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Santa Fe Opera 1: In Darker Light
Jesse Simon
Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is a
work in which brief flickers of light are forever trying to emerge from the
surrounding gloom: for every glint from a golden ring there is a bottomless
pool waiting to swallow it whole; beacons from distant ships are engulfed by
impenetrable fog; and there are places surrounding the castle where the midday
sun never reaches the forest floor. The notion of darkness as an inevitable
default state was central to the new production that appeared as part of this
summer’s Santa Fe Opera season – the work’s first appearance on the Santa Fe
stage in over forty-five years – for which director Netia Jones created a
patient, contemplative world that remained attuned to both the elemental
symbolism of Maeterlinck’s text and the pervasive unease in Debussy’s score.
Although there was often a lot going on – including
near-constant video projections of slowly shifting abstract textures and several
scenes in which actors doubled the singers – the stage remained uncluttered and
the presiding mood was one of introspection, understatement and vague anxiety.
Much of the action took place within what appeared to be an underground bunker
constructed for the purposes of some obscure scientific experiment. The space
was reached by a set of matching spiral staircases – one on each side of the
stage – and its most conspicuous feature was a large glass box filled with low
green vegetation. (The use of colour throughout the evening was pleasingly restrained:
the green of the plants and the orange of Mélisande’s costumes in the early
acts were all the more notable amid the cool darkness of their surroundings).
The staging made little attempt to explain
its ominously scientific setting; it seemed far more concerned with
communicating nuances of mood through the allusive video imagery that
accompanied most of the scenes – the distressed stone textures that appeared
between the second and third scenes of Act 2 were especially appealing,
suggesting both vestigial life and terminal decay – and through the emotional
restraint of its performances. Netia Jones, who was also responsible for the
set, costume and video-projection designs, had no difficulty sketching the
principal characters with a few well-chosen physical movements – the
introverted reticence of Pelléas and the unsettling distance of Mélisande would
have been just as clear without the music and dialogue – but the great
strength of her direction lay in her ability to create scenes in which almost
all emotional excess had been stripped away. Even the most highly charged
scenes – especially those between Golaud and Mélisande – were suffused with a
low-key hopelessness.
Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande. Netia Jones, director. Harry Bicket, conductor. Santa Fe Opera, July 2023. © 2023 by Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe Opera.
In several scenes, the spare interactions
of the singers at the front of the stage were mirrored at the back by a group
of actors doubling each character. Although this background action started as straightforward
mimicry – as though the set was divided diagonally by a large mirror – by the
third act it had started to introduce its own elaborations and departures: the
foreground exertions of Pelléas at the foot of Mélisande’s window was
accompanied by an altogether more solemn background scene in which Pelléas
moved slowly towards an expectantly immobile Mélisande. Yet the extra movement
on stage – which often seemed intended to convey a less idealised version of
the events in the drama – did little to upset the staging’s unsettling
stillness.
The staging also introduced a number of
intriguing avenues of interpretation, most notably during the prelude in which
Mélisande watches her own double float past in a pool of water. Although the
opera itself never explains the events that left the disconsolate Mélisande stranded
in the forest, the later appearance of video projections with Mélisande
drowning in the water suggested the fascinating possibility that she had, in
fact, thrown herself in the water at the opera’s opening and that all the
subsequent action was a last-second flashback to the tragic circumstances that
pushed her to end her life.
Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande. Netia Jones, director. Harry Bicket, conductor. Santa Fe Opera, July 2023. © 2023 by Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe Opera.
If the staging derived its power from allusion
and ambiguity, the central trio of vocal performances gained strength from the
directness of their expression. As Pelléas, Huw Montague Rendall was impressive
as much for his pliant tone as for the emotional range he brought to his
scenes. In his first two encounters with Mélisande his physical awkwardness was
matched with a vocal delivery of yearning sensitivity. His shy demeanour began
to disappear in the third act: his rapturous response to Mélisande’s hair had
an appealing energy and, in the vault scene, he summoned an apprehension
bordering on terror. His finest moment, however, may have been the brief solo
scene in Act 4, in which the gravity of his impossible situation was put forth
with uncomplicated clarity.
Samantha Hankey’s Mélisande generally
sounded far less fragile than Golaud’s assessment would seem to indicate. Her
strident response to Golaud’s tentative advance in the opening scene was more
affronted than frightened and there was an unexpected edge of satisfaction in
the elegantly sung hair song of the third act; yet she alternated these moments
of forthright lucidity with passages – notably her trancelike scene by the pool
at the beginning of the second act – in which she seemed compellingly
remote. The emotional poles of her character were delineated most clearly in
her two final scenes: by the time of her fourth-act meeting with Pelléas the
glassy caprice of earlier scenes had been replaced with a focussed sincerity;
and in the final act her disoriented utterances were all the more moving for
their undercurrent of resignation.
Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande. Netia Jones, director. Harry Bicket, conductor. Santa Fe Opera, July 2023. © 2023 by Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe Opera.
Zachary Nelson provided the evening with a
commanding Golaud whose austerity of manner couldn’t quite conceal his capacity
for anger. The gentle placations in his opening encounter with Mélisande –
delivered with an elegantly rounded darkness of tone – revealed an unmistakable
edge of menace, while his excellent scene in the second act rendered the sudden
transition from excessive magnanimity to implacable rage chillingly credible.
His most violent moments – his abuse of Mélisande in the fourth act and even
his frustrations with Yniold in the third – were notable for their
uncomfortable malice, and even his guilty contrition in the fifth act was
underscored by an obvious lack of belief in Mélisande’s innocence.
The principals received excellent support
from the resigned Arkel of Raymond Aceto and the resilient Geneviève of Susan
Graham, while Harry Bicket guided the orchestra through an elegant, understated
performance in which mood and pace were held in careful balance. Yet neither
the quality of the performances nor the intelligence of the staging were
entirely able to dispel the opera’s pervasive pessimism; if one left the
auditorium more subdued than elated it is perhaps a tribute to the production’s
success in capturing the gloom that makes Pelléas et Mélisande such a
troubling, fascinating work.
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