televised, in Brussels (house debut 1982) and in Liège (1982). 20th-century French opera A lighter hearted sequel to Le nozze di Figaro, Massenet's Chérubin gave von Stade the chance to marry her affection for Cherubino to her Francophilia. She thinks the opera "just adorable. It's a little piece of fluff, one of [Massenet's] most charming works. Cherubino ... is now a young man. A beautiful dancer named L'Ensoleillad comes to town, and Chérubin falls madly in love with her. But she is a courtesan and the mistress of the king, and so Chérubin cannot have her. Meanwhile, there is a soubrette character, sort of like Susanna, ... who is in love with him. ... It's typical Massenet, with lots of big dance numbers, and funny counts and countesses running around. ... It's really such a dear piece." She starred in the opera when it received its US premiere in concert in Carnegie Hall (1984) and again, theatrically, in Santa Fe (1989). "There were all sorts of people who wanted to talk me out of doing Mélisande", von Stade said in 1976. "They said I was mad to try it. Now that role fits me like a glove: I love it." She sees the heroine of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande as anything but the "manipulative femme-fatale" that some commentators judge her to be. "She is young, and she's been abused. ... And that's a very special circumstance ... because that makes kids operate a certain way. ... Her lies are lies of necessity. ... I don't think she has any bad intentions. She's young enough to not see some of the consequences of what she might do. ... People want to impose themselves on her and form her to be what they want her to be, and she is just who she is, which is a young, damaged girl." Her 1972 Santa Fe Pelléas was followed by productions in Geneva (1976), in Paris (1977), at La Scala (1986), in Vienna (1988, 1990), and at Covent Garden (1993). At the Met, she was Mélisande in 1988 and again in 1995, when the house celebrated her quarter century of service to it with a new production of Pelléas by Jonathan Miller. She has sung the part of the Child in Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortilèges, but only in semi-staged presentations: one in London's Barbican Hall (1991), the other in San Francisco (1999), both