Again, Pelldas

In Grand Opera, most heroes and heroines, ample of brisket and bosom, love and suffer loudly and straightforwardly. When the tenor and soprano get in one of their deplorable, inevitable fixes, they inevitably thrash their arms, square off at high Cs. Not so the hero and heroine of Pelleas et Melisande, Achille-Claude Debussy's 40-year-old opera (his only completed one) based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck. Laid in "an unknown land" in a vaguely medieval time, Pelleas is elusive, dreamy, half-said, half-unsaid. Of all her troubles, Melisande never says anything more complaining than: "Je ne suis pas heureuse" (I am not happy).

To Maeterlinck's understatements, Debussy gave a sheeny, translucent orchestral background, a tonal tapestry winding on & on with never a big aria or ensemble piece for the singers. The love avowal of Pelleas & Melisande ("I love you." "I love you, too.") is sung to a magnificent orchestral silence. The opera therefore demands and gets reverent handling from singers who can look and act poetic on the stage. The first Melisande, in 1902, was Mary Garden, who was given the role by the director of the Paris Opera Comique, although Debussy had agreed that Maeterlinck's newlywed wife (and longtime mistress), Georgette Leblanc, should have it. Maeterlinck, vexed, publicly hoped that the opera would be a failure; there was much pamphleteering against it; Mary Garden's Scottish-American accenting of "Je ne suis pas heureuse" was roundly jeered. But Pelleas was a hit.

Last week Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera "revived" Pelleas for the first time since 1935 (when Edward Johnson, now the Met's manager, sang it with Lucrezia Bori, now retired). For Pelleas, the Metropolitan had engaged a young (36), slim-legged, personable French tenor, Georges Cathelat, a friend of old (77) Maeterlinck who joined the Opera Comique in 1931. Today France's best Pelleas, Cathelat was released from his wartime job in the censor's office at the behest of U. S. Ambassador Bullitt.

The Metropolitan's Melisande, pretty Helen Jepson, in a wig as long as the locks of the famed Seven Sutherland Sisters, was a stolid princess of whom Debussy would never have said, as he did of Mary Garden, that hers was "the gentle voice I had been hearing within me, faltering in its tenderness. . . ." The Metropolitan orchestra, noodling along under Wagnerite Erich Leinsdorf, only occasionally set forth Debussy's score in its full glow. But Tenor Cathelat, a good actor and a good manager of a middling voice, captivated New York's Debussyites -- who were out in full cry -- and earned critical notices which any operatic censor would be glad to pass.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.