'Secrets and Lies' or the Truth about Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande - Katherine Bergeron

Katherine Bergeron focuses her attention on the last act of Pelléas. The narrative incongruities that surface in the unbroken final scene become the basis for a broader exploration of the question of truth (la vérité) that the opera itself raises.
This is a part of the conference, 'Debussy: Text and Ideas', which is available in full on the Gresham College website.
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website.
www.gresham.ac.uk

[@scmager]

Many interesting insights and observations, although I suspect Debussy himself would be perplexed at such a sure-handed academic discourse on something about which he was rather reticent. And perhaps most of this should be directed rather to the librettist, Maeterlinck, whose text Debussy selected very carefully, and to which he was quite faithful. I think the meaning, or meanings, of this play are Maeterlinck's concern, who was reportedly not very musical. Debussy was attracted to the play because the very obscurity of its meanings provided an ideal vehicle for the kind of lyrical-dramatic music he sought to invent, and in fact, it was not the first play of Maeterlinck's that Debussy sought to adapt to music. Ultimately, for the composer, the music is the thing, and if it has anything to say, it does so in ways that are verbally inexplicable. And were it not for Debussy's music, notwithstanding other treatments by Fauré, Schoenberg, and Sibelius, we would scarcely be talking about this drama at all. Which brings me to point out that many contemporary, incongruous stagings of Debussy's work that render it as a psycho-drama or gothic soap opera come perilously close to overlooking and overshadowing his music altogether--a kind of obscurity that he probably would not have appreciated.

[@julianholman7379]

that was a great pleasure. I never meet anyone who could careabout such things. Iwent with my pet pigeon to walk in the cemetary yesterday - the first mild day - and found the grave of Edward Johnson. Near a puddle where ffurgeli bathed. back home I looked edward Johnson up and was reminded of P & M and longed to hear again "on dirait que ta voix a passe sur la mer au printemps". The only other line i remember is 'mais la tristesse de toute ce que l'on voit'. Nowadays i adore nothing more than Les Boreades - marvel that someone of 80 could sing Jouissons!jouissons! jouissons! But the melancholy paradoxes of modernism are still very much native land. But that informs the experience of ancien regime happiness (!)