Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande

[Clever Hans]

I found a French/English libretto here:  http://imslp.org/wiki/File:PMLP09094-Debussy-PelleasLibrettoFE.pdf 

The translation's a bit old and musty ("How old may you be?").  I may have a copy of the libretto from the Decca recording on my home computer.  I'll check and see when I get home this afternoon.

Thanks!

[Wendell_E]

You're welcome.  I checked, and no longer have that Decca/Ansermet libretto. 

[Clever Hans]

I appreciate your checking and thanks for the imslp.org tip.

[king ubu]

in reply to a post in the "what are you listening to" thread, but I thought it's more appropriate over here (got to read through this thread now):

Debussy+Pelléas+Boulez=Merveilleux!!!! 

Yes indeed!

But even better was last night's live event at Zurich Opera:

PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE
Opera by Claude Debussy

Conductor   Alain Altinoglu
Orchestra   Philharmonia Zürich
Choir   Zusatzchor der Oper Zürich, SoprAlti

Arkel, König von Allemonde   Brindley Sherratt
Pelléas, Arkels Enkel   Jacques Imbrailo
Golaud, Arkels Enkel   Kyle Ketelsen
Yniold, Golauds Sohn aus erster Ehe   Damien Göritz
Ein Arzt   Charles Dekeyser
Mélisande   Corinne Winters
Geneviève, Mutter von Golaud   Yvonne Naef
Pelléas' Vater   Reinhard Mayr

Inszenierung und Bühne   Dmitri Tcherniakov
Costumes   Elena Zaytseva
Light-Design   Gleb Filshtinsky
Video-Design   Tieni Burkhalter
Chorus master   Jürg Hämmerli
Dramaturgy   Beate Breidenbach

As so often, getting visuals really helped me getting into this opera, which is sort of uneventful after all ... and I still have a bit of a hard time hearing the many qualities of the piece when listening at home. But the staging here in Zurich got very good reviews, good enough for me to end up snatching the last ticket of the cheapest category ... best thing: I had checked in the afternoon, I had the seventh and last place in a box with two times three seats in front of me, and only one of those was sold - that person never turned up, so I had the box for myself (the seat I ended up on would have cost 200$, I paid around 35  , second cheapest would be in the 100$ region already, so there's not much of a choice for mere mortals that attend concerts on a regular basis and not just every three or four months as a special event).

Anyway, Altinoglu really brought the music alive, it was glooming and glowing on low blue flame, at times bursting out (sometimes covering the singers almost completely for a very short moment, but I guess that was part of the effect they aimed at). And the singing was superb all 'round, I though.

They video-recorded last night's performance, so it might be either on one of those private pay tv channels or on DVD, eventually (though I wonder if they can get rid of all the coughing? I am still ill and dragged myself there to not miss anything, and I managed to cough only in breaks or when it was really loud ... and I ate a whole box of cough pastilles, but hey, suffering for art, right? After all, this is protestant Zurich, everything has its price  )

Either way, I was totally floored and crushed and could have gone into the lake after the performance. Truly outstanding!

The thing that made me think - after all, this seems to be the beginning of modern opera, right? So, the plot is empty, or rather, oblique, half of the dramatis personae is absent (blanks), the characters you get to see remain empty (think Robert Walser, think Samuel Beckett), projections maybe ... so the devastating sadness that is left behind cannot, ultimately, be one induced by the plot itself - which is silly, childish, abstruse, obscure ... you name it, but don't try and pretend you have figured out the one reading of it that holds up against any scrutiny! So that sadness, rather, is the reaction to realizing the emptiness of life as modern age has brought it to the fore. It's the sadness of the drifter (what's that again, Deleuze/Guattari, right? To me, it's Jakob von Gunten) becoming aware of himself. Something like that, which may now sound abstruse and obscure, too.

[narraboth]

Pelleas! My secret favorite as a Wagnerian

There's a really good one conducted by Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht.

[Spineur]

This one.  I have seen other covers as well

[ritter]

But even better was last night's live event at Zurich Opera:

PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE
Opera by Claude Debussy

Conductor   Alain Altinoglu
Orchestra   Philharmonia Zürich
Choir   Zusatzchor der Oper Zürich, SoprAlti

Arkel, König von Allemonde   Brindley Sherratt
Pelléas, Arkels Enkel   Jacques Imbrailo
Golaud, Arkels Enkel   Kyle Ketelsen
Yniold, Golauds Sohn aus erster Ehe   Damien Göritz
Ein Arzt   Charles Dekeyser
Mélisande   Corinne Winters
Geneviève, Mutter von Golaud   Yvonne Naef
Pelléas' Vater   Reinhard Mayr

Inszenierung und Bühne   Dmitri Tcherniakov
Costumes   Elena Zaytseva
Light-Design   Gleb Filshtinsky
Video-Design   Tieni Burkhalter
Chorus master   Jürg Hämmerli
Dramaturgy   Beate Breidenbach
...
Either way, I was totally floored and crushed and could have gone into the lake after the performance. Truly outstanding!

The thing that made me think - after all, this seems to be the beginning of modern opera, right? So, the plot is empty, or rather, oblique, half of the dramatis personae is absent (blanks), the characters you get to see remain empty (think Robert Walser, think Samuel Beckett), projections maybe ... so the devastating sadness that is left behind cannot, ultimately, be one induced by the plot itself - which is silly, childish, abstruse, obscure ... you name it, but don't try and pretend you have figured out the one reading of it that holds up against any scrutiny! So that sadness, rather, is the reaction to realizing the emptiness of life as modern age has brought it to the fore. It's the sadness of the drifter (what's that again, Deleuze/Guattari, right? To me, it's Jakob von Gunten) becoming aware of himself. Something like that, which may now sound abstruse and obscure, too.

Thanks for the report, king ubu! Must have been quite an experience. Altinoglu is a very interesting conductor (his DVD of Honneger's Jeanne d'Arc from Montpellier is excellent), and Therniakov can be erratic on occasions, but sometimes provides stunning new inights into pieces that one thinks one knows very well... And Pelléas et Mélisande is a simply stunning work, elusive and mysterious..

This one.  I have seen other covers as well

AFAIK, there's two Ingelbrecht recordings of the opera. the one you mention, Spineur (which I bought some time ago and was not overwhelmed by), and another uerly French effort, originally available in the "golden" series of Montaigne, and in this more recent (but also OOP) release:


The leads are Jacques Janssen, Micheline Grancher and Michel Roux...

[king ubu]

for the German-reading crowd, I put up a slightly longer write-up here:
http://ubus-notizen.blogspot.ch/2016/05/pelleas-et-melisande-27-mai-2016.html

The Ingelbrecht (the Testament one) recording is on my pile of yet-unplayed ones (that includes the HvK, the second Ansermet, the Cluytens and - bought because it was mentioned a few days ago somewhere on this site - the Met/Cooper one on Naxos). Heard so far: Desormière, Ansermet 1, Boulez/Sony (seems there's a DVD with a different cast as well).

[Spineur]

Thank you for correcting me.  There are indeed a 1951 and a 1962 (Théatre des Champs Elysées) recordings.  I actually have the gold edition (1962).  One can find it on the secondary market for some pretty steep price.

It took me a long time to get into Pelleas.  I had attended several live performances over the past two decades and its only in the past year that I was able to turn the key to this opera open.  As Ubu said, the libretto of Maurice Maeterlinck, is underwhelming as opera material and this is why its not easy to get into.

Since I saw in the thread that some of you were looking for its actual text, here is a link for you.

http://operacritiques.free.fr/sylvie_maet.pdf

[narraboth]

:


The leads are Jacques Janssen, Micheline Grancher and Michel Roux...

I have this one. I quite like the touch of how music was handled. Good quality of recording, too.

[zamyrabyrd]

I really enjoyed this short clip, played it over and over again:
https://www.youtube.com/v/wlQRUIWiXxA