Launched by the Royaumont Foundation and created more than a year ago in Toulon, before Orléans and Clermont-Ferrand, this production of Pelléas and Mélisande, by Debussy (1862-1918), in its version for piano, is finally hosted in Paris, at the Athénée-Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, until Sunday February 25. The composer was very keen on this transcription for keyboard of his only opera, produced and amended by his hand as rehearsals and performances required rewriting and corrections, as evidenced by the scores published in 1902 by Fromont, then by Durand in 1905 and in 1907. The François-Lang musical library also has two copies of the first edition for piano, as well as that of an orchestral score (1904) full of autograph notations in ink and pencil. This shows that Debussy’s quest is at the heart of the Royaumont Foundation, which is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary.
In the garden, a grand piano, a small courtyard sofa, and at the back of the stage, a wooden fence with a door: the directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier perfectly own their Pelleas, already staged in large scale at the Grand Théâtre de Genève twenty years ago, with no less in the title roles than Simon Keenlyside and Alexia Cousin, with José Van Dam’s Golaud. However, they found a major interest in putting the work back on the job, as if it were offered to them, like Debussy containing the orchestral efflorescence with the piano keys alone, the experimentation of an exciting stage asceticism.
Because reduction does not rhyme with impoverishment, quite the contrary. It is sometimes the case with music like those broths whose perfumes and flavors concentrate as they evaporate. This is how, joining a form of symbolism specific to the poetry of Maeterlinck (author of the libretto), they reduced the space to a few objects. Thus the sofa, on which a fleeing and crying Mélisande first curls up, becomes in turn a fountain of the romantic encounter with Pelléas, a dark cave where rival half-brothers confront each other, then a meeting place murderer of the last evening, and finally Mélisande’s deathbed. Little Yniold also mourns his lost bullet, the sheep that are taken to their death and his lost happiness.
The piano is of course a center of attraction. A full-fledged character who organizes the subtle play between commentary, atmosphere and narration, seeming to model a sung word from which the prosody emerges in a fresh and natural way. All at once landscape, setting, playwright, he brings the tragedy to its conclusion, also constructing on the visual level a sort of second stage. As soon as he enters, Golaud, visibly drunk, leans against it, a bottle in his hand. It is seated high up on the large black cover that Mélisande arranges her hair at the window of the tower, before going to bed, half-naked, for an erotic scene which sees Pelléas melt into her hair.
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