Mélisande (Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande). Soprano. Found lost in a forest by Golaud, who takes her home and she marries him. She finds his castle gloomy and full of foreboding. She is attracted to his younger half-brother Pelléas, with whom she plays innocent games round a fountain. The ring Golaud gave her falls into the water. She returns home to find her husband was injured at the exact time she lost the ring. Pelléas is leaving and comes to say goodbye to Mélisande, who is combing her long hair. It falls over his face, filling him with passion, but they are interrupted by Golaud. She and Pelléas plan one last meeting, and when Golaud finds them together he kills his brother. Mélisande gives birth to a daughter. She is dying but assures Golaud that she has never been unfaithful to him. Aria: Mes longs cheveux (‘My hair's so long’). Created (1902) by Mary Garden.
MÉLISANDE
(Pelléas et Mélisande - Debussy)
by Joan Rodgers
Mélisande is certainly the most complex and elusive character I have ever portrayed on stage. Dramatically satisfying characters often seem to be written for dramatic voices, but Debussy has created this infinitely subtle role for a lighter, lyric, voice. It requires a soprano with a warmth in the middle of her voice or a mezzo with a transparency at the top of her range. Mélisande's character requires the singer to draw from a broad palette of vocal colours and to explore the nuances of the text in great detail.
In playing Mélisande, I felt as much (if not more) like an actress than a singer. I was never aware of really ‘singing’. In fact, Mélisande does not have a major aria and spends much of her time ‘uttering’ rather than proclaiming, often holding back while Pelléas and Golaud are pouring out their emotions. This is the essence of her personality - we never really know what she is thinking or feeling. She is actually not a tremendously sympathetic character. The audience often warms more to Golaud - a tormented bear of a man, desperate for Mélisande to give of herself. It is this complete openness of raw emotion that probably allows us to feel for him in a way that we cannot feel for Mélisande.
There are many contradictions in her character - she seems innocent and childlike, but at the same time she is knowing, using her femininity and sexuality to attract first Golaud and then his half-brother Pelléas. The attraction that Golaud feels for her probably lies in this contradictory mixture of child and woman. Yet she frequently manipulates him, sometimes lying to him like a child, sometimes deceiving him like a woman.
One suspects that Mélisande has been abused before meeting Golaud (Maeterlinck begins the drama with her escaping from Bluebeard, who had imprisoned her as one of his wives). As often happens, the abused seek more abuse, as if they expect it. We see this when Golaud drags Mélisande along the ground by her hair - she seems to accept his cruelty as something not to be resisted. The other side of the coin is that the abused, knowing the effects of abuse, go on to abuse others and one could argue that Mélisande abuses Golaud mentally and emotionally by withholding so much of herself from him and by openly transferring her affections to Pelléas. In a sense, Pelléas's personality is a better match for Mélisande's: from their first meeting they develop a relationship based on emotional immaturity and reticence.
She retains this behaviour even on her deathbed where, despite Golaud's piteous outpourings, she continues to withhold all the answers that he is so desperate to discover. ‘Tell me the truth’, he begs. ‘The truth …’ is her uncommitted reply. Either ‘truth’ has no relevance for her or it is a concept she cannot understand.
She remains an elusive, impenetrable creature. We are never even sure of the moment of her death - there is no classic half-finished sentence typical of so many dying operatic heroines. Debussy draws his own veil over her. Perhaps he did not want anybody apart from himself to know that moment.
Mélisande has been sung by a succession of illustrious interpreters. It is interesting to think that Debussy wished not for a French singer, but for the Scottish Mary Garden to be his first Mélisande, and Maggie Teyte, another Anglo-Saxon, went on to become a famous exponent of the role. The soprano who has most impressed me on disc as the ideal Mélisande is Suzanne Danco, whose vocal warmth and clarity seem perfectly suited to Debussy's heroine. There has lately been a trend for mezzo-sopranos to sing the role and one can see why. A mezzo voice with its strength in the middle register can cut through some of Debussy's more lush orchestral passages rather more easily than most sopranos. Since the evolution of the traditionally plummy contralto into a more silvery, higher-reaching voice, the role of Mélisande is ideal for the right kind of mezzo-soprano. The one who springs most readily to mind as one of the great modern Mélisandes is, of course, Frederica von Stade. The translucent and silvery timbre of von Stade's voice beautifully conveys the vulnerable, almost ethereal, quality of Mélisande.
