Please note that Christine Rice has withdrawn from these concerts due to illness. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra welcomes Jenny Carlstedt, who has graciously agreed to sing the role of Mélisande.

PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

Thursday, May 14, 2015, at 7:00 French Saturday, May 16, 2015, at 7:00 Tuesday, May 19, 2015, at 7:00 & Pelléas et Mélisande Festival Music by Libretto adapted from the play by Esa-Pekka Salonen Conductor Narrator...... Dianne Wiest

Mélisande...... Jenny Carlstedt mezzo-soprano Pelléas, Arkel’s grandson...... Stéphane Degout baritone Golaud, half-brother of Pelléas...... Eric Owens bass-baritone Arkel, king of Allemonde...... Willard White bass-baritone Geneviève, mother of Golaud and Pelléas...... Elodie Méchain contralto Yniold, the young son of Golaud...... Chloé Briot soprano The doctor / A shepherd...... David Govertsen bass

Sailors, servants, beggars Chicago Symphony Chorus Duain Wolfe director

First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

Mike Tutaj Projection design Keith Parham Lighting design Anya Plotkin Production stage manager

Staging and narrations devised by Gerard McBurney

English titles adapted from original titles by Jonathan Burton Projection photography by Alison McBurney

(continued) Pelléas et Mélisande Music by Claude Debussy Libretto adapted from the play by Maurice Maeterlinck

Act 1 Scene 1...... A forest Scene 2...... A room in the castle Scene 3...... Outside the castle

Act 2 Scene 1...... By a well in the park Scene 2...... A room in the castle Scene 3...... Outside a grotto

INTERMISSION

Act 3 Scene 1...... One of the towers of the castle Scene 2...... The castle vaults Scene 3...... A terrace at the entrance of the vaults Scene 4...... Outside the castle

INTERMISSION

Act 4 Scene 1...... A room in the castle Scene 2...... A room in the castle Scene 3...... A well in the park Scene 4...... A well in the park

Act 5 Scene 1...... A bedroom in the castle

The setting is the kingdom of Allemonde and its surroundings

The CSO thanks Julie and Roger Baskes, lead sponsors of the Reveries & Passions Festival concert programming. The appearance of the Chicago Symphony Chorus is made possible by a generous gift from Jim and Kay Mabie. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional sponsorship support for the Reveries & Passions Festival has been provided by: The Jacob and Rosaline Cohn Foundation, Mr. & Mrs. Richard J. Franke, The Gilchrist Foundation, and Burton X. and Sheli Rosenberg. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBEZ 91.5FM for its generous support as a media sponsor of the French Reveries & Passions Festival. CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines.

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

2 COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher

Claude Debussy Born August 22, 1862, Saint Germain-en-Laye, . Died March 25, 1918, Paris, France. Pélleas et Mélisande

Born exactly one week language whose sensitivity could be extended apart in 1862, Claude into music and into the orchestral backcloth.” Debussy and Maurice Debussy had been looking for an operatic Maeterlinck would subject—he had toyed with various ideas and eventually be linked in made a few false starts, including, most substan- creating the seminal tially, a setting based on Corneille’s Le Cid. “For French masterwork of a long time I had been striving to write music twentieth-century music, for the theater, but the form in which I wanted it Pelléas et Mélisande. We to be was so unusual that after several attempts do not know when I had given up on the idea,” he later wrote. The Debussy first became attracted to the Symbolist Corneille subject, he realized, was “totally at writer’s work, but in 1891 he asked for permis- odds with all that I dream about, demanding sion to transform Maeterlinck’s play, La princesse a type of music that is alien to me.” Debussy’s Maleine, into an . Maeterlinck turned him vision was so radically new that he could not at down (the play had already been promised to first put it into words—in 1890, he tried to list Vincent d’Indy). Debussy then read some of his ideals and concerns in a letter to Maeterlinck’s new play, Pelléas et Mélisande the composer Ernest Guiraud: “A poet who half shortly after it was published in May of 1892, speaks things. Two related dreams: that’s the and attended the premiere on May 17, 1893. That ideal. No country, no date . . . scenes with dif- afternoon, sitting in a small Paris theater, he ferent locations and of different types; characters found his ideal operatic subject, one that would who do not discuss, submitting to life, destiny, free him to create a new kind of musical etc.” With these scattered thoughts, Debussy theater—and “release dramatic music from the was beginning to reconstruct the foundations heavy yoke under which it has lived for so long,” of opera—to build a new kind of musical drama as he later said. “The drama of Pelléas, which that mirrored the naturalness of speech and that despite its dream-like atmosphere, contains far was musically fluid and free, never stopping for more humanity than those so-called real-life traditional arias or ensembles. documents, seemed to suit my intentions admira- In August of 1893, Debussy sent his poet bly,” he recalled. “In it there is an evocative friend Henri de Régnier to ask Maeterlinck

COMPOSED These are the first Chicago Symphony APPROXIMATE 1893–1895, 1898, 1900–1902, Orchestra performances. PERFORMANCE TIME subsequently revised Acts 1 & 2 INSTRUMENTATION 59 minutes FIRST PERFORMANCE three flutes and piccolo, two oboes Act 3 April 30, 1902; Opéra-Comique, Paris, and english horn, two clarinets, three 34 minutes France bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, Acts 4 & 5 three trombones, tuba, timpani, 64 minutes FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES percussion, two harps, strings November 26, 28 & 29, 1986, Orchestra CSO RECORDING Hall. Erich Leinsdorf 1986. Erich Leinsdorf conducting. CSO (Preludes and Interludes, arranged (Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the by Leinsdorf) Twentieth Century: Collector’s Choice) (Preludes and Interludes, arranged by Leinsdorf) 3 for permission to set Pélleas et Mélisande to with the scene by the well—the climactic, fateful music. This time, the playwright agreed at once. encounter between Pelléas and Mélisande—and Debussy began composing early in September, continued to concentrate on one act at a time— even before he got Maeterlinck’s approval. and not always in order. Debussy saved act 2 for Debussy set the play virtually intact, rather than last, apparently believing that he was only able to adapt it as a conventional opera libretto—that, convey its sense of impending catastrophe once in itself, was a revolutionary decision, motivated he had already written the opera’s tragic climax. by Debussy’s intention that “the characters of For a brief time, starting in the summer of this opera try to sing like real people, and not 1894, Debussy worked simultaneously on three in an arbitrary language made up of worn-out of his greatest works—Prélude à l’après-midi d’un clichés.” Early on he decided to omit four short faune, Pelléas et Mélisande, and the orchestral scenes from the play in order to focus on the Nocturnes. Finally, on August 17, 1895, he said two protagonists, a the opera was finished, aside from the orchestra- choice Maeterlinck tion (he had marked up the score with various endorsed. From instrumental indications, often in colored ink). the start, Debussy But it would be nearly another decade before was puzzled by the Debussy finally stopped reworking and rewriting. elusive character of (Even after the full score was published in 1905, Mélisande, and he he continued to refine the orchestration.) For sev- wrote to a friend of eral years around the turn of the century, Pelléas the difficulty of cap- et Mélisande was one of music’s unknown master- turing “nothingness” pieces, unpublished and unperformed. At first, in music. Mélisande’s Debussy seemed oddly unconcerned with getting background is inten- it onstage. When the great violinist Ysaÿe sug- tionally left blank gested that Debussy allow concert performances Maurice Maeterlinck in Maeterlinck, but of excerpts from the opera, as a way of putting it she is, in fact, one of before the public—and enticing opera companies Bluebeard’s wives— to produce it—the composer refused outright. He even Maeterlinck mentions this in another of also rejected the idea of a symphonic suite drawn his plays—and when we first encounter her in from the opera. the opera, she has run away from his castle of Finally, in 1901, Debussy was promised abuse and has become lost in the woods. (The a production of Pelléas et Mélisande at the Bluebeard legend was very much in vogue in the Opéra-Comique in Paris in the spring of 1902. music world at the time: Dukas began his opera He then began to produce a vocal score for Ariane et Barbe-bleue just as Debussy was finish- rehearsal purposes and finalize the full orches- ing Pelléas—Dukas quotes three measures from tral score. That same year, Debussy visited the Debussy score at the mention of Mélisande; Maeterlinck and his mistress Georgette Leblanc, and Bartók would compose Bluebeard’s Castle an accomplished soprano, at their home, to play within the decade.) through “their” opera. While Debussy worked According to the composer Raymond his way through the entire score at the piano, Bonheur, Debussy said that music came to him Maeterlinck made desperate signals to Georgette spontaneously, almost unbidden: “Idly, simply for behind the composer’s back. “As [Maeterlinck] the pleasure it gave him, he began to set to music knew nothing about music,” she later wrote, the long scene by the well in act 4, so different in “time seemed to him to be going slowly. Several its original version from what it was to become; times he wanted to leave the room; I held him another followed, and then another . . . the back. Resignedly, he lit his pipe.” score found itself finished, almost without his Debussy had promised the role of Mélisande realizing it.” Bonheur’s account does not mesh to Georgette and even began to rehearse with her with Debussy’s characteristically systematic privately. But when he heard Mary Garden sing, work habits, his perfectionism, or his intense at the suggestion of the head of the opera house, seriousness of purpose, but he did indeed begin he changed his mind: “That was the gentle voice

4 that I had heard in my inmost one scene to another, to make being, with its hesitantly the necessary stage changes, tender and captivating charm, and he was forced to write such that I had barely dared longer orchestral interludes. “I to hope for.” Maeterlinck read went to see him every day to of Debussy’s about-face in the snatch away the notes he had newspaper. He was irate. He written between one rehearsal first threatened a lawsuit to and another,” Messager said. cancel the Paris staging, and “That is how he wrote the won- then physical violence against derful interludes which provide the composer himself. Instead, such a moving commentary on he published a letter in Le the action.” Figaro, disassociating himself from the production, denounc- rom the night of the ing the opera, and hoping that premiere, Pélleas has it would be an “immediate divided opinion. Even and resounding flop.” (Garden Fso, it was quickly recognized was convinced that it was as a landmark—a score that Maeterlinck who had a satirical could be attacked and even plot synopsis distributed at rejected, but not overlooked. the dress rehearsal, causing It immediately established laughter to spread throughout Debussy as a major vision- the house.) ary. After Pelléas, every new Before rehearsals began, piece of his was considered Debussy played through the important—eagerly antici- opera once more, singing all Mary Garden as Mélisande. pated, studied, and evaluated. the parts himself, for his cast, Garden, Debussy’s first Mélisande, At the opening, , to introduce them to the special frequently sang in Chicago an influential critic as well as a world they would soon inhabit. from 1910 until 1931, including composer—his most enduring performances of Debussy’s Pelléas “Each of us sat with a score, et Mélisande on several occasions. work, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, heads bowed as if we were all at She served as music director of the was just five years old—called prayer,” Garden later recalled. Chicago Opera Association for the Pelléas a masterpiece: “each “Listening to that music, I 1921–22 season. bar exactly corresponded to seemed to become someone the scene it portrayed . . . and else, someone inside of me to the feelings it expressed.” whose language and soul were akin to mine.” Vincent d’Indy marveled at how the opera As André Messager, who would conduct the “expressed human feelings and human suffering premiere, said: “At the end, all of us were carried in human terms, despite the outward appearance away by excitement.” the characters give of living in a mysterious Rehearsals began in January 1902 and con- dream.” But not everyone was sympathetic to tinued for fifteen weeks. Debussy himself was Debussy’s naturalistic vocal writing, so elusive present at sixty-nine rehearsals. He quickly and fragmentary; his rhythmic fluidity and realized that the part of Yniold, the young boy, unsettled harmonies; or his mastery of under- could not adequately be sung by a child, and statement, both in the melodic lines and in the the role was reassigned to a soprano, a tradition orchestral writing. , the com- that continues to this day. (There have been poser of the recent, high-powered tone poem Ein exceptions, including performances conducted Heldenleben—it had been given its U.S. pre- by Pierre Boulez in the 1990s, which cast a boy miere by the Chicago Symphony just two years soprano.) Late in the rehearsal process, it became earlier—turned to Maurice Ravel at the end of clear that Debussy hadn’t allowed sufficient time the first act and said, “Is it like this all the time?” in his music, which moves without pause from Over the years, every major composer has had to

5 come to terms with Pelléas, and for each unsym- pathetic listener—Stravinsky called it “a great bore on the whole, in spite of many wonderful pages,” there has been someone for whom it was life-changing—Messiaen said his decision to become a composer was made the day his teacher gave him the score of Pelléas.

elléas et Mélisande stands apart from the music of its day. While Debussy was working on the opera, Puccini’s Manon PLescaut and Verdi’s Falstaff premiered; this was the time of Mahler’s monumental early sym- phonies and Strauss’s high-decibel tone poems. Debussy’s language in Pelléas is not only more refined, subtle, and delicate than anything else André Messager, who conducted the premiere of being written at the time, but it also is qui- Debussy’s P elléas et Mélisande eter, particularly at some of its most powerful moments. Many pages of the score, including the beginning and end of nearly all five acts, hover The single greatest musical influence on on the verge of silence. In 1893, as Debussy was Debussy’s score was . Debussy starting to work on the opera, he wrote to the had first fallen under Wagner’s spell when he composer Ernest Chausson: “I have found, and made pilgrimages to Bayreuth in 1888 and what is more, quite spontaneously, a technique 1889, attending performances of , Die which strikes me as fairly new, that is silence Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and finally Tristan (don’t laugh) as a means of expression, and und Isolde, which completely overwhelmed him. perhaps the only way to give the emotion of a (He knew the score so well that he once won a phrase its full power.” Debussy’s silences are not bet by playing the entire opera from memory at only weighted with drama themselves, but they the piano.) Although he said he couldn’t imagine also help concentrate the emotions of the music “what could be done beyond Tristan,” Pelléas they surround. The effect, even in passages that was his answer. It is surely no coincidence that rarely rise above piano, can be hair-raising. Maeterlinck’s play so closely parallels Tristan und

WORDS TO PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE

The dramatic and lyrical power of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s solution is Mélisande,” in which he defends Pelléas et Mélisande is dependent to introduce a speaker, who brings himself against his critics on the fragility of Debussy’s score. us the bare bones of the story and I have been asked more than All but one of the opera’s five acts helps us through the power of her once if my dramas were really emerge from hushed silence and voice to adjust our ears to the hushed written for a puppet theater . . . begin almost before we are aware atmosphere. Perhaps, he said, she of it. True, there are two forceful might be the child born in the play’s and states his credo: endings (to acts 3 and 4) and final moments, recalling from the Art always works by detour and one headlong opening (to act 4), distance of a lifetime. never acts directly. but, for the rest, most take place All the spoken words you hear are somewhere near the threshold of pillaged from Maurice Maeterlinck and This was a credo that Debussy our hearing. taken from three sources: his original understood from the moment he In the darkness of the theater, this French play, from which Debussy drew encountered Maeterlinck’s text, and is thrilling, but in a half-lit concert his libretto; two of the play’s earliest which led him to create from it an performance, the appropriately translations into English; and—most operatic and symphonic masterpiece. concentrated quietness can be fascinatingly—the author’s combative harder to achieve. and poetic “Preface to Pelléas et Gerard McBurney

6 Isolde in its themes of love, jealousy, and revenge, years later, when another friend left Debussy’s and its symbolic emphasis on the contrast company one night to attend a performance of between darkness and light. Debussy admitted Boris Godunov, Debussy said: “You will find all of that he still feared “the ghost of old Klingsor” as Pelléas is there!” he sat down to write Pelléas, and the sound world Like Beethoven’s Fidelio, Pelléas remained the of Parsifal is often evident, particularly in the composer’s only opera. Debussy’s search for a powerful orchestral interludes. Even Wagner’s sequel centered on two short stories by Edgar most discussed innovation, his use of leitmotifs, Allan Poe, a writer he admired deeply: The Devil finds its parallel in Pelléas. But Debussy’s use of in the Belfry and The Fall of the House of Usher— recurring musical ideas tends to identify states works that could hardly have been more different of mind, moods, and emotions rather than the from Pelléas. “I have been successful with Pelléas,” characters themselves—what he derided as the Debussy once said. “That is why I will never “calling card” technique of Wagner’s Ring cycle. write another piece similar in subject and atmo- Debussy’s uncritical adulation of Wagner was sphere.” As he told a reporter for Harper’s Weekly, short-lived, and he would later claim that his “I cannot understand the object of a writer who method of composing “owes nothing to Wagner,” creates a second work along the same lines which and insist on an important distinction: his music made the first successful. I should no more want was “post-Wagner” rather than “after Wagner.” to repeat myself than I should want to copy As he finally said, in 1903, the year after the pre- someone who had written before me.” miere of Pelléas, “Wagner, if I may be permitted A postscript. Georgette Leblanc did finally to express myself with the pomposity befitting sing the role of Mélisande in Boston in 1912. him, was a beautiful sunset mistaken for a dawn.” Maeterlinck himself did not attend a perfor- In the early 1890s, while Pelléas was taking mance of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande until shape, Debussy found another world of influ- 1920. “For the first time I have understood my ences. “I went to Bayreuth like everyone else,” he play,” he said at the time, a confession that came told the critic Louis Laloy, “and I wept my fill too late, as Debussy had died two years earlier. at Parsifal. But when I came back I got to know “In this affair I was entirely wrong, and he was a Boris Godunov, which cured me.” Robert Godot, thousand times right.” a lifelong friend, remembers leaving the score of Mussorgsky’s opera on Debussy’s piano as early as 1889—and that for the longest time, whenever Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago he visited, it appeared to be undisturbed. But Symphony Orchestra.

7 Pelléas et Mélisande

SYNOPSIS

Act 1 Legendary times in the mythical land approaches, and, as she leans forward, her tresses of Allemonde. fall over him. Pressing them to his face, he kisses In a forest, Golaud, a widower and grandson them. Golaud breaks in upon the scene and of King Arkel, has lost his way while hunting. chides them for playing like children. He discovers a frightened girl, Mélisande, by In the dim vault below the castle, Golaud a fountain. She too is lost and cannot explain leads Pelléas to a yawning abyss, where the youth who she is. Since night is falling, she reluctantly gasps for air. As they emerge, Pelléas cries out consents to follow him. in relief. Golaud warns him that Mélisande is In Arkel’s castle, Geneviève reads the blind expecting a child. old monarch a letter Pelléas has received from Beneath his wife’s window, Golaud suspi- Golaud, his half-brother. Golaud has married ciously questions Yniold, his little son by his first Mélisande and is reluctant to return home, marriage, about Pelléas’s attentions to Mélisande, since Arkel wished to choose his bride. The but the boy can tell him nothing. When the win- old man, however, accepts the union. When dow lights up, Golaud lifts the child to watch the Pelléas enters, asking leave to visit a dying couple, but Yniold sees nothing incriminating. friend, Arkel reminds him that his own father is seriously ill and persuades him to remain to greet Act 4 Pelléas finds Mélisande in one of the Golaud’s bride. castle rooms and tells her he intends to leave the From a castle garden, Geneviève shows next day; agreeing to a final tryst at the fountain, Mélisande the lofty forests of Allemonde and the they part. Mélisande returns with Arkel, sea beyond. Pelléas joins them as distant sailors’ who assures her that since Pelléas’s father is cries signal the departure of Mélisande’s ship. recovering, the castle soon will be more cheerful. Geneviève entrusts the girl to his care. The old man is horrified when Golaud stalks in, and, accusing Mélisande of infidelity, throws her Act 2 Deep in the park, Pelléas leads Mélisande to the ground. As Golaud rushes off, she sobs to a well. Fascinated by her reflection, she that he no longer loves her. Arkel says if he were allows her long hair to get wet. Then, childishly God he would pity the hearts of men. playing with her wedding ring, she drops it By the well, Yniold tries to lift a stone covering into the water. Tremulously, she wonders what a ball he has lost. Distracted by sheep being to tell Golaud. “The truth,” counsels Pelléas as led to slaughter, he leaves as night falls. Pelléas they leave. arrives, soon followed by Mélisande. Though Golaud lies in bed, tended by Mélisande. In afraid of being seen, they quietly declare their the forest, his horse bolted and threw him, he love. Mélisande spies someone in the shadows; tells her, and for a moment he had the sensation the lovers desperately kiss. Enraged, Golaud of a great loss. As they talk, Mélisande suddenly storms in, kills Pelléas with his sword, and then begins to weep, saying she longs to leave the pursues the fleeing Mélisande. gloomy castle. Golaud, taking her hands to comfort her, notices the ring is missing. When Act 5 Arkel, the now remorseful Golaud, she says she lost it in a grotto, he sends her after and a physician wait in the bedchamber where it, though she is afraid. Mélisande, who has given birth prematurely, At the grotto entrance, Pelléas and Mélisande lies dying. She awakens with no recollection grope through the darkness so she will be able of violence and acknowledges no guilt in her to describe the place to Golaud. As the moon love for Pelléas. Arkel and the physician return appears, Mélisande is frightened by sleeping with the baby, followed by serving women. beggars and pleads to be taken away. Murmuring that she finds only sadness in her daughter’s face, Mélisande dies. Arkel leads the Act 3 Mélisande, looking from her tower grieving Golaud from the room, observing that window, sings as she combs her hair. Pelléas now it is the child’s turn.

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