Eric Da Silva, a member of the Artists of Atelier Ballet, performs with soprano Meghan Lindsay in Opera Atelier's production of Pelléas et Mélisande.Bruce Zinger/Supplied
When does an opera officially become old?
That’s a question – a complicated one, according to experts – that the Toronto-based Opera Atelier, known for revitalizing operatic pieces from the Baroque era, is grappling with as it stages its latest project.
Pelléas et Mélisande, Claude Debussy’s only opera, first premiered in Paris in 1902 and plays at Koerner Hall until Sunday. It’s the youngest opera to be staged in Opera Atelier’s history; their next season will mark a return to more antique works by Marc-Antoine Charpentier and George Frideric Handel.
But according to the group’s music director David Fallis and associate music director Christopher Bagan, Pelléas et Mélisande was a natural choice for Opera Atelier. Despite its youth, the piece is heavily influenced by earlier musical periods, and sonically sounds much like Opera Atelier’s other, older repertoire.
“It’s a natural evolution to apply our philosophies around historical performance practice to later work, and to explore later work with that kind of aesthetic in mind,” says Bagan, who arranged the new version of Pelléas et Mélisande for Opera Atelier with an eye toward historical reflection. His arrangement, as with many commissioned by the company, scales down Debussy’s score for a relatively small orchestra.
“It’s a bit like alchemy,” he says of putting together the opera’s various musical parts with a blend of historical and modern instruments. Translating an opera between centuries, he says, is a delicate manoeuvre that requires a sense of humour and a willingness to problem-solve: “Instruments aren’t like iPhones,” he says. “The piano isn’t an evolution of the harpsichord. One isn’t superior to the other. There’s always something gained and something lost when you make those choices.”
The piece’s original score, written for 60 to 80 instrumentalists, has been massaged down for the 14-person Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, which is performing Pelléas et Mélisande with Opera Atelier: “There’s always a trade-off when you scale down like that,” says Bagan. “You lose some depth and orchestral colour, but you gain clarity and flexibility.”
Philippe Sly portrays Arkel in Opera Atelier's ongoing production.Bruce Zinger/Supplied
One thing that benefits from that transformation, he says, is an opera’s text, which in a stripped-down context can sound more like natural speech. There’s a “nimbleness,” he says, to the intimacy of Opera Atelier’s transmutations: It’s easier to embrace the volatility of live performance with a 14-piece group than it is with an 85-piece one.
“We sacrifice some richness, yes,” he says. “But the immediacy and expressiveness increase.”
Baroque music – or, in Pelléas et Mélisande’s case, Romantic-era music in a Baroque coat – requires contemporary musicians to make a number of decisions about how to play in a way that’s authentic to the time of composition, but realistic to the conditions of its performance setting.
Some Baroque string instrumentalists, for instance, choose to play with catgut strings rather than modern steel ones. The deceptively named catgut strings – most often, they’re made from sheep or goat intestines – create a sound closer to what audiences might have heard in the 17th and 18th centuries. But they’re harder to keep in tune, and prone to snapping.
“How you play a piece is sort of a testament to what you believe the piece should be, and what the composer might have thought that piece should be,” says Guy Fishman, principal cellist of the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston and a faculty member at the New England Conservatory.
He’s not surprised by Atelier’s inclusion of Debussy in their repertoire: “That’s the most 18th-century thing you could do, be flexible like that,” he says. “They’re applying 18th-century values to this 20th-century piece – that’s kind of exciting.”
Claude Debussy’s only opera, first premiered in Paris in 1902, plays at Toronto's Koerner Hall until Sunday, April 19.Bruce Zinger/Supplied
Story-wise, Pelléas et Mélisande, adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1893 play of the same name, centres a mysterious, action-packed love triangle. Much like an impressionistic painting, the work is ambiguous in places – both plot and character details are painted with gossamer-thin brushstrokes, leaving audiences to make their own meaning of the work.
“Debussy was extremely faithful to Maeterlinck’s original text,” says Fallis. “He didn’t alter words, which is unusual – he preserved it almost entirely.” Fallis also underscores Debussy’s interest in 17th- and 18th-century French music, which helped Pelléas et Mélisande fit into Atelier’s programming purview: “This opera doesn’t feel like a departure for us,” he says. “It’s a natural extension of what we already do.”
Even so, Pelléas et Mélisande being programmed by a company such as Atelier poses the question of when an opera becomes old enough to be considered, well, old. It’s believed that the rigorous study of early music emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but what about in 100 years? How will music historians categorize the works of the last century when its last listeners die out; how long will it take for the works of Glenn Gould to be considered museum pieces?
The emergence of recording technology, says Fishman, was a seismic development that forever changed how music is analyzed by musicians. “When recordings came out, we suddenly knew what the performers and composers wanted, without any doubt,” he says.
“So there’s a question there: Do we let our creativity thrive? Or do we put ourselves in the shoes of those players? On the other hand, most Baroque composers never thought this music would be played 200 years later – they wrote music for tomorrow.”
Hank Knox, a founding member of Montreal’s Arion Baroque Orchestra, says there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to when a piece of music officially becomes old enough to be considered antique – musicians in different specialties will give you different answers, he says.
“The older I get in this field, the less sure I am of anything,” he says, laughing. “I think we like to pretend that we know exactly how something will sound. But early music is always filtered through your preconceptions, your recollections, the way you engage with the material, how you discovered it, what you know about the composer. It’s a shot in the dark.
“The way we think about the past has evolved over time,” he adds. “But it’s fascinating to watch as it continues to evolve.”