Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 28, 2025
If the theatre in America is weak, what it needs is not endowment: it needs great and popular plays. Why should we waste our money and our energy trying to make the crowd come to see The Master Builder, or A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, or The Hour Glass, or Pélléas and Mélisande? It is willing enough to come without urging to see Othello and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.
She asked why he didn't tell them about the new idea and get them to adopt it instead, but he greeted this suggestion with an impatient laugh. "It would be absolutely impossible for Ravinia in the first place," he said. "The thing would need as big a production as, oh, Pelléas and Melisande. And then this woman could never sing it. She isn't the type.
But, above all, it was the figure of Mélisande herself that made him pour himself completely into the setting of the play. For that figure permitted Debussy to give himself completely in the creation of his ideal image. The music is all Mélisande, all Debussy's love-woman.
An interlude of some fifty measures, in which the Forest, Fate, and Mélisande themes are exploited, introduces the second scene of the act. To an accompaniment of long-sustained chords varied by recurrences of the Mélisande theme, Geneviève reads to the venerable Arkël Golaud's letter to his brother.
"But to-day you go wake him now quick is it not?" "Quite out of the question," said Katie. "If you care to leave that letter here, I will see that it is placed on his Grace's breakfast-table, with the morning's post." "For the rest," added her eyes, "Down with France!" "I find you droll, but droll, my little one!" cried Melisande. Katie stepped back and shut the door in her face.
One might tell the tale from the point of view of Laërtes or Claudius or Polonius or the gravedigger; and it would still be a good tale and the same tale. But if we take a play like Pelléas and Mélisande, we shall find that unless we grasp the particular fairy thread of thought the poet rather hazily flings to us, we cannot grasp anything whatever.
The original Paris cast was as follows: Pelléas, M. Jean Périer; Mélisande, Miss Mary Garden; Arkël, M. Vieuille; Golaud, M. Dufrane; Geneviève, Mlle. Gerville-Réache; Le petit Yniold, M. Blondin; Un Médicin, M. Viguié. M. André Messager was the conductor. The work was admirably mounted under the supervision of the Director of the Opéra-Comique, M. Albert Carré.
He tells her that he has had a letter from his dying friend Marcellus, summoning him to his bedside, and that he may perhaps go away on the morrow. "Oh! why do you go away?" says Mélisande. The second act begins at an old and abandoned fountain in the park the "Fountain of the Blind," so called because it once possessed miraculous healing powers. Pelléas and Mélisande enter together.
It is a stifling day, and they seek the cool tranquillity of the fountain and the shadow of the overarching trees "One can hear the water sleep," says Pelléas. Their talk is dangerously intimate. Mélisande dips her hand in the cool water, and plays with her wedding-ring as she lies stretched along the edge of the marble basin. She throws the ring in the air and it falls into the deep water.
Nevertheless, it was soothing to be undressed, and yet more soothing anon to sit merely night-gowned before the mirror, while, slowly and gently, strongly and strand by strand, Melisande brushed her hair. After all, it didn't so much matter what the world thought. Let the world whisper and insinuate what it would.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking