Pelléas et Mélisande

Mrs Patrick Campbell asked Fauré for incidental music to the first English production of Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande, which opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London on 21 June 1898. He had only weeks; his pupil Charles Koechlin orchestrated most of the score for the small pit band while Fauré composed. Four movements were later drawn into a concert suite, op. 80, which Fauré rescored himself, adding the Sicilienne in 1909. The music preceded Debussy's opera on the same play by four years and Schoenberg's tone poem by five.