‘Perhaps in this world nothing ever happens without purpose,’ sings old, blind King Arkel in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and that at least is something to hold on to. God knows, you need it. Peel away the fairy-tale trappings of Maeterlinck’s original play, and the world of this opera is profoundly cruel. Its characters are often passive observers of their own fate (Pelléas admits before his final scene that he’s never yet returned his beloved Mélisande’s gaze). And yet Debussy pretty much compels you to feel for them, in a score of all-but-unbearable tenderness and beauty. It’s only once you’ve left the theatre that, wrestling with the pieces of this ravishing, troubling puzzle, you realise that it’s either insoluble — or that it offers a message bleaker than any Gotterdämmerung.
Wisely, David McVicar’s new production for Scottish Opera leaves its options open. The cast wears Edwardian costume of the operatic variety — the sort where men in frock-coats carry huge medieval swords.
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