Gabriel Fauré: Pelléas et Mélisande, suite, Op. 80

When the Flemish playwright, poet, Symbolist and winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize in Literature Maurice Maeterlinck wrote his fairytale-like myth about the fateful bond between Pelléas and Mélisande, it probably never occurred to him what a powerful impulse he would be providing to the world of music. Jean Sibelius produced incidental music for the play, Claude Debussy wrote a landmark opera, and Arnold Schönberg a symphonic poem. The first master of composition to take up this drama however was Gabriel Fauré. After a time he transformed his incidental music for the play into a four-part suite, which includes the famous Sicilienne.