Pelléas & Mélisande

Though they had remarkably little personal contact, weren’t friends and were barely collaborators, Destiny would unite in perpetuity the names of French composer Claude Debussy and Belgian dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck. They were born seven days apart, Debussy, the elder, near Paris on August 22, 1862, and Maeterlinck in Ghent. The latter, a writer symbolist poet and Nobel Prize winner, wrote a five-act play entitled Pelléas et Mélisande, published in 1892. Claude Debussy saw in it a perfect vehicle for an opera suited to his principles and preferences, and set most of its text to his own very personal music. The music was not to serve a form; rather, the form was to flow from the music, and they were both to issue from the drama and the word. Debussy's creation was an absolute masterpiece, one that opened a new path to many other composers, often imitated, but never equaled.

Debussy's goal was to create an opera according to his own sensibilities, without regard to—in fact, in spite of—all the rules, forms and conventions that dominated the preceding two centuries. Despite Debussy's rejection of Richard Wagner (after having been thoroughly bathed in Wagnerian waters in his youth), that Teutonic master's shadow remained long and inescapable. The parallels and inspiration of Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal are manifest. And yet Pelléas in unmistakably pure Debussy, from the first to the last note.

-from LA Opera's article "Destiny: a note from James Conlon"