I. Prélude. Andante molto moderato II. Andantino quasi allegretto [Fileuse] III. Sicilienne. Allegretto molto moderato IV. Molto Adagio [La Morte de Mélisande]

The youthful symbolic drama Pelléas et Mélisande by the Nobel Prize winning Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck, exerted a mesmeric influence on audiences at the turn of the century. It seemed to particularly address composers, three of whom were inspired independently to write music around 1900: Claude Debussy who composed an anti-Wagnerian opera (1894-1902), Arnold Schoenberg who wrote a monumental symphonic poem in Wagnerian spirit (1903), and Jean Sibelius wrote incidental music for a stage production (1905) in his own Finnish idiom. They were joined by a fourth composer, Gabriel Fauré.

Until the emergence of Debussy, Fauré (1845-1924) was regarded as the most progressive French composer. He wrote little and slowly. In April 1898, he was asked to compose music for the London stage premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande, but granted a mere month and a half to fulfil the commission. Because of the impending deadline and other commitments (Fauré was the chief inspector of France's provincial music conservatoires which led him to constantly travel the country), he entrusted the orchestration to his pupil Charles Koechlin. The nine performances at the Prince of Wales Theatre were a relative success although the British critics, who were still under the sway of Wagner, were unkind to Fauré's music.

However, Fauré's music gives a perfect background to this love story, constructed as it is from sensitive, obscure fragments of speech. The action is simple: Golaud espies a fairy like girl alongside a brook. He marries her and takes her back to his family castle, where the girl and Pelléas – Golaud's younger brother – fall in love. Their love grows irresistibly which only adds to Golaud's jealousy: when he finds them together, he stabs Pelléas. Mélisande, who is by now expecting a child, dies from her sorrow but the child is born alive. It is not the action of the work which gives this drama its magic but the system of symbols that permeates the text, as well as its many silences, the tension of unexpressed thoughts.

In early 1899, Fauré composed a four part orchestral suite from the incidental music, slightly altering Koechlin's orchestration. The sad and clear music of the first movement is the portrait of Mélisande and introduces the work. This is followed by a spinning song (Fileuse), depicting Mélisande alongside her spinning wheel – the illustrative accompaniment of sordino violins envelops the superb oboe melody. The third movement, which derives from music Fauré wrote earlier for Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, features a flute melody accompanied by harp, but it also fits Maeterlinck's drama. The sensitive closing movement describes Mélisande's death in music, the theatre curtain falling on its final notes.