About the work
„Impressions de Pelléas" is a chamber arrangement of Claude Debussy's only completed opera „Pelléas et Mélisande" (1902), created by Marius Constant together with the director Peter Brook in 1992 for Brook's Paris Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. The version condenses the great symbolist work for intimate forces — the accompaniment is taken by two pianos.
Plot
The underlying opera follows Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist drama. Lost while hunting, Prince Golaud finds the enigmatic, weeping Mélisande at a spring in the forest and takes her as his wife. In Golaud's gloomy castle of Allemonde, Mélisande meets his younger half-brother Pelléas; between them grows a tender, scarcely spoken love. Golaud's jealousy mounts into the morbid: he eavesdrops on the pair, uses his own child as a spy, and finally strikes Pelléas down at the well. Mélisande dies soon after, having given birth to a child — gently, mysteriously, and without ever revealing her secret. „Impressions de Pelléas" concentrates this dreamlike action on its essential emotional moments.
Cultural significance
Debussy's „Pelléas et Mélisande" is regarded as a key work of musical modernism and the symbolist opera par excellence. The arrangement by Brook and Constant made the work newly experienceable in radical reduction and was widely restaged internationally. It gives small houses and ensembles access to Debussy's unique world of sound and atmosphere.