E-Mail This Article to a Friend Fresh and French Bernard Haitink conducts the BSO in Debussy’s operatic masterpiece BY DAVID WEININGER

"For me, the one flaw in Debussy is that he didn’t write enough for the orchestra," says Bernard Haitink backstage at Symphony Hall, between rehearsals for the BSO’s opening-night performances. And Haitink’s career-long involvement with the music of Claude Debussy — one of the 20th century’s most subtle radicals — will leave a clear mark on his concerts here. This weekend he conducts the French master’s La mer, along with works by Wagner and Franck. Next weekend, in one of the season’s most anticipated events, he conducts three concert performances of Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy’s inscrutable sole opera. (Two performances will take place in Boston, a third at New York’s Carnegie Hall.)

Haitink recorded all of Debussy’s major orchestral works with the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam in the 1970s, but his passion has only grown of late, both on and off the podium. "When I’m at home and I want to relax with some music, which I often do, I listen to his piano music, his Préludes. Last Sunday, before I came to Boston, I listened to the Trois images [for orchestra] ? wonderful, wonderful music.

"But what is it? How can one describe it?" he demands, as if intent on pinning down this famously elusive music in a few simple words. Debussy’s gauzy colors are the most distinctive calling card of his art, but his music also possesses an evocative and unsettling force that is almost impossible to analyze. "It comes from nowhere and it goes to nowhere," Haitink declares, beginning a thought. "It is just. . . ." Here he breaks off, still unable to find le mot juste. "It is a very special art, very special. My words are very vague," the conductor finally admits, "but I don’t know how to put it more clearly."

Fortunately, his ability to communicate through the music doesn’t depend on his ability to explain it. His Concertgebouw recordings remain among the most esteemed in the catalogue, due in no small part to that orchestra’s distinguished legacy in French music. "There was a great French tradition there, more than any other orchestra ? more than Dresden, more than Berlin, more than Vienna. Amsterdam always loved French music, and the audience loved it as well."

Even more revelatory is a live recording of Pelléas on the Naïve label, taped three years ago with the Orchestre National de France. Haitink had conducted the opera only once before, in what he calls an "awful production" at the Glyndebourne Opera in England. ("I don’t think I want to be remembered for the performance, either.") But when the French orchestra asked him to conduct the work, "I jumped at the chance. And it gave me immense pleasure."

One of the recording’s great strengths is the way it makes clear Debussy’s debt to Wagner, and especially to his final opera, Parsifal. But Haitink contends that the most important catalyst for the composition of Pelléas was the discovery of the libretto written by the Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. Here Debussy found in language a close analogue to the revolution he was quietly leading in music. "I know that nowadays people laugh a little bit at Maeterlinck, and all these symbolic things," Haitink says. "I still think it’s a wonderful libretto, and just what Debussy needed: not always outspoken things, no arias, nothing ? just indications. That fired off his whole imagination."

And he’s equally anxious to try the piece in Boston, with an orchestra whose French pedigree is unrivaled in America. Haitink also counts himself as a great admirer of the man largely responsible for giving the BSO its expertise in the French idiom, former music director Charles Munch. "He was a breath of fresh and French air. Maybe he was not such a great disciplinarian, but he was an artist and he could, when he was in the right mood, take an orchestra airborne as no other conductor could."

Perhaps the only downside to the performances is that they’re likely to be Haitink’s last with the orchestra, at least for the immediate future. His run as principal guest conductor ends this year, and with James Levine beginning his music directorship next year, Haitink thought he should "not be in the way." As for his role as a guiding hand to the BSO, especially during the interim years between Seiji Ozawa and Levine, "It could be true, and if so I’d be very pleased. But it was never my intention to boost myself as a sort of father figure. I just come and do what I think I should do. And that’s it."

Bernard Haitink conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Pelléas et Mélisande at Symphony Hall at 8 Thursday, October 16, and Saturday, October 18. Tickets are $26-$95; call 617-266-1200.