When the Eyes Hear What the Ears Can’t

Opera is an art of overstimulation. That is perhaps one of the reasons for its renewed popularity in a multimedia age addicted to the glutting of the senses.

But there is danger in overstimulation. Opera is not very good narrative theater. Music is too slow and too vague for real-time plots or naturalistic theatrical acting. Opera is poetry, and it is never entirely successful if the eye receives prose.

That is why Robert Wilson’s productions, abstract and peculiar though they may seem at first, work so well. Imagery is stark, bold, clean, modern and startling; light is obsessively precise; vivid colors tell their own story. But most important of all, eye and ear stay out of each other’s way.

Wilson’s new production of Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande”--which was created in Paris this past season and now has come to the Salzburg Festival, its co-producer--begins in blackness. Absolute blackness, even in the pit. Then, out of nothingness, a thin longitudinal line of the most luminescent white slowly grows from floor to ceiling of the enormous stage of the Grosses Festspielhaus, the largest of the three Salzburg opera theaters in former court stables that are built right up to the sheer rock cliff of a mountain.

Everything else seems to have vanished--the Mozart that drones around town, the swank audiences so proper in their manners yet as ill at ease with today’s artistic adventures as their ancestors were with Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. There is only the special world of Debussy.

And Debussy’s world in “Pelleas” is gloomy and magical. Golaud discovers the enigmatic young Melisande in a mysterious forest. The castle he takes her to as his bride is cold and damp. Pelleas and Melisande fall in love in half sentences. No one in this opera seems to know what anyone else thinks. It’s perfect for Wilson.

Wilson’s stage pictures are about as minimal as they could possibly be. The pre-Raphaelite design that is often associated with this opera is all gone. The line of light at the beginning is joined by other lines. They move. That is Golaud moving through the forest.

In a later scene, when Melisande drops the wedding ring Golaud gave her down a fountain, the water is a diaphanous quarter-scrim that gently blows in the wind. The ring is an eerie circle of light projected on the back scrim. At other times, the most brilliant colors (mostly blues) on the scrim capture emotions.

When the child Yniold attempts to lift a boulder on the castle terrace, the stage contains only the flawless egg-shaped stone. The background is a gorgeous pale light. The stone levitates magically.

Melisande, magnificently sung and acted by Dawn Upshaw, does not have the long hair with which the libretto has her engulf Pelleas. And she does not need it. Upshaw strikes poses and holds them, poses made for a postmodern dancer, with arms and torso often at unusual angles and formations. Anything--her arms, her long gown--can stand for long hair. She rarely shows expressions. Likewise the other characters, each of whom seems to exist in his or her own light.

These are stage pictures so otherworldly in their beauty and perfection that they seem relevant but not entirely explicable. The term “deconstruction” is not easily defined but it seems to apply here. Each character is alone, rarely connected to others. There is almost no touching in this production, and little reacting. One can watch the opera from any character’s point of view.

That allows music itself room to do the work of conveying emotion, although it is a challenge to the singers not only to learn all those difficult positions but also to sing without revealing what they are singing about with facial expression.

Upshaw does this with extraordinary poise. She is a direct singer, with the unfussy tone that Debussy strove for. But though she is not a singer well-practiced in mystery, she conveys it anyway. The mystery is all around her, which allows the purity of her singing to seem, under the visual circumstances, disembodied.

The cast, in typical Salzburg fashion, is without weakness vocally or theatrically, no matter the demands put upon it. German baritone Russell Braun, as Pelleas, can match Upshaw in uncommon forthrightness. Canadian baritone Victor Braun is able to find just the degree of harshness in Golaud as the production will allow. Pelleas’ mother and grandfather, Nadine Denize and Robert Lloyd, are appropriately somber and sympathetic.

Much that is meaningful in “Pelleas,” however, is the business of the orchestra, the Philharmonic of London, conducted with imagination and lyrical beauty by Sylvain Cambreling. This and his conducting here of Mozart’s early opera “Lucio Silla,” prove him ready for much greater renown than his positions as music director of opera companies in Brussels and Frankfurt have yet give him.

Wilson, of course, needs no further renown here in Europe. The Texas-born director is practically an icon. And this “Pelleas” is so well-made that it only underscores his neglect by American opera companies, notwithstanding the fact that he is currently preparing a new opera with Philip Glass, which will reopen UCLA’s Royce Hall in the spring.