PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE

Dutch director Jetske Mijnssen stages productions at opera houses right across Europe. The psychological intensity of the characters is front and centre in her work, emanating from an intensive investigation of the music. Most recently she has presented Idomeneo, Orlando paladino (Joseph Haydn) and Hippolyte et Aricie (Jean-Philippe Rameau) at the Opernhaus Zürich, Eugen Onegin and Don Carlo at the Oper Graz, L’Orfeo (Claudio Monteverdi) at Det Kongelige Teater in Copenhagen, Katja Kabanowa at the Komische Oper Berlin and Maria Stuarda (Gaetano Donizetti) at De Nederlandse Opera Amsterdam. She shares a long-standing collaboration with stage and costume designer Ben Baur. La Traviata was already produced at Theater Bern in 2013 with conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. The Lithuanian native has been Musical Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra since the 2016/2017 season. In 2022, she made her conductor’s debut at the Bayerische Staatsoper with The Cunning Little Vixen and now returns for Pelléas et Mélisande.

The opera Pelléas et Mélisande, world premiere in 1902 in Paris, is based on the eponymous play by Flemish symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck, a tragically ending fairy-tale love triangle surrounding the stepbrothers Golaud and Pelléas and the mysterious Mélisande loved by both. For him the external plot is not the core of the drama, says Maeterlinck – for him is far more about trying to, “go deeper into the human consciousness.” The model for this is Allemonde Castle, a grim, oppressive place without light. The actual plot remains vague, so in his opera Claude Debussy also plumbs psychological depths and topicalises subliminal emotional processes. His music is always “reticent”, approaching silence again and again. The composition dazzles in the most diverse colours, which subtly illuminate the characters. Pelléas et Mélisande is a tragedy of the inner self, enigmatic, morbid, deeply sad and full of beauty. Appearing for the first time at the Bayerische Staatsoper with this production, Dutch director Jetske Mijnssen directs.