In two minds

There are some operas, as there are some people, that it is impossible to establish a settled relationship with, and in my case Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is one of them, in fact by far the most pressing one. I never know in advance how I’m going to react to it, and to some extent the actual performance I see is not the determining factor. I’d like, just once, to see the play and find out how I reacted to that. For Debussy offers such a vivid and sometimes perplexing counterpoint to Maeterlinck’s words that one’s reactions to the characters and their actions are always in flux — at least so long as you don’t see the opera too often.

At the Barbican last Sunday, in the second of two performances with the LSO (dedicated to the memory of Pierre Boulez and to be issued on CD), Sir Simon Rattle offered a powerfully thought out and immaculately performed interpretation of the work — and therefore left me more divided about it than ever.