Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande – Degout, Jordan

There is a moment near the close of act 4 — Pelléas and Mélisande finally saying aloud what the whole opera has forced them to circle around — when Stéphane Degout simply stops husbanding his voice and lets it flood. Ardor without indulgence. It is the kind of singing that makes you sit up in your chair, and it also happens to be the moment when Philippe Jordan’s pit playing turns positively incandescent, strings pulsing under the vocal lines like something barely allowed to surface. I’ve heard a lot of Pelléas over the years, going back to the old Désormière album and forward through Boulez, Abbado, the Rattle traversal. I’m not sure I have heard this scene done with quite this combination of restraint and eventual abandon.

Degout is one of the great Pelléases of our time. Not a small, fey mezza-voce Pelléas of the type French tradition sometimes prizes — Jacques Jansen and his descendants — but a virile, forward-voiced one, singing the role’s endless half-lit phrases as though they were as urgent as any Verdi aria. Opposite him, Elena Tsallagova’s Mélisande is deliberately cool, a voice with a slight silvery detachment that keeps her just out of emotional reach even at her most confiding. Some will miss the vulnerability that sopranos like Elisabeth Söderström or, more recently, Natalie Dessay bring to the part. But Tsallagova’s chilliness is a defensible reading — Mélisande as a creature who never fully belongs to this world, who came from nowhere and tells Golaud so, and means it.

Vincent le Texier’s Golaud surprised me. This is a darker-grained, weightier voice than the role usually gets — there’s an almost Wagnerian heft to it, more Amfortas than the usual French baritone leanness — and it pays off in the final act, where his grief and bewilderment become something genuinely wrenching rather than merely pathetic. Franz-Josef Selig’s Arkel carries similar authority: careworn, stooped in sound in the outer acts, then unexpectedly luminous in his act 4 scene with Mélisande, when the old king allows himself to imagine that her presence might renew the sickly house of Allemonde. Selig lets you hear the difference. Anne Sofie von Otter’s Geneviève is exactly what it should be — dignified, understated, a small role sung by someone who could headline the whole enterprise and chooses not to show it. Julie Mathevet’s Yniold has the right unnerving, almost eerie clarity of a child who overhears everything and understands too much.

So: musically, a first-class Pelléas, one that would sit near the top of a purely audio shortlist alongside Désormière and the Karajan/Berlin recording that still divides opinion decades later.

Then there’s Bob Wilson.

If you know Wilson’s theater work — the glacial gestures, the sculptural lighting, actors moving as though through cold honey — you know exactly what you’re getting here, and no amount of description will change your mind about it in advance. Debussy and Maeterlinck already gave us a drama of suggestion, of characters who say less than they feel and feel more than they can name. Wilson’s answer is to freeze that ambiguity into tableaux: singers plant themselves downstage, address the middle distance, barely touch. Golaud’s jealousy becomes a matter of angular hand gestures under blue light rather than anything approaching violence. It is beautiful to look at, genuinely, austerely luminous — Wilson’s eye for a lit space is second to none — and it is also, scene after scene, weirdly inert.

Whether this serves Debussy’s opera or merely decorates it is the real question, and I confess I go back and forth. There’s an argument that Maeterlinck’s symbolist fog is better served by stylization than by the pseudo-medieval realism directors used to inflict on this piece — turrets, forests, actual wells. Wilson refuses all of that, and good riddance, honestly, to the wells. But Pelléas is not only mist and suggestion. It is also bodies that want each other and cannot say so, a marriage curdling into violence, a small child terrified of what he’s seen. Wilson’s ritualized stillness drains tension out of scenes that need it. Golaud dragging Mélisande by the hair plays here as choreography, not brutality, and something is lost.

What rescues the production, again and again, is the singing itself, which pushes up against the director’s ice like heat against glass. Degout in particular seems to be acting through his voice precisely because Wilson has taken so much physical expression away from him. It works, in its way, though not the way Debussy or Maeterlinck necessarily intended.

Do I recommend this? With reservations that feel almost as strong as the enthusiasm. As a document of world-class singing in this opera — Degout above all, but the whole cast, really — it belongs on the shelf. As theater, it will alienate anyone not already sympathetic to Wilson’s aesthetic, and even sympathizers may find ninety minutes of glacial poise a long sit. Get it for the ears. Watch it once for the eyes, and decide for yourself whether Maeterlinck’s fog needed quite so much refrigeration.