Claude Debussy. Pelléas et Mélisande
Hector Berlioz. Symphonie Fantastique

Of the nearly fifteen operatic projects that Claude Debussy considered seriously he completed only one – the opera Pelléas et Mélisande. The composer contemplated the plot of the opera for at least ten years, starting one day in May 1893 when he first saw Maurice Maeterlinck’s play at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens.
The story of love and jealousy is told in  Pelléas in a manner utterly dissimilar to the spirit of the age. The events literally seem to hang in the air – Maurice Maeterlinck’s play is devoid of historical or ethnographic reality and consequently placed no demands on the composer either to be “historically accurate” – which was regarded as a must at the height of the eclectic period – or to focus on social problems in the spirit of French naturalism. The playwright merely presented a loose net of symbols that enmesh the characters as if from nowhere. All that remained to be done was to entrap the elusive. “I followed ‘something’ for many, many days and she [Mélisande] was the result,” Debussy wrote to Ernest Chausson, “Now I am being tormented by Arkel; he comes from a world beyond the grave, there is a prophetical tenderness to him that is typical of all those who are destined soon to die. And all of this must be said using just Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti! What a profession!”
Love and jealousy were not themes tackled by the impressionists. Contemporaries immediately noted that Debussy not only “interpreted” the play but also surrounded the Belgian symbolist’s corporeal characters with vibrations of light and air and at times abandons them in silence and in darkness. The composer Paul Dukas said “He succeeded in enwrapping Maeterlinck’s play with the atmosphere he desired absolutely and magnificently.”
By 1895 Debussy’s opera was complete. Attempts to get it staged never came to fruition. For a long time Pelléas lay hidden away at the Opéra Comique, and it was only on 30 April 1902 that the premiere took place, Paul Dukas writing in  La Chronique des arts: “Something incredible has happened with M. Albert Carré, Director of the Opéra Comique: ha has staged the masterpiece.” The score was congenially played by the conductor André Messager to whom Debussy wrote “You have succeeded not only in giving the sound structure of Pelléas a tender delicacy that is impossible to find anywhere else as it is entirely obvious that the inner rhythm of all music depends on the person bringing it to life just as words depend of the lips of the people saying them.”
Anna Bulycheva

“A huge symphonic composition in a new genre, by means of which I shall attempt to make a great impression on my audience,” was how Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) described the score of his Symphonie fantastique  (1830), a clear manifesto of musical romanticism. The  composer was not relying on the imagination of his audience, which had learned the classicist model of the symphony – from Haydn to Beethoven. And as well as the titles of the movements of the Symphonie fantastique he gave it a well-developed literary programme in which autobiographical motifs are reflected: the story of the young composer’s passionate love for the Irish Harriet Smithson, prima donna of an English theatre company on tour in Paris.
In following the programme, the attentive listener will not miss the details of the plot of this musical “novella”, brilliantly brought to life by means of the symphony orchestra. The  central image of the symphony, its idé fixe, is the theme of love which cements together the entire cycle. It appears in various forms – ranging from the dreamlike contours of a beautiful and desirable woman in the first three movements to grotesque and caricature in the final two. The  Symphonie fantastique was first performed in Paris on 5 December 1830 under the baton of the composer.
Iosif Raiskin