It’s one of the greatest operas of the 20th century, with sensuously multicolored music by Claude Debussy and a psychologically probing libretto by the Belgian symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck. But it took Pelléas et Mélisande 122 years for the Dallas Opera to present its first staged performance in Texas, Friday night at the Winspear Opera House. (The Round Top Festival Institute marked the opera’s centenary with a 2002 concert performance.)
Like La traviata, which opened the Dallas Opera season — and numerous other operatic hits — Pelléas ends with a woman’s death. But there the similarities end. Pelléas has neither party scenes nor hit tunes.
As with Wagner, an influence on Debussy’s one major opera, vocal lines and orchestral music flow in organic processes. Only gradually do tensions among mysterious characters rise to high drama.
The best thing about Friday’s opening performance was glorious playing from the Dallas Opera Orchestra, the score’s rustles, shimmers, weavings and surges exquisitely shaped by guest conductor Ludovic Morlot. The three principal roles were well sung and — within constraints of an often frustrating staging — vividly portrayed. The production is sung in the original French, with projected English translations.
Lost in the woods, Golaud discovers the mysterious and similarly lost Mélisande. He takes her back to the castle where he lives with his half brother Pelléas; their mother Geneviève; their grandfather, the old king Arkel; and Yniold, Golaud’s young son from a previous marriage.
Golaud marries Mélisande, but a greater connection develops between her and Pélleas. Enraged by growing jealousy, Golaud kills Pelléas and injures Mélisande, who dies shortly after giving birth to a baby.
On one level, the opera is a love triangle, but an ambiguous one. It’s also a domestic drama in an isolated, suffocating environment haunted by death. That Mélisande is psychologically damaged is clear from the start. Golaud’s emotional fragility and volatility aren’t immediately obvious, but his insecurity pushes him into madness.
A co-production with the Bavarian State Opera, introduced last summer in Munich, the Dallas Opera’s version transposes the opera from the libretto’s mythic “Allemonde” to an aristocratic turn-of-the-20th-century household. The libretto specifies a forest, a castle with tower and a spooky crypt, but Dutch stage director Jetske Mijnssen keeps the action indoors. The revival director here is Kathleen Smith Belcher.
Designer Ben Baur supplies no set as such, but assorted chairs, a long dining table with candelabra, a floor standing mirror, and beds for Golaud, the dying Mélisande and (mentioned in the libretto but never an active role) Pelléas’ father. The opening-scene forest is replaced by ballroom-dancing couples.
A downstage trough of water makes do for the opera’s fountain, although patrons seated on the main floor won’t realize it’s there until Mélisande and Pelléas splash around in it. Baur’s costumes look out of a Henry James novel — that’s fine — although lost-in-the-woods Mélisande seems implausibly well dressed.
For an opera unlikely to be seen around here for decades to come, it’s a pity the production so often works at cross purposes with the libretto. Again and again, characters sing about things or actions nowhere to be seen. Extra characters cluster around what should be intimate dialogues.
The libretto makes much of contrasts of light and dark, but Andrew May realizes Bernd Purkrabek’s original lighting design with scarcely varied side lighting — arresting as it is. One needn’t be a slave to literalness, but we need some contrast between nature and the castle’s dank oppression, not just interior scenes. And Pelléas here somehow survives Golaud’s mortal wound.
Pelléas is a creative masterpiece, but its subtlety makes it relatively rare even in top opera houses. Especially for an audience mostly new to it, so much extra work shouldn’t be required to make sense of it.
That said, Lauren Snouffer embodies Mélisande’s fragile strangeness with a radiant lyric soprano. Benjamin Appl, originally cast as Pelléas, withdrew some weeks beforehand. But the company was lucky to book Edward Nelson, who’d sung the role several times, most recently last summer in Des Moines. He supplied good looks and a lyric baritone that could take on considerable power at dramatic moments. Nicolas Courjal was the very personification of Golaud, with a gruff, granular baritone and increasing physical menace.
Friday’s performance was plagued by frequent imbalances between voices and orchestra. It struck me as less a matter of overplaying from the pit than of inadequate projection by the singers. The absence of reflective set walls didn’t help.
Willard White’s Arkel was particularly underpowered, and Benjamin Bjorklund’s Yniold needed some amplification. Katharine Goeldner was a serviceable Geneviève, Ben Brady a surprisingly sonorous Physician. The chorus’ brief offstage effects, prepared by Paolo Bressan, were magically atmospheric.
Details
Repeats at 2 p.m. Sunday and 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday at Winspear Opera House, 2403 Flora St. $15 to $389. 214-443-1000, dallasopera.org.