A Singer's Notes by Keith Kibler 16: Pélleas et Mélisande

Mary Garden as Mélisande
Mary Garden as Mélisande

Why has Debussy's Mélisande become a mezzo-soprano role? Maybe David Mamet has given me the answer to this. The playwright and bomb-thrower tells us in his new book Theatre that actors are in almost every case better off without a director, their own instincts leading the way. Mélisande has been sounding lower and lower over the decades (and Pélleas, too, for he always follow her wherever she goes). Here are the explanations we get: the part is low (surely Debussy realized this, yet did not change it, as he did for a baritone Pélleas), the orchestras are larger, the halls are larger, and maybe mezzos just want to do it. I have now in my imagination the idea that a century of cynicism has altered the instincts of the finest singers of the role, and also its finest hearers. Mary Garden certainly, I'm almost certain, did not chirp. She was a soprano, she was a Scottish-American from Chicago, she was the first Mélisande.


Read the full article on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller