Pelleas et Melisande (DVD)
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Item: 3760115301443
Description
Pelleas et Melisande (DVD)
Artists: Marc Mauillon, Jenny Daviet, Laurent Alvaro, Stephen Bronk, Malmö Opera Orchestra and Chorus
Directors: Benjamin Lazar
Format: NTSC
Language: French, Spanish, German, English, Japanese, Korean
Region: All Regions
Number of discs: 2
Studio: Bel Air Classiques
DVD Release Date: November 17, 2017
Run Time: 178 minutes
When Debussy completes the score, based on the eponymous symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck, of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, the world of opera still abides by Richard Wagner and the upheaval he caused with Tristan und Isolde. But Debussy decides to stand on the exact opposite side, and uses his new opus to preach a new aesthetic creed. In depicting the forbidden love story between the timid Pelléas and the beautiful Mélisande, kept apart by an unfortunate marriage, the French composer brings us back to the immortal legend of Tristan and Isolde, but this time showing the world that the future of music could very well lie far away from Wagner s overwhelming lyricism and outsized rhetoric.
This new production, created by one of the rising stars of French stage direction Benjamin Lazar for the Malmö Opera (headed by Ingmar Bergman from 1952 to 1958), encapsulates all the different aspects of this mysterious work, from the oniric poetry invented by Maeterlinck and Debussy to the realism, poignant because openly simple and even mundane, of these profoundly human beings lost in a forest full of sound and symbols that will never let them escape.
The young French conductor Maxime Pascal, the Orchestra of the Malmö Opera, and an almost all-French cast (among which the excellent Marc Mauillon and Jenny Daviet), bring forth with intelligence all the refinement and all the vitality this unique and fascinating score has to offer.
History
Pelléas et Mélisande
Composed in 1895, Pelléas et Mélisande is the only opera Claude Debussy ever completed. It is considered a landmark in 20th-century music.
Performed in five acts, the story is about the love triangle between Prince Golaud, Mélisande, a mysterious young woman lost in a forest whom he marries and Golaud’s younger half-brother Pelléas, who has a passionate relationship with Mélisande. In the end this is a classic tale of love, betrayal and death.
Set in the mythical kingdom of Allemonde, the era is not indicated, but the ambience of the story is medieval, more suggestive than specific.
It premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on April 30,1902, was performed at the Met in 2011 then returned almost a decade later in its 2018–19 season.
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