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The Mystery Endures Berlin
Staatsoper
06/21/2026 - & June 23, July 3, 9*, 2026
Claude Debussy : Pelléas et Mélisande
Thomas Blondelle (Pelléas), Magdalena Kozená (Mélisande), Simon Keenlyside (Golaud), Anne Sofie von Otter (Geneviève), Stephen Milling (Arkel), Bendikt Siewert (Yniold), David Ostrek (Doctor, Shepherd)
Staatsopernchor, Dani Juris (chorus director), Staatskapelle Berlin, François‑Xavier Roth (conductor)
Ruth Berghaus (stage director), Hartmut Meyer (sets & costumes)
(© Tatjana Dachsel)
One hundred and twenty-five years after its 1902 première, Pelléas et Mélisande remains avant garde, at least dramatically. Debussy’s œuvre is familiar to many thanks to such seminal orchestral works as La Mer and piano works such as Suite bergamasque, neither of which are a challenge for the contemporary listener. However, the libretto for Pelléas, a variant of Dante’s Francesca da Rimini love triangle, is more aesthetic than realistic.
Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1892 play Pelléas et Mélisande fascinated musicians of the epoch. Both Fauré (in 1898) and Sibelius (in 1905) wrote incidental music for it. Even Schoenberg wrote a tone poem (1905) on the theme. Fascinated by the symbolist play, Debussy created an opera, his only complete work for the stage. Considered a pinnacle of twentieth century opera, Pelléas affords marvelous opportunities for the stage director.
The return of Ruth Berghaus’s Pelléas et Mélisande to the Staatsoper Unter den Linden served as a reminder that certain productions eventually transcend the notion of repertory and become works in themselves. More than three decades after its première, this Pelléas remained as disconcerting and as fresh as ever, its imaginative force undimmed by time.
Berghaus belonged to that rare class of directors whose productions created complete theatrical worlds governed by their own internal logic. Emerging from the Brechtian tradition but never constrained by it, she fashioned a stage language of extraordinary poetic concentration. Her Pelléas, together with her Hamburg Tristan and Berlin Barbiere, stood among her most significant achievements.
Its power derived in large measure from its visual austerity. Hartmut Meyer’s sets were reduced to a few essential elements, yet seemed inexhaustibly rich in suggestion. Dominating the stage was the celebrated yellow staircase, rising steeply into darkness and functioning in turn as tower, castle and tribunal of fate. Around it stretched a spherical playing area whose unstable surface prevented anyone from ever appearing entirely secure. Characters slid, stumbled and crawled across it, as though condemned to inhabit a world in permanent disequilibrium. Few scenic metaphors have expressed with such economy the emotional instability of Debussy’s drama.
The austerity, the linear shapes and the masterful use of shadows are also a clin d’œil to the German expressionist cinema of the likes of F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, 1922, and Faust, 1926) and Robert Wiene (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920), which adds to the oppressiveness of the universe into which Mélisande finds herself immersed.
The costumes, too, possessed a singular charm. Their curious combination of Saint‑Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince and Czech animation created figures at once comic and melancholy, as if the inhabitants of Allemonde had wandered out of some half‑remembered fairy tale. The production’s lighting completed the effect, continually reshaping the stage into a succession of images of striking beauty. Every scene seemed to reveal another hidden perspective, another layer of mystery.
Yet the production’s greatness lay not merely in its visual imagination but in its dramaturgical intelligence. The enlarged letters that passed between the characters and were pinned to the walls like exhibits in a trial transformed a Brechtian device into something dreamlike and ominous. Equally striking was the production’s view of Mélisande herself. Surrounded by men who desired, possessed or projected themselves upon her, she appeared not as an enigma to be solved but as an irreducibly other presence, a creature whose innocence exposed the moral failures of the world around her.
Only one directorial choice seemed questionable: the absence of Mélisande’s famous hair. Since Debussy and Maeterlinck endowed it with such symbolic and erotic significance, its omission inevitably lessened the enchantment of the tower scene. It was, however, a small blemish in an otherwise remarkably coherent conception.
In the pit, François-Xavier Roth took a comparatively long time to find the work’s pulse. His reading was thoughtful and meticulously prepared, and he displayed an acute ear for Debussy’s instrumental colours, but the opening acts occasionally lacked dramatic tension. The score’s elusive currents did not always flow naturally, and certain scenes passed without quite achieving their cumulative force. After the interval, however, the performance was transformed. Roth allowed the music to breathe more freely and drew from the Staatskapelle Berlin playing of remarkable intensity and refinement. The orchestra’s sound acquired greater warmth and dramatic purpose, and Debussy’s constantly shifting harmonies finally assumed their proper expressive weight. By the final acts, the performance possessed precisely the atmosphere of luminous melancholy and latent menace that this score demands.
The evening was crowned by a superb cast. Magdalena Kozená offered a Mélisande of uncommon sensitivity, avoiding every trace of affectation. Her portrayal suggested both innocence and self‑possession, fragility and inner strength. At this stage of her career, her voice maybe a tad too heavy for the role. After all, the ideal Mélisande is a childlike femme enfant. Thanks to her great artistry, Kozená was able to modulate her voice to suit the role, which she sang with great subtlety, colouring the text with infinite care and preserving throughout the character’s essential mystery.
Thomas Blondelle’s Pelléas was equally distinguished. Blondelle astounded with his excellent diction. He brought to the role an appealing youthfulness and a beautifully focused lyric tenor, phrasing with elegance and exemplary attention to the French language. His performance deepened steadily over the course of the evening, culminating in a love scene of genuine emotional ardour.
Simon Keenlyside’s Golaud was perhaps less immediately imposing than some, but it proved deeply affecting. Rather than presenting a figure of elemental violence, he charted the gradual disintegration of a man destroyed by jealousy and fear. The scene with Yniold was especially moving in its mixture of tenderness, cruelty and desperation.
Anne Sofie von Otter lent Geneviève her customary intelligence and dignity, while Stephen Milling brought gravitas and vocal authority to Arkel. Bendikt Siewert was an exceptional Yniold, singing and acting with astonishing assurance, and David Ostrek made a strong impression in his brief appearances as the Doctor and the Shepherd.
By the close, Debussy’s singular masterpiece had once again revealed itself as anything but static or obscure. In the hands of Berghaus, and ultimately under Roth’s inspired direction, it emerged as a work of immense psychological depth and human tenderness.
Few productions survive for thirty-four years without becoming museum pieces. This Pelléas remained something altogether rarer: a living work of theatre, still capable of unsettling, enchanting and renewing our sense of what opera can be.
Ossama el Naggar
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