Years before composing Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy articulated his operatic ideal: "A poet who half speaks things." That’s exactly what he got in Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, and the result was a work that shattered artistic conventions. Only in Wagner, perhaps, is the conceptual fit between music and action so perfect. Debussy’s characters wander about in a nameless, timeless realm, speaking around rather than to each other, as things happen for no reason that they or the audience can discern. The music similarly wanders from place to beautiful place, lacking direction and any sense of harmonic function. In Tristan und Isolde, the orchestra bears the burden of telling the real story; here there’s no real story to tell, and the music can do no more than offer glimpses of the nameless forces that control Maeterlinck’s doomed characters. Pelléas is thus a watershed not only in music but in modern art: opera was now liberated from its narrative burden and freed to be obscure and elusive.

I can’t think of a recording better suited to show this side of Debussy’s masterpiece than the current one, which was drawn from live concerts in 2000. Anne Sofie von Otter is a magnificent Mélisande: she captures the speech-like simplicity of Debussy’s vocal writing and makes it sound artlessly beautiful. Wolfgang Holzmair’s Pelléas is a study in dignified tragedy. The playing of the ONF has an iridescent beauty that places it firmly in the French tradition. Haitink leads a performance that makes the work into an extended dream; all that’s lacking is the needed energy at the opera’s few moments of dramatic intensity. This recording nicely complements Claudio Abbado’s more passionate, extrovert reading; together Haitink and Abbado set the modern standard for this endlessly mysterious piece.