The New Role, The New Score, And all of it Outside
by Miriam Khalil
@SongbirdKhalil
I’m excited to be making my role debut of Mélisande in Debussy’s incredible opera Pelléas et Mélisande. Learning Mélisande was like navigating through a complicated maze. The deeper into the maze, the more mesmerized and dizzy I became. At first I thought that it was the music causing this entwining but eventually I realized that not only is the music as elusive as water, but so is her character. She is pure and ever changing, innocent but also very complicated. She knows things that she shouldn’t. She has lived both one life and also one hundred lives. She makes decisions that she knows will lead to her undoing and can’t stop herself from making them because ultimately those same decisions are what will bring her closer to Pelléas.
Playing Mélisande is difficult in a sense because it has to come from a most honest and transparent place. It is the only way that it will feel right and as a result, I’m finding that it will never feel safe or easy. In certain scenes Mélisande seems to not even be in the same conversation as the people she is speaking with. She answers questions that have not been asked and changes the subject when the questions are too intimate or revealing. She never answers who she is or where she came from. We only know how she truly feels when she finally professes her love to Pelléas at the end. It’s a turn away from her constant silence and sadness, which follows her throughout the opera. She finally finds joy in Pelléas , someone who is nothing like her but in actuality, he is the mirror to her soul. Without knowing it, his words and melodies spill out all that she is feeling. He speaks words and emotion which mirror what she feels in her darkest places which she has kept secret through her silence.
