Pelléas and Mélisande (French: Pelléas et Mélisande) is a Symbolist play by the Belgian playwright and author Maurice Maeterlinck. It's about the forbidden, doomed love of the title characters and was first performed in 1893.
The work never achieved great success on stage, apart from operatic setting by Claude Debussy, but was at the time widely read and admired by the symbolist literary elite, such as Strindberg and Rilke. It inspired other contemporary composers, like Gabriel Fauré, Arnold Schoenberg, Jean Sibelius, and Mel Bonis.
