vulgarities (such as the overuse of the melodramatic device of the
sforzando,
or sudden fortissimo blast of orchestral noise),
Werther
is a coherent, effective music drama which provides two superb leading roles.
For the tenor, Werther is pure joy, with a glorious aria (‘Pourquoi me réveiller’ in Act III) fewer of the problematic high-lying or soft passages that so many French operas require.
Charlotte is a strongly drawn personality, whose voyage towards self-discovery is movingly and perceptively drawn through her great scene in Act III.
The orchestration is dark in hue, with a striking use of the saxophone to accompany Charlotte’s ‘Les larmes qu’on ne pleure pas’ in Act III.

Massenet also wrote a version which transposed Werther’s role for baritone – this was recently revived at the Met for Thomas Hampson – and Charlotte can also be sung by a darker-coloured soprano such as that of Angela Gheorghiu.

In performance

The opera does not move easily out of its original period (though in Amsterdam, Willy Decker tried an admired abstract approach) and the success of a performance depends less on imaginative production than on securing two principal singers who can strike the necessary sparks off each other and rise to the high drama of Act III with life-or-death intensity.

Recording

CD: Angela Gheorghiu (Charlotte), Roberto Alagna (Werther); Antonio Pappano (cond.).
EMI 556820 2

Claude Debussy

(1862–1918)

Pelléas et Mélisande

Five acts. First performed Paris, 1902.

Libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck, edited by the composer

Debussy toyed with many ideas for operas, including an adaptation of
As
You
Like
It,
but eventually settled on a successful contemporary play in the fashionable Symbolist vein.
Initially received with hostility and bafflement,
Pelléas
is now acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of modern opera, though the subtlety of both music and text means that its great underlying emotional power is not always evident on a first hearing.

Plot

In the mythical kingdom of Allemonde, Prince Golaud meets a mysterious girl when he is wandering in a forest.
Her name is Mélisande, but she does not know where she has come from and seems possessed by some deep sadness.
As related to his grandfather, the blind King Arkel, in a letter read aloud by his mother Geneviève, Golaud subsequently marries her.

Pelléas, Golaud’s stepbrother, returns from his travels.
Mélisande remains uncommunicative but evidently unhappy in the dark and gloomy castle; she is befriended by Pelléas and loses her wedding ring when they are out walking together.
Golaud questions Yniold, his son by his first marriage, about relations between Pelléas and Mélisande, but gets no clear answer.
Golaud becomes increasingly jealous and attacks the pregnant Mélisande, to the dismay of Arkel.

Pelléas feels he must leave the castle.
He secretly meets Mélisande for the last time in the park outside the castle.
Finally, they quietly declare their love for each other.
Golaud, who has been spying on them, kills Pelléas.

Mélisande lies dying, having been delivered of a premature child.
Golaud is full of remorse and begs Mélisande to tell
him the truth about her relations with Pelléas, but she is incoherent.
Arkel laments the sadness of life, as Mélisande, mysterious to the last, passes away.

What to listen for

More purely a play set to music than any opera previously written,
Pelléas
uses a fluent vocal line which embodies the rhythms and accents of ordinary speech rather than their lyrical expansion.
Although the opera contains no obvious set pieces, certain episodes do stand out – Geneviève’s reading of Golaud’s letter, for instance (so exposed for the contralto that it sternly tests her ability to stay in tune); the hauntingly beautiful modal folk-song which Mélisande sings as she lets her hair fall from the window of her tower; or the enthralling love duet in which Pelléas’s shy confession seems about to blossom into a tune (‘On dirait que ta voix’) only to be drowned by the tension of the situation.
Note also how, in its final scene, the opera, like Mélisande herself, seems to die away rather than conclude.

The opera is often described as Wagnerian.
But although one can certainly sense the anterior influence of
Tristan
and
Parsifal,
Debussy’s use of melodic motifs is much more sparing than Wagner’s, and the score does not have the overall cumulative structure of Wagner’s late operas – instead, Debussy uses the orchestra to evoke an atmosphere and a visual impression, most notably in the breathtaking transformation of the sounds which accompany Pelléas and Golaud as they move out of the vaults into the sunlight in Act III.

At one level, Mélisande is relatively easy to sing – there are no high notes, nothing sustained or long-breathed – but less easy to interpret.
The range of notes required is so narrow that the role can comfortably be sung by either soprano or mezzo-soprano; the orchestration which underlies her music is not heavy either.
What makes a great performance is the subtlety with which the singer colours or inflects words and phrases, suggesting the evasiveness of the girl.
Pelléas lies most comfortably for a high-lying, light-timbred baritone,
but is also often taken by light tenors.
As bass-baritone, Golaud is more challenging, at least in terms of riding orchestral storms.
Arkel is a bass, with a long, noble monologue in Act IV; Yniold can be sung either by a boy treble or a very light, flat-chested and boyish-sounding soprano.

In performance

Initially associated with the sub-culture of homosexuals, decadents and Symbolists,
Pelléas
was first staged in a medieval fairy-land which kept the emotional drama obscured.
Today’s directors have seized on the opera with relish, and it has received several radically different interpretations.
At the Met, for instance, Jonathan Miller set it in a Victorian country-house and gave the opera the feel of a late Henry James novel, in which what the repressed inhabitants don’t say becomes more interesting than what they do; in Amsterdam, Peter Sellars presented the action in and around a crumbling, isolated mansion on the Atlantic or Pacific seaboard, populated by four generations of a wealthy but dysfunctional American upper-class family; for Opera North, Richard Jones suggested that Arkel’s castle was something like a prison, in which the characters were confined to whitewashed cells and much was made of the image of a locked door and what happens behind it; for WNO, Peter Stein’s wonderfully musical and visually beautiful production returned to the piece’s roots, presenting a
fin-de-siècle
fairytale setting (and faithfully representing all Maeterlinck’s stage directions, including a flight of doves and a flock of live sheep) without any loss of psychological complexity or human reality.