A Light in the Forest of This Debussy Work:The conductor Simon Rattle, making his long-overdue debut at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, brought an unusual sense of structure to Debussy's "Pelléas and Mélisande" in a revival of the 1995 Jonathan Miller production. This lengthy 1902 masterpiece of Impressionism, based on an inscrutable Symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck, can feel like an excursion into the dark, trackless forests so often invoked in the opera, but Mr. Rattle's masterly shaping of its flowing melodies and shifting harmonic landscape turned it into a drama. This reading had both spine and direction, heightening the beauty and danger in Debussy's music. It was less mysterious, perhaps, but more gripping.The outline of the story is simple. Prince Golaud encounters the weeping Mélisande in a forest. He marries her, and takes her back to the castle of his aged grandfather, King Arkel. She and his much younger half-brother, Pelléas, become close. Golaud grows jealous and, catching the two together, kills Pelléas. Mélisande gives birth to a baby girl, and dies.
However, the play, and Debussy's setting of it, are anything but simple. Mélisande is a mystery—no one knows who she is, or where she came from. The actual relationship of Pelléas and Mélisande is not clear. The atmosphere of the castle itself, permeated with age and death and surrounded by dark forests where no one can see the sky, is as much of a character as any of the humans. There are continual references to blindness.
