In two minds

There are some operas, as there are some people, that it is impossible to establish a settled relationship with, and in my case Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is one of them, in fact by far the most pressing one. I never know in advance how I’m going to react to it, and to some extent the actual performance I see is not the determining factor. I’d like, just once, to see the play and find out how I reacted to that. For Debussy offers such a vivid and sometimes perplexing counterpoint to Maeterlinck’s words that one’s reactions to the characters and their actions are always in flux — at least so long as you don’t see the opera too often.

At the Barbican last Sunday, in the second of two performances with the LSO (dedicated to the memory of Pierre Boulez and to be issued on CD), Sir Simon Rattle offered a powerfully thought out and immaculately performed interpretation of the work — and therefore left me more divided about it than ever. The text is of unmitigated pain, bewilderment, miserable uncertainty, while the music streams along with extraordinary beauty and, in this performance, passion and radiance, as if suggesting that there is another way of regarding the events that it illuminates, as if they could be transfigured by it. Which is to say that Pelléas owes far more to Parsifal than Debussy wanted, though the transition music between the first two scenes shows that his conscience got the better of him, making explicit his debt to the dreaded Klingsor. As someone who shares the play’s outlook, and finds the music of almost unbearable beauty (sometimes), I am as torn by the work as Debussy can have wished.

This performance was directed by Rattle’s long-term operatic partner Peter Sellars, and though it wasn’t as irritating and distracting as I feared, it still did nothing to help one enter the opera’s world.