Golaud is at the midpoint of his worldly span, and thus the farthest removed from the light. The opening lines of the opera are surely a conscious echo of those of La divina commedia. (Golaud: “I will never be able to get out of this forest. God knows just where this beast has led me.” Dante: “Midway on the pathway of our life/I found myself in a dark forest/wherein the right way had been mistook.” And Golaud will soon meet for his guide not Virgil, but Mélisande, who, leading by being led, will guide him into his own Inferno.) Golaud can understand things only in worldly terms. He must make sense of them. Arkel says that before the meeting  with Mélisande, Golaud had always taken his advice; Geneviève notes that he had always been “so prudent, serious, and reliable.” From the outset, Golaud tries to comprehend why Mélisande is the way she is, but there aren’t any answers in the terms that he can understand. This at first arouses his sympathy and curiosity, then drives him to the edge of madness.

Golaud would appear to be the character who drives the action of the opera. His life predicament sets it in motion, and we are introduced to him under circumstances that make him seem the protagonist. Even when he morphs into the fatal enemy of the protagonist couple, we do not entirely lose sympathy with him, for he continues to represent all of us in the lost times of our lives. But it is Mélisande who is the avatar of the drama’s pull toward the light, and thus the key to interpretation of the whole. And if we, like Golaud, start to ask the questions normally to be asked of any character (Who is she? Where has she come from and where is she going? What does she want?, etc.), we are stonewalled—by her. Her evasiveness concerning everything about herself; her reckless loss of her wedding ring; her untruthfulness with Golaud about it and feigned search for it with Pelléas; her step-by-step binding of Pelléas to her, through to the inevitable end in the shadows outside the castle; then, finally, her own death, which seems inexplicable unless willed—what can all these things signify? And—essential to any interpretation of the character—how conscious is she of the probable consequences of her actions? Because if these are even near the the threshold of awareness, she is actually a manipulative little monster. Indeed, there is much in her words, behavior, and music, starting with the wheedling violin glissandos by which we and Golaud first detect her weeping, that could be heard and seen that way.

That line of thought, which I’ve long idly entertained, was taken out for a long run by a recent encounter with Jean Markale’s Montségur and the Mystery of the Cathars. As readers of Opera as Opera know, I’ve long been intrigued by the Cathars and their proximity to the sources of the metanarrative I see as the engine of E-19 opera. Their beliefs place them as a late, purified form of the dualistic, light/dark, spirit/matter mystery religions referred to above. As a mystic acolyte, Maeterlinck was surely acquainted with them, and when I saw that Markale’s book devoted considerable attention to Pelléas, I had to give it a look. Markale interprets Pelléas et Mélisande as ” . . . an initiatory drama presented as a theatrical and musical game whose intricacies express in the noblest manner possible the Cathar problem of the angel soul.” For him, Mélisande is ” . . . a perverse adolescent . . . an excellent student of Satan . . . perfectly aware of what she is doing when she sets her heart on Pelléas . . . and drags him to his ruin.” He likens her to Kundry, a fallen angelic soul, and sees Golaud as a tyrant and “kind of devil” who imprisons Mélisande in a worldly marriage.