Mystic, wonderful: the sound world presented in Claude Debussy’s only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande — and, indeed, the visual world in the best productions of it, like this one — invites comparison with the eerie beauty of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur. Set in and around a crumbling, water-girt castle, it tells a strange story of a lovely woman, origins unknown, who comes to exert a fatal fascination on two royal brothers.

To the elder, Golaud (baritone Alan Opie) she contracts a marriage, about which we learn in an oblique manner characteristic of this great masterpiece through a letter read by his mother Geneviève (mezzo-soprano Anne Mason) to her father-in-law, King Arkel (bass Brian Bannatyne-Scott). To the younger, Pelléas (Dutch tenor Palle Knudsen), she becomes the object of an obsessive and dangerous admiration — and he for her.

This reaches its climax in the opera’s most famous episode (a love scene in which no word of love is spoken) when the all-too-savvy heroine lets down her lustrous locks from the top of her tower for the feverish handling of her besotted swain. The ravishing music — superbly delivered by singers and orchestra under conductor Brad Cohen — matches the ecstasy of the action. For savage power it is matched here only by the traumatic scene in which the insanely jealous Golaud sets his terrified son Yniold (treble Eoghan McNelis) to the task of spying on the illicit lovers.

In the role of Mélisande, the superb soprano Anne Sophie Duprels brings a similar emotional heft to that she delivered last year as Holland Park’s Kát’a Kabanová. The production reunites her with director Olivia Fuchs, designer Yannis Thavoris and lighting designer Colin Grenfell. Between them, they conjure a magical world, monochrome in the main, at which we cannot do other than gaze in rapt fascination.

There are further performances tonight, on Wednesday, next Friday and on June 16. Tickets: 020 7361 3570 (www.ohp.rbkc.gov.uk).