A lost hunter—a widowed prince—discovers a traumatized waif by a pool in the forest, takes her home to the family castle, takes her to wife, only to lose her to his half-brother. A sad tale, full of Gothic echoes—and for many aficionados, an everlastingly unrewarding one. For others, the shadowy goings-on, talky musical dialogue, and misty yet oceanic turbulence of Debussy’s orchestra cast a spell they have no wish ever to break. Right now, such fans have two new irresistible prospects. A new Pelléas et Mélisande at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan, is designed, staged, and lit by Romeo Castellucci, whose visions establish their own disorienting gravitational fields. The prospective standout in the cast is the biker baritone Simon Keenlyside, whose rugged grace used to shine in the role of the naïve, otherworldly kid brother Pelléas. But now, he’s the bearish hunter Golaud, a character equally worthy of his empathy. Meanwhile in Toronto, Opéra Atélier joins forces with the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra to air the Canadian performer-scholar Christopher Bagan’s adaptation of Debussy’s score for their early-music instrumentarium. Perverse? Maybe not. Maeterlinck’s poisoned fairy tale of a stage play Pelléas et Mélisande, which Debussy trimmed but did not otherwise noticeably alter, traces its roots to Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales from the age of Louis XIV. Neither Perrault nor Maeterlinck was writing for children, but whereas the former peddled avuncular moral uplift, the latter wrote from a place of overstimulated senses and moral exhaustion. What a difference a few centuries make. —Matthew Gurewitsch