Robert Wilson, Pelléas et Mélisande

Wilson’s production of Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande is on stage at Opéra national de Paris from 19 September to 6 October 2017

Like Tristan and Isolde, Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande seek to pursue their impossible love in an intangible temporality where prosody is as limpid as music. In the enigmatic beauty of Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama, the composer perceived the theatrical counterpart to his musical ambitions. A world of things let unsaid, a terrain of psychological irrationality and verbal ellipses for which he composed a score as sensual as it is mysterious. On the denuded stage of the Opéra Bastille, Bob Wilson’s production illuminates the obscure souls of the lovers, throwing their images into relief and ixing the negatives on the dazzled retinas of the audience.