Runtime: Approx. 20 minutes
Maurice Maeterlinck’s melancholy play about forbidden love and self-determinism has tantalized many composers. Claude Debussy famously selected the play for his only opera, and Arnold Schoenberg, Jean Sibelius, and Alexandre Desplat also turned to the tale as inspiration. But the first composer to set Maeterlinck’s story to music was Gabriel Fauré, who composed incidental music for the play’s London production in 1898.
Written at the height of the Symbolist movement, the play follows the titular characters as they find themselves in a classic forbidden love story which ends, as these stories so often do, in lethal tragedy. It opens on Mélisande alone in the woods; she has just escaped a difficult marriage that has traumatized her so much that she barely remembers her past. Goulad, grandson of King Arkel, comes upon her and convinces her to return to his home with him where she is quickly, and without her consultation, wed to him. Mélisande is greatly liked by both Arkel and Goulad’s son, Ynold, but she feels caged in the dreary castle and isolated in her marriage. When she meets Goulad’s brother, Pelléas, the two form an easy friendship and begin to spend time together. One day, they meet by a fountain where Mélisande, fiddling with her wedding ring, accidentally drops it into the water.
Goulad, furious over the lost ring and growing suspicious of their relationship, enlists Ynold to spy on the pair. Ynold eventually catches them embracing and tells Goulad who, in a fit of rage, kills Pelléas and severely wounds Mélisande. Distraught, Mélisande once again begins to lose her memories. She eventually dies in childbirth, but by the time of her death she has forgotten both her final meeting with Pelléas and the circumstances of his death.
Set in a decaying and melancholy castle surrounded by thick forest, the play is characteristic of Maeterlinck’s aesthetic, which historian Edmund Wilson described as inhabiting “a twilit world,” his characters “less often dramatic personalities than disembodied broodings and longings.” The premiere performance used minimal lighting and placed a gauze filter across the stage, lending the set a hazy, unearthly quality. This choice provided a visual rendering of Maeterlinck’s thesis that humans live essentially in the dark about their true desires; they do not understand the world or themselves and are ultimately subject to an unchangeable fate.
Fauré’s incidental music possesses the same dreamy, mysterious quality that defines the story, while also offering a lushness to the romance at its heart. The opening movement depicts Mélisande in the woods, string melodies floating along unhurriedly as she sits by the stream. At first, Fauré’s harmonies are enigmatic, perhaps an echo of Mélisande’s contented amnesia. They soon build, and the music becomes more definitive as Goulad grows nearer. Towards the end of the movement, a horn call signals his appearance as the two meet.
The second movement, “Fileuse” (The Spinner), offers a portrait of Mélisande’s new life at the castle as she sits at her spinning wheel. The music is propelled along with a rhythmic ostinato depicting the wheel, while a glassy melody, first played by the oboe, floats above.
The third movement, “Sicilienne,” was originally written for a different work and repurposed by the composer, but the music fits so perfectly in its new home that no one would guess it was composed for a different story. Here, Fauré uses it to set the titular couple’s tryst with lush, romantic melodies; however, a shadow is cast with the use of the traditionally sorrowful key of G-minor that hints at the tragedy to come.
The Suite’s final movement, “La mort de Mélisande” (The Death of Mélisande), concludes the story with lamenting melodies in the winds that loom over a constant striding rhythm, implying the sombre processing of a funeral march. The timpani beats steady steps forward as the music draws to a mournful end. The movement was eventually played at Fauré’s own funeral.