Lost in a forest, Golaud meets a mysterious young girl crying by a fountain. She has fled from those who were harming her and her name is Mélisande. Golaud persuades her to marry him and come with him to Germany, where his father King Arkel welcomes them into his dark castle. Misery and famine reign in Germany, but in the castle, essential things are kept silent. Its inhabitants are prey to trauma and repressed desires. It is only with Pelléas, Golaud’s half-brother, that Mélisande finds the shared awareness that the essential is not always the visible. A fatal triangle thus develops between Mélisande and the two brothers.

Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas and Mélisande is one of the key works of the Symbolist movement, in which so many other Belgian artists such as Émile Verhaeren, Georges Rodenbach and James Ensor distinguished themselves. Claude Debussy was one of the many musicians to succumb to its timeless mystery, and asked Maeterlinck to adapt the play into a libretto for the only true opera that he would write: “I wanted the action never to stop, but for it to be continuous and uninterrupted. I never allowed my music to hasten or delay the movement of my characters’ feelings and passions due to technical demands.”

Streamed on Grand Théâtre Digital during the Covid epidemic, in January 2021, this staging which unites Ballet du GTG director Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and the Ballet’s associate artist Damien Jalet with legendary visual artist and performer Marina Abramovic, is finally arriving in front of the place de Neuve audience. In it, the creators draw their material from the continuous circle of life and its inherent link to the cosmos, following Debussy in refusing all illustration, but throwing rays of cosmic light here and there on the characters’ invisible energies and hidden emotions. Eight dancers from the Ballet du GTG accompany and express the inner feelings of the soloists, while the grande dame of avant- garde haute couture Iris van Herpen dresses their invisible meshes. Generating the mysterious frisson which makes this fragile drama so compelling is acclaimed Slovak conductor Juraj Valcuha, leading the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande for the very first time.