On 24 and 28 October at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre Valery Gergiev will be conducting the first premiere of the 2019-20 season – Claude Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande. The Stage Director, Costume Designer and co-Production Designer together with Marsel Kalmagambetov is Anna Matison.
The roles are being rehearsed by:
Pelléas – Gamid Abdulov, Yegor Chubakov and Vladimir Moroz;
Mélisande – Aigul Khismatullina, Anna Denisova and Irina Mataeva;
Arkel – Oleg Sychov and Vladimir Feliauer;
Geneviève – Elena Sommer, Elena Vitman and Zlata Bulycheva; and
Golaud – Andrei Serov and Yevgeny Ulanov.
Pelléas et Mélisande is Anna Matison’s second work as a director for the Mariinsky Theatre. Her debut production – Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Golden Cockerel – was conducted by Valery Gergiev at the Mariinsky II in December 2014. In 2017 a video recording of the opera was released on the Mariinsky label in DVD and Blu-ray formats. The disc was nominated for a Grammy award (2018) as best opera recording as well as many rave reviews in such respected publications as BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone, where the production was hailed as “an excellent piece for your first acquaintance with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera.”
Of her latest work for the Mariinsky Theatre, Anna Matison says that: “Maestro Gergiev has long wished to stage Pelléas et Mélisande at the Concert Hall – it is here that you can truly get to grips with all the nuances of the score. In Debussy’s music there are no typical duets, triplets or choruses, though there are leitmotifs – we rhyme these carefully, sometimes repeating literally one and the same mise-en-scène with differing characters. Maeterlinck made generous use of symbols, transforming the traditional love triangle into a philosophical narrative. While maintaining the symbols that already exist, we are adding new ones. For example, the dying kingdom with its dying king are like a boat sinking beneath the waves, while the characters are forced to survive amidst the pieces of wreckage that will also disappear soon.”
Of the more than ten opera projects that Claude Debussy had seriously considered, he completed just one – the opera Pelléas et Mélisande. The opus, based on the eponymous play by Maurice Maeterlinck, was completed in 1895, though it did not immediately meet with success in attempts to have it staged.
The premiere took place at Paris’ Opéra Comique on 30 April 1902. At the time, the absence in the score of songs and dances, choruses and ensembles, and the semitones and extremely precise musical imagery that had concerned the composer left audiences at a loss. As time passed, however, assessments of the work improved, and for the French this opera by Claude Debussy became a matter of national pride as well as a historical event heralding the start of the 20th century in music. In Russia, Pelléas et Mélisande was first performed in 1915 at Petrograd’s Theatre of Musical Drama, subsequently not being staged in St Petersburg for almost one hundred years. It was only in 2012 that the Mariinsky Theatre turned to it, presenting a production staged by Daniel Kramer.
Further performances of the new production will also take place at the Concert Hall on 5 November and 13 December.
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