Premiering at Bergen National Opera, Pelléas et Mélisande marks Alan Lucien Øyen’s return to opera after his acclaimed Rusalka for Opera Ballet Vlaanderen. Steeped in Maeterlinck’s symbolist poetry and Debussy’s luminous score, Øyen approaches the work as theatre, focusing on the interrelationships, the unspoken histories, and the silences between words.
Øyen gives us a staging that is highly visual, one that magnifies the music and heightens its effects.
Model of Åsmund Færavaags’s wooden stage design.
Model of Åsmund Færavaags’s wooden stage design.
Model of Åsmund Færavaags’s wooden stage design.
From Rusalka, Opera Vlaanderen, set design Åsmund Færavaag
In Pelléas et Mélisande, Alan Lucien Øyen - known for weaving text, movement, and visual poetry - turns his theatrical lens on Debussy’s only opera. Øyen focuses on the opera’s human undercurrents: longing, fragility, and the subtle, shifting dynamics between characters.
“I’ve always been curious about what has happened to Mélisande before we meet her,” Øyen reflects. “In a time riddled with trauma and triggers, this opera becomes a mirror for our own search for meaning and connection.”
The tone and atmosphere are inseparable from Debussy’s music, which dictates the emotional landscape. Øyen and his long-time collaborators respond with poetic imagery, a stage design in wood by Åsmund Færavaag that morphs continuously from scene to scene, oscillating between abstraction and concrete form. The wooden textures evoke nature while framing the castle’s heart as a space in tension with the outside world.
Costumes by Stine Sjøgren weave the opera’s metaphorical narrative into designs that allow the story to be played with naturalism, close to our own time, yet timeless. The result is a Pelléas et Mélisande that feels at once intimate and universal, a space where the past and present breathe together, and where the smallest gestures carry the weight of unspoken histories.
Pelléas et Mélisande is presented by Bergen National Opera in collaboration with Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Edvard Grieg Choirs and opens on Nov 1st, 2025 in Bergen, Norway.
www.bno.no/pelleas-et-melisande