Debussy's opera "Pelleas et Meisande," which was revived at the Metropolitan Opera on Wednesday, tells us at once not enough and too much. There is no clear information about time, place or even the precise relationships within the family of wandering solitaries that is being observed. And much of what they say is vague or off the point. It is the power of Debussy's music, though, to reveal how remarks that seem stray and almost meaningless, or questions that appear idle, can be tight little burning bombs, fired by one person at another with exact control in games of love and cruelty.

Everything is in the subtext, and much of the subtext is in the orchestral score. This was beautifully presented by the Met Orchestra under James Levine, with fine string textures, gleaming brass, excellent woodwind solos, colorful harps and timpani gestures unusually full of character. Mr. Levine's tempos were generally slow, but often with the possibility   ?   and sometimes the actuality   ?   of a sudden or gradual acceleration, conveying an intensification of emotion. The impression was of a frozen lake that could crack at any point to reveal the water beneath boiling.

The whole penultimate scene   ?   the last of six scenes between Pelleas and Melisande but the first in which they speak directly to each other, with catastrophic consequences   ?   was one long accelerando toward passion and violence. Speed went with fury, too, in the terrifying scene in which a young boy, Yniold, is forced by his father, Golaud, to spy on his stepmother and his uncle, Melisande and Pelleas, together in an upstairs room.

This scene's turning point was tellingly marked. Yniold, seeing the state his father is in, tries to get away. No, says Golaud: you stay with me. And the line was intoned by Jos van Dam with the sullen, irrefutable force of a man turning into an animal, backed by low sounds in the orchestra having the same tone. Then, with his father holding Yniold up to the window, the orchestra's fast brilliance communicated simultaneously the boy's rising fear, the father's mounting suspicion and perhaps the growing poignancy and even embarrassment the audience must feel in witnessing these events.

Mr. Van Dam's performance was strong all through. His singing was heightened speech, the notes and rhythms always making a direct expressive effect, across a range from care to anger to, in the last act, dumb bewilderment mixed with an emphatic wish still to get to the truth (a word he sang with the tremolo of bursting emotion). And his body language matched his singing.

The last act was also important for the orchestra and Mr. Levine. With more characters onstage than in any previous scene, and with the action moving to a standstill, it seemed the lead was being taken by the orchestra, playing music as sweeping and rapturous as "La Mer." The people, on the point of departing, were being revealed as the playthings of their inner life, a life to which they had no conscious access. That is the work's keenest tragedy.

Its great gifts here are in the splendid cast as well as the superb orchestra. Susanne Mentzer provides a magnetic and dark-voiced Melisande, projecting a sensuality of which the character seems unaware, caught up as she is in feelings of disaffection and melancholy. Dwayne Croft is full and ardent as Pelleas, aptly veering between the radiant confidence of shining phrases and softer insecurity: he makes everything sing as much as Mr. Van Dam makes everything speak. Robert Lloyd shows the grandfather, Arkel, still in complete possession of the lyrical genes that went to Pelleas. Nadine Denize is the bit-part mother and James Danner a spirited Yniold.