Pelléas and Mélisande () is a Symbolist play by the Belgian playwright and author Maurice Maeterlinck about the forbidden, doomed love of the title characters. It was first performed in 1893. The work never achieved great success on the stage, apart from in the operatic setting by Claude Debussy, but it was at the time widely read and admired by the literary elite in the symbolist movement, such as Strindberg and Rilke. It also inspired other contemporary composers, including Gabriel Fauré, Arnold Schoenberg, Jean Sibelius, and Mel Bonis. Synopsis Golaud finds Mélisande by a stream in the woods. She has lost her crown in the water but does not wish to retrieve it. They marry, and she instantly wins the favor of Arkël, Golaud's grandfather and king of Allemonde, who is ill. She begins to be drawn to Pelléas, Golaud's brother. They meet by the fountain, where Mélisande loses her wedding ring. Golaud grows suspicious of the lovers, has his son Yniold spy on them, and discovers them caressing, whereupon he kills Pelléas and wounds Mélisande. She later dies after giving birth to an abnormally small girl. Themes This play treats the familiar triangle of wife, husband and lover, ending with the death of both the wife and the lover at the hands of the husband. The best known example of this triangle is the story of Paolo and Francesca of Rimini, treated in two highly successful plays also dating to the 1890s by Gabriele D'Annunzio and the English playwright Stephen Phillips. A brief summary of the play will concentrate best on Mélisande. At the beginning of the play she has just escaped from a failed marriage that has so traumatized her that she scarcely remembers either it or her past. She marries Golaud through no choice of her own, and remains essentially distant from him. The audience realize she is falling in love with Pelléas long before she does. On her deathbed she has quite forgotten her final meeting with Pelléas and his death, and dies without realizing that she is dying. This and the whole play -- for none of the other characters are wiser -- expresses a sense that human beings understand neither themselves nor each other nor the world. The problem is not simply human blindness, but the lack of a fixed and definable reality to be known. This is the Maeterlinck who paved the way