Pelleas & Melisande: English National Opera Guide 9 (English National Opera Guides)

English National Opera Guides are ideal companions to the opera. They provide stimulating introductory articles together with the complete text of each opera in English and the original. In this Guide to Pelleas, Maeterlinck's play is reprinted in full, so that the opera-lover can read the scenes that Debussy did not set to music. Hugh Macdonald's much praised English translation is published here for the first time, with an essay uncovering the musical roots of Pelleas and illustrating its importance to music of the twentieth century. Alain Raitt, author of several studies of Symbolist writers, evaluates Maeterlinck's status as a dramatist, and Roger Nichols analyses the score. Proust's short pastiche of the opera and Arthur Symons' review of the first English performances challenge us to come to terms with this eternally intriguing masterpiece.