September 10: Pelléas et Mélisande (1902)

Posted by Charles T. Downey at 12:56 PM | Link to this post

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Premiered at the Opéra-Comique, Paris (1902), with Mary Garden in the title role (instead of Maeterlinck's mistress, Georgette Leblanc), directed by Albert Carré, and conducted by André Messager.

Libretto (in French) (English translation): Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911) (play premiered in 1893). Also set to music by Gabriel Fauré, Suite of incidental music, op. 80 (1898); Arnold Schoenberg's symphonic poem, op. 5; and Jan Sibelius's incidental music, op. 46.

Most famous performance: Covent Garden, 1969, with Pierre Boulez conducting.

This opera will be produced at the Metropolitan Opera, from January 29 to February 8, 2005 (with a live radio broadcast on February 5, 2005).

See the information on Pelléas et Mélisande from the Metropolitan Opera International Radio Broadcast Information Center.

Related Posts:

• Dr. Downey, Maurice Maeterlinck and the "Theater of the Unexpressed"
  
• Dr. Downey, Other Notes on Pelléas
  
• Lindsay Heller, Other Settings of "Pelleas" (Faure, pt. 1)
  
• Lindsay Heller, Other Settings of Pelleas (Faure, pt. 2)
  
• Lindsay Heller, Other Settings of "Pelleas" (Schoenberg)
  
• Lindsay Heller, Other Settings of "Pelleas" (Sibelius)
  
• Grace Cho, Act 1, Pelleas et Melisande
  
• Tim Ballard, Acts IV and V of Pelleas et Mélisande - by Debussy

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Available at Amazon:

Roger Nichols et al., Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (1989)	Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Montreal Symphony, Charles Dutoit (1991)
Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Covent Garden, Pierre Boulez (1991)	Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Maria Ewing, Vienna Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado (1992)
Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Anne Sofie von Otter, Bernard Haitink (2002)

September 3: Introduction

Posted by Charles T. Downey at 9:09 AM | Link to this post

Welcome to this course on Opera in the Twentieth Century at The Catholic University of America. We will be covering a range of modern operas in class, and I hope that we can use this Weblog to continue our presentation and discussion of the works we study during this semester. You are all invited to post your findings, your questions, your answers, and anything else that you find interesting related to our topic. You can use the Comments function to respond to another student's post, or you may choose to write a complete post instead.

The matters that we discussed in our first class were:

• What is an opera? What are the qualities that all operas have in common that allow us to distinguish them from other types of music?
  
• What are the conventions that opera composers of the 20th century inherited from the past, to reject or re-embrace?
  
• What happened to the business of opera and the question of patronage in the 20th century?
  
• Why have some 20th-century operas become accepted as part of the operatic canon? How does the idea of an operatic canon affect the creation of new works?
  
• What influence did the ideas of Richard Wagner have on operas created after him?
  
• What are the traditional literary sources of opera? What has happened to the process of choosing and creating opera librettos in the 20th century?