Pelléas et Mélisande

music: Claude Debussy
libretto: Maurice Maeterlinck

singers: Yanhua Liu
Thomas Stimmel
Robert Elibay – Hartog

piano: Yonatan Cohen

costumes: Caroline Niestroy
graphics: Anna Niestroy

December 2012
Sternchen Berlin

I’ll run away screaming with joy and pain like a blind man flees the burning of his house.

Chasing in the deep woods on a cold dark winter day, Golaud meets the mysterious Mélisande. Where does she come from? What is she doing here? What sort of secret is she hiding? Golaud brings her to his castle in Allemonde and they marry. Pelléas, Golaud’s half- brother, gets obsessed with the mysterious beauty. A complicated story of a ménage à trois begins. Pelléas wants to finally put an end to the torment and makes a ghastly decision.

The staging of some scenes of this masterpiece took place in a small club in the heart of Berlin. I used its huge windows and a careful lighting concept to transform it into a forest, to a castle, to a prison…

The tower room is dark. But their faces glow with their smiles. They grope in front of themselves like blind people and find each other as they would a door. Almost like children frightened by the night, they press close into each other. And yet they are not afraid. There is nothing that might be against them: no yesterday, no morrow; for time is shattered. And they flower from its ruins.

Rainer Maria Rilke
The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke