Pelléas et Mélisande

extract sung par Mary Garden (act 3, scene 1: Mes longs cheveux)

The play by the Ghent poet Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), owes its fame to the opera in five acts and nineteen scenes by Claude Debussy (1862-1918). The premiere in April 1902 was booed because he audience were shocked at the composer's musical choices. But contemporaries soon recognised it as a masterpiece of French music.

Feminine hair has a central place in Debussy's opera. An attractive bait, it characterises the enigmatic Mélisande, married to Golaud and soon bound to Pelléas by a love with a fatal outcome. Moving and elusive, the long hair attracts Pelléas irresistibly. At the beginning of act III, a love duet whose orchestral changes of rhythm translates their growing passion (1), reveals the eroticism of this golden hair. At nightfall, the young woman, at the top of a tower of the château, starts a lament while brushing her dishevelled hair. Guided to the foot of the tower as much by the light of her hair as by the siren's song, Pelléas celebrates Mélisande's beauty. Liberated and animated by their independent movement, the lovely woman's long tresses cascade down to him. He plunges ecstatically into this bountiful hair, an inexhaustible fount of sensuality: "I have never seen such hair as thine, Mélisande !... See, see, see, it comes from so high and yet it floods me to the heart... And it is so soft, it is as soft as if it had fallen from heaven!... Throughout this love song Mélisande, who so often refuses any contact, offers her abundant tresses to her beloved's embrace, a barely veiled metaphor for a more carnal union and an indissoluble bond between the two lovers that only Golaud will be able to break tragically.

As if out of a fairytale, Mélisande's hair reflects the "turn of the century" image of the seductive femme fatale who binds men to her long blond curls.