The Mistletoe Bride And Other Haunting Tales - Plot & Excerpts
Each author in the collection was invited to choose one – significant – opera as their inspiration and I chose Pelléas et Mélisande by Claude Debussy. Debussy is an off-stage character in the second of my Languedoc Trilogy, Sepulchre, which is partly set during the 1890s, so I had been listening to a great deal of French impressionist music and reading symbolist poetry, plays and novels to all the better immerse myself in the world of fin-de-siècle Paris.Pelléas et Mélisande, the only opera Debussy wrote, premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in April 1902. Adapted from Maeterlinck’s symbolist play of the same name, it had mixed reviews at the time, though quickly became seen as marking a turning point in the development of opera from its nineteenth-century traditions to a musical form lighter on its feet.For readers not familiar with Maeterlinck’s tragic tale or Debussy’s interpretation, here are the bare bones of the story. A man quick to anger, violent and jealous, Prince Golaud comes across a young woman, Mélisande, wandering lost in a forest.
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