Pelléas et Mélisande

September 22 Cast

September 24 Cast

SEB presents:

Opera by Claude Debussy

World premiere on April 30, 1902 in Salle Favart

Premiere in the Estonian National Opera on September 22, 2023

PS: On September 22 before the premiere  we invite all people to a dinner "Stage fever before the premiere" in the Estonia restaurant where the creative team of the new production will join the guests. Alongside a delicious three-course dinner, we will talk about exciting details and incidents related to the birth of the production, which might go unnoticed on the stage. In an open discussion, visitors will also find answers to their questions.

The conversation will be led by Liina Viru, the literary editor of the Estonian National Opera. Taking part in the discussion will be director Albert-André Lheureux and artist Liina Keevallik. The conversation will be in English with translation into Estonian.

Albert-André Lheureux: “It is time that Debussy’s once revolutionary masterpiece be brought to the Estonian audiences. “Pelléas et Mélisande” is as if a magic ritual that awakens a secret world inside and around us.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the flourishing age of symbolism that favours investigation of unknown worlds, Maurice Maeterlinck, the winner of the Nobel Literature Prize wrote a mysterious play “Pelléas et Mélisande” in addition to the famous “The Blue Bird”. Immediately, Claude Debussy saw in it a subject for an opera…

The amazing blend of text and music through musical lights and shadows makes it only vaguely possible to apprehend the secret being of a human. What is the meaning of our life, the journey of our soul, our the meaning of doubts and search for truth? Where is the truth? Everyone searches for it in their own way.

This story shows us what the innocent eye of a child or the child himself catches. He will drag us by hand into the fairy-tale, where the good or the bad spirits seem to choose our paths.

Let the unique blend of music and text take us with them and discover our surroundings like a child who is presented with a world where to look for and find himself. It is a passionate story of poetic love, chained to the torture chair by jealousy, doubt and violence.

Exceptional beauty charms us. In this exclusive piece it reflects in the whirlwind of emotions, while finding its way through the dense forest of our contradictory thoughts”.

Performed in French with subtitles in Estonian and English.