Ionarts-at-Large: The Domestication of Pelléas and Mélisande

There they stand like two lonely snowmen: Christiane Karg’s Mélisande and Christian Gerhaher’s Pelléas at the opera’s end, as if they had never done anything else. And in truth, they hadn’t… such is the strangely intoxicating stasis of Debussy’s only opera.

Pelléas et Mélisande glides along at a tranquil pace on the deep black waters of Debussy’s music, an endless instrumental parlando