Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande

When theater managers awoke to the novelty and subtle appeal of Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1893 play Pelléas et Mélisande, it was staged all over Europe — always with incidental music that joined together scenes or under­scored moments of particular importance or tension. Few plays, in fact, were ever staged in the 19th century without musicians in the pit, and because Maeterlinck’s highly suggestive and atmospheric drama was perfect for musical illustra­tion, several composers were called on to provide incidental music.

Gabriel Fauré’s music — from which this suite was drawn — was commissioned in 1898 for a production in London, which was taken to New York soon after. In 1902, Debussy’s operatic treatment of Maeterlinck’s text — approved by the playwright himself — premiered in Paris to resounding acclaim. Composers outside France also created their own musical takes on the story in the following years. Sibelius’s incidental music for the play was first heard in 1905 in Helsinki. Schoenberg — then on the cusp of his experiments in atonality — composed a richly scored tone poem on the subject in 1903. All in all, it was a time of many musical views on the play’s subject and atmosphere.

Fauré’s beautiful, wistful music is perfect for the drama. The play tells, in muted tones and against a dimly medieval background, of Mélisande’s love for Pelléas, half-brother of her husband, Golaud. The latter is character­ized by the second main theme of the Prélude (in the woodwinds and cello) and, at the end, his horn call is heard in the depths of the forest. The movement has been described as “less a décor than a state of mind,” with some chordal string writing strongly reminiscent of Fauré’s well-known Requiem, written between 1887 and 1890. The second movement, Fileuse, follows a long tradition of spinning-wheel pieces, and moves to the minor mode for a melody that is fully exploited in the last movement.

The Sicilienne is perhaps the best-known movement of the suite, with its charac­teristic and charming melody and its suggestions of modal color. It had been composed earlier for a different purpose and has little connection with the play, but its charm is inescapable. The final movement, in contrast, is charged with the tragic emotions of the last act, when Mélisande dies under the remorse­ful gaze of Golaud and his household.

When pressed for time, Fauré sometimes passed the orchestration of his works to his pupils. After his death it was disclosed that the orchestrator of this suite (and much of the entire full score of incidental music) was Charles Koechlin, who was Fauré’s biographer and himself a composer of unrecognized achievement. This suite was a task he undertook with exceptional skill.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.