The Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst Present PELLEAS AND MELISANDE

The Cleveland Orchestra and Music Director Franz Welser-Möst announce further details of their new production of Debussy's Pelléas and Mélisande. The impressionistic French opera, with its luminous and hypnotic score, is being presented at Severance Hall this coming spring, with performances May 2, 4, and 6, 2017. The creative team for this brand-new, made-for-Cleveland production is being led by Director Yuval Sharon working with Set Designer Mimi Lien, Lighting and Projection Designer Jason Thompson, Choreographer Danielle Agami, and Costume Designer Ann Closs-Farley.

Derived from Maurice Maeterlinck's surrealist play of 1893, the opera Pelléas and Mélisande tells an enigmatic tale of two fallen lovers, whose passions are destined by the realities surrounding them. The work, premiered in 1902, was composed when Impressionism was a new and radical force in the arts and is Claude Debussy's only completed opera. While its storyline shares thematic links to the timeless legend of Tristan and Isolde, Debussy's score also shares musical connections with the groundbreaking harmonies - and dramatic underpinnings - of Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde (1865). In spring 2018, the Orchestra will perform Tristan and Isolde.

For the Cleveland production, soprano Martina Janková will interpret the role of Mélisande. Cleveland audiences will remember Martina's riveting performances as the Vixen in the Orchestra's groundbreaking 2014 production of Janá?ek's The Cunning Little Vixen, as well as her earlier work in Mozart's Da Ponte operas, 2009-11. Baritone Elliot Madore, who received rave reviews for performances as Pelléas in 2015 at the Bavarian State Opera, makes his Cleveland Orchestra debut in the title role. Additional cast members include bass-baritone Hanno Müller-Brachmann(Golaud), bass Peter Rose (Arkel), mezzo-soprano Nancy Maultsby, (Geneviève), and soprano Julie Mathevet (Yniold) and baritone David Castillo (Doctor/Shepherd), in their Cleveland Orchestra debuts.

"I have wanted to do this impressionistic opera with The Cleveland Orchestra for a number of years," comments Franz Welser-Möst. "But I had been waiting for the right time, to have the right singers and the right creative team, so that we could together tackle the psychological depths of the action onstage and within this piece. In fact, there is not a lot of action onstage - this is not Verdi or Puccini. On one level, there is little immediately dramatic about this work. Instead, this opera is dreamlike. The action is inside the characters, inside the music. In Pelléas and Mélisande, Debussytakes the romantic feelings of the characters and weaves them into a mesmerizing and fascinating continuum. He identified their desires in an almost Sigmund Freudian subconscious way, and he wrote that into the music."

"With the trusting relationship that Franz and I developed with Vixen, it is truly exciting for me to think about what Pelléascan and will be for Cleveland," says Yuval Sharon, who directed The Cleveland Orchestra's innovative production of Janá?ek's The Cunning Little Vixen in 2014. "Our collaboration on Pelléas wouldn't happen without Franz Welser-Möst's incredible appetite for new ways of presenting opera. He's focused on unlocking each piece for the individual listener and creating something meaningful that can be shared with an audience, with the community. I deeply connect with Franz's wish to take an opera, no matter when it was written, and make it feel alive today and foresee how relevant and vital it can be for centuries to come."

"Yuval Sharon is one of the most talented, ingenious people I've ever met," says Welser-Möst. "Yuval always has new ideas, yet they are also always extremely true and faithful to the piece. He is very musical, and he understands how the music and the drama go together hand-in-hand. He works with the music and the texts to develop his ideas. ForPelléas and Mélisande, he understands that the drama is inside the music, inside the characters. And Yuval is developing a concept, with a transparent box, that can be both clear and opaque, that reveals at one moment but obscures in another, which can emphasize the shifting and dreamlike nature of this opera. This box will help explore deeply into the psyche of the characters. I am very excited by this idea, because it mirrors the way Debussy's music works in the opera. It also immediately solves some of the limitations of Severance Hall, where we have to work within an incredible but immovable sound shell onstage - Yuval is a master of thinking beyond such limitations, to find a way to use the situation not as a restriction but as an asset."

FRANZ WELSER-MÖST talks about Pelléas and Mélisande:

"Pelléas and Mélisande is in many ways a child of Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde, both musically and dramatically. Debussy was totally taken by the new sound world that Wagner had created in Tristan. That opera was very much the climax of German Romanticism, but it was also the beginning of a new line going forward, of trying to understand and explore the psyche of characters in a drama. And Debussy found his own way, musically, to extend beyond Wagner's achievements. In Pelléas, the drama is much more about the psychology of the characters involved, rather than in the actual plot or storyline. And Debussy accomplished this so successfully through his pioneering efforts at musical impressionism."

"Freud's theory of psychological analysis, about the meaning of dreams and especially what they mean erotically, played an enormous role in the arts a century ago, in affecting and changing the way art was both made and how it was interpreted, not just in music, but in painting and sculpture and literature. Debussy's Pelléas and Mélisande is all about this kind of erotic dream world, only some of which actually takes place in reality. These characters, these lovers, are seething with passion, with desire, with questioning. Our staging of Pelléas is going to be very much focused on and emphasize this kind of Freudian, modern viewpoint."

"Debussy's music for Pelléas and Mélisande is very much like an impressionistic painting. And if you look at it up close, you can't really see anything. You have to have a certain distance to see the overall picture or structure. And this is exactly how Debussy wrote this opera. To become involved in this music, you need distance. Not that you sit back and keep it distant. Rather, the meaning comes across over time, as you continue to listen throughout the performance - and even afterwards, thinking about it again. As an audience member, if you are open to what is happening, not just between the characters, but inside and within each character, you will be amazed at the kind of intoxicating experience this opera can be."

This is probably easier for audiences today than it was a hundred years ago, because of what we have all come to see and understand in movies - where the psychology of the characters is hinted at on screen and in the soundtrack. Pelléas predates and anticipates this kind of understanding, but it doesn't have to feel foreign to people listening today in the 21st century. In fact, it is wonderful in the way it washes over you little by little, to make you aware of the undercurrents.

"Debussy's Pelléas and Mélisande follows Wagner's Tristan and Isolde in the balancing of inner and outer drama. LikeTristan, it is narcotic in a way, it is very seductive, in a subtle way that you may not notice at first. You can get drunk, psychologically, if you are open to this music."

Director YUVAL SHARON talks about Pelléas and Mélisande:
"A central part of the inspiration for this new Cleveland production came from someone very close to The Cleveland Orchestra, Pierre Boulez. In his description of Pelléas and Mélisande, Boulez said that it was 'like a tree surrounded by mist.' Because the dramatic world of this opera is ethereal and hazy, I wanted to use that idea to visualize this opera, for mist to be a defining element of this production."

"I started thinking about a glass enclosure in which the characters can be seen, yet they are trapped, as prisoners - because the characters of this opera feel isolated from each other, and their loneliness informs their thoughts and actions. The glass box will fill with fog that may at times overwhelm or completely obscure the actors. The audience won't see entrances or exits, just characters appearing and disappearing in a landscape of fog. Projections and several other technologies will give the impression of a constantly shifting world surrounding the singer-actors."

"I hope that audiences that come to experience any opera are looking for something that transcends their everyday life in some way, for something that invites them to see the world in a broader and expanded way, by experiencing an amazing combination of musical and visual worlds."

Director Yuval Sharon

"LA's avant-garde opera darling" (The Hollywood Reporter) Yuval Sharon has been creating an unconventional body of work exploring the interdisciplinary potential of opera. His productions have been described as "thrilling" (The New York Times), "virtuosic" (Opernwelt), "dizzyingly spectacular" (New York magazine), "ingenious" (San Francisco Chronicle) and "staggering" (Opera News). In 2016, he made his Vienna Staatsoper debut with a new production of Eötvös's Tri Sestri, and he is the recipient of the 2014 Götz Friedrich Prize in Germany for his acclaimed production of John Adams's Doctor Atomic, originally produced at the Staatstheater Karlsruhe.

In the 2016-17 season, beyond his continued duties as Artistic Director of The Industry, an experimental opera company in Los Angeles, Yuval Sharon will embark on his three-year Artist-Collaborator residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. While there, he will produce Night and Dreams: A Schubert & Beckett Recital, which explores the relationship between 20th century writer Samuel Beckett and Franz Schubert's Lieder, performed by tenor Ian Bostridge, Lou Harrison's Young Caesar, conducted by Marc Lowenstein, and the sound and light installation Vertiginous Tracks, which will exist throughout the 2016-17 season over the escalators at Walt Disney Concert Hall, with sound and music design by Rand Steiger. He will also return to Staatstheater Karlsruhe for a new production of Die Walküre, and to The Cleveland Orchestra, where he will originate a new semi-staged production of Pelléas and Mélisande, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst. For more information, visitwww.yuvalsharon.com/.