Pelléas et Mélisande (Fauré)

[2] Debussy in his letter said: "j'aimerai toujours mieux une chose où, en quelque sorte, l'action sera sacrifiée à l'expression longuement poursuivie des sentiments de l'âme.

[10] Mrs Campbell was enchanted by his music, in which, she wrote, "he had grasped with most tender inspiration the poetic purity that pervades and envelops M. Maeterlinck's lovely play".

[11] She asked him to compose further theatre music for her in the first decade of the 20th century, but to her regret his workload as director of the Paris Conservatoire made it impossible.

[9] Fauré's incidental music was used again in Georgette Leblanc's production of the play in the cloisters and gardens of Saint-Wandrille abbey in August 1910, conducted by Albert Wolff.

[14] After Fauré, three other leading composers completed works inspired by Maeterlinck's drama: Debussy's opera (1902), Schoenberg's early tone poem (1903) and Sibelius's incidental music (1905).

[5] The original orchestration for the London production consisted of two flutes, one oboe, two clarinets, one bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, harp and string quartet.

The second theme is introduced by a romantic solo cello with woodwind, and may, in Larner's view represent Mélisande as first seen by her future husband, Golaud.

The Fauré scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux notes that, although Debussy omits it in his operatic version, Mélisande is shown at her spinning wheel in Maeterlinck's play.

[15] The movement, although in the traditionally sad key of G minor, represents, in Larner's view, "the one moment of happiness shared by Pelléas and Mélisande".

Nectoux writes that although the piece was reused from an earlier work (incidental music to Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) very few people would guess that it was not composed for Pelléas and Mélisande, so appropriate is it to its purpose.

The opening theme returns fortissimo on the strings "before a last echo of the song and a sadly modal approach on solo flute to the final chord" (Larner).