Melisande height - How tall is Melisande?

The play has been the basis of several pieces of music. Perhaps the best known is the opera of the same name (1902) by Claude Debussy. In 1898, Gabriel Fauré had written incidental music for performances of the play in London and asked Charles Koechlin to orchestrate it, from which he later extracted a suite. The story inspired Arnold Schoenberg's early symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande of 1902–03. Jean Sibelius also wrote incidental music for it in 1905; the section "At the castle gate" has found fame as the signature music of the BBC The Sky at Night programme. In 2013, Alexandre Desplat, commissioned by the "Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire", composed a Sinfonia Concertante for Flute and Orchestra, inspired by Maeterlinck's Pelléas and Mélisande.

Pelléas and Mélisande (French: Pelléas et Mélisande) is a Symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck about the forbidden, doomed love of the title characters. It was first performed in 1893.

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, of which the best known example 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.