Pelléas and Mélisande

Common card · No. 380912

Pelléas and Mélisande (French: Pelléas et Mélisande) is a Symbolist play by the Belgian playwright and author Maurice Maeterlinck, first performed in 1893. The play is about the forbidden, doomed love of the title characters. The work never achieved great success on stage, apart from the operatic setting by Claude Debussy, but was at the time widely read and admired by the symbolist literary elite, such as Strindberg and Rilke. It inspired other contemporary composers, like Gabriel Fauré, Arnold Schoenberg, Jean Sibelius, and Mel Bonis.

Read on Wikipedia · Image W. & D. Downey, Public domain