The New York City Opera's presentation of Pelléas et Mélisande is the best I have ever seen, here or in Paris. Its quality was unquestionably due to the internationality of talents, people who, precisely because they were not French, made a superhuman effort to enter the French brain of the past (of the Dark Ages of Bluebeard, from whom Mélisande had escaped, and of the Paris of 1900, where Claude Debussy lived and loved), an effort not always made by the French who inadvertently sabotage their masterpieces. Frank Corsair placed the singers in a decor of art nouveau (which the French call "modern style") from which New York's Patricia Brooks emerged as an appropriately nubile Mélisande, Canada's André Jobin as an unusually masculine Pelléas, while Viennese Julius Rudel conducted the piece like the symphony it is, a violent reverie, an instrumental tissue with words superimposed. << less