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. In the same year Mel Bonis wrote a piano piece named 'Mélisande'. 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. In 2024, Lauré Lussier composed a 50 minute long electroacoustic work of the play. It has been released on the German label Adventurous Music.
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