The rule of thumb for enjoying
(or at least appreciating) Arnold Schoenberg’s music is to recall that his
entire output conveniently falls (or can be forced into) into three discrete
periods. First up is Late Romantic where his inspiration was Richard Wagner and
Johannes Brahms. Works produced at the time include the ‘popular’ Verklärte
Nacht, the massive cantata Gurre-Lieder and the present Pelleas.
This music was ostensibly tonal, but subject to intense chromaticism. The
second period showed increasing tendencies towards the complete abandonment of
key towards atonality and the loosening of some formal conventions. Then
followed the development of serialism or dodecaphony which involved tone rows
created from the 12 notes of the octave and manipulated in a strict manner.
Towards the end of his life, Schoenberg appeared to create a synthesis between
serialism, tonality, and neo-classicism.
The story of Pelleas and
Melisande is well-known. Briefly, it is a tragic love triangle. Golaud
discovers the mysterious Melisande in the forest. He takes her back his castle
and marries her. Along comes his half-brother Pelleas who immediately falls in
love with her. There is a fountain scene with Pelleas where Melisande loses her
wedding ring. Golaud is jealous, with his suspicions eventually leading him to
murder Pelleas and wounds Melisande. She dies in childbirth, revealing that she
loved Pelleas ‘innocently.’ Golaud is tormented by nagging doubts. That’s it!
There have been several attempts
at musically representing Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelleas and Melisande.
I guess that the best known is Debussy’s one and only completed opera,
premiered in 1902. Gabriel Fauré
wrote his incidental music in 1898 followed by a derived suite. This has
remained popular with the ‘Sicilienne’ being oft recorded separately. Enthusiasts
of Jean Sibelius will recall that he composed incidental music for the play in
1905. That same year he extracted an orchestral suite from this music. Several
recordings have been made of the latter, but I understand there is only a
single edition of the complete incidental music.
Schoenberg’s Pelleas und
Melisande was written between 1902 and 1903 and premiered in Vienna on 26
January 1905. It is a long work, lasting for nearly three quarters of an
hour. Despite its designation as a ‘symphonic poem’ most commentators
(following Alban Berg) have suggested that in ‘the four principal sections of
this work we can even identify clearly the four movements of a symphony’. This
is exemplified by the opening movement in sonata form, a ‘minuet and trio’ creating
what could be a ‘scherzo’, a broad ‘adagio’ followed by a finale that establishes
a reprise of what has passed rather than a ‘traditional’ rondo. Onto this
four-part formal construction, the composer has overlain the various programmatic
events derived from Maurice Maeterlinck’s play. The symphonic poem largely
follows the story outlined above.
Schoenberg’s Pelleas has
been subject to much detailed analysis, both from a musical and a psychological
perspective, including by Egon Wellesz and Alban Berg. On the other hand, the
composer was keen to point out that the score was inspired directly by
Maeterlinck’s drama. He wrote that he ‘tried to mirror every detail of it, with
only a few omissions and slight changes of the order of the scenes.’ Schoenberg
created some twenty thematic statements that could be termed Wagnerian
leitmotifs but are used as part of the symphonic development.
What does Schoenberg’s Pelleas
sound like? It is a powerful synthesis of Wagner and Brahms with input from
Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. Basically, it is a post-Tristan tone poem.
Finally, it is important to
recall that when Schoenberg began this score, he was unaware that Claude
Debussy was writing his opera, which was premiered in 1902.
Erwartung (Expectation),
op.17 was composed rapidly between 27 August and 12 September 1909, with the
orchestral score complete by 4 October. Schoenberg created his own monodrama
text from a libretto devised for him by Marie Pappenheim. This work had to wait
for several years before being premiered in Prague on 9 June 1924 during that
year’s Festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music.
The rather gruesome ‘plot’ is straightforward.
A woman wanders through a dark forest. She is trying to find her deceitful
lover. Perversely, she suddenly stumbles across his murdered corpse. Did she
murder him? That is not affirmed or denied explicitly. Erwartung can be
interpreted as a hysterical dream or nightmare (aka Freud) rather than a
‘realistic story.’ Pappenheim was a psychiatrist. The impetus for this tale of
love and jealousy may have been anchored in ‘history’. Schoenberg’s wife
Mathilde had an affair with the artist Richard Gerstl. Gerstl was later to
commit suicide by hanging himself and self-stabbing. Schoenberg was distraught
until Mathilde returned to him.
The ethos of Schoenberg’s
interpretation is well summed up in his own words: ‘the slow representation of
things that go through the mind in a moment of great anxiety.’ The progress of
the work involves the woman’s singing ‘interleav[ing] straight description with
interpretation’.
Artistically, this music defies
all convention. It is mono-thematic: in other words, there is no repetition of
themes, subjects, motives of harmonic sequences. It is ‘stream of consciousness’
music, although some musicologists have identified certain themes giving
continuity.
The performance of these two
diverse works is stunning. I especially enjoyed soprano Sara Jakubiak’s
dramatic and often moving rendition of Erwartung. She brilliantly
communicates the intensely varied emotional responses required in this ghastly monologue
which include ‘fear, horror, loathing and compassion, all balanced with some rationality
and the inevitable madness.' Equally
important in this work is the orchestral ‘accompaniment’ with its ever-creative
resources of ‘colourful voices’ involved in ‘multifarious entanglement[s]’. Erwartung
is one of the three great Germanic songfests which also included Richard
Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs.
On the other hand, Pelleas
presents all the challenges of a huge romantic symphonic tone poem. Edward
Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra succeeded in giving structure to
this massive work. The recording of both works is ideal.
I appreciated the liner notes by
Paul Griffiths for their succinctness. It would be so easy to write a long,
learned and ultimately obscure essay on this music. Both works are supported by
a detailed analysis and contextualisation, but they never demand a degree in
the Second Viennese School of Music for their utility. I was surprised that an
English text of Erwartung was not included. My German is not quite up to
understanding and appreciating the complex literary notions in Marie Pappenheim
libretto. I think it must be copyright reasons. The booklet contains lots of photographs
of the performers, one of the composer and Mathilde and none of Maeterlinck or
Pappenheim. I was a bit disappointed with the cover design, which seems
remarkably boring: I concede that it represents a wood or a forest which is the
locus of both these masterpieces.
Listening to these two works back
to back, it is hard to imagine that they were composed by the same person and
only four or five years apart. Pelleas und Melisande is often regarded
as the last major high point of romanticism but also subtly pointing to the
future development of music and Erwartung is one of the great icons of
musical expressionism. Not everyone will agree with this assessment, but it
might be a fair starting point for an appreciation and assessment of these two
works.
Track Listing:
Arnold SCHOENBERG (1874-1951)
Pelleas und Melisande: symphonic poem for orchestra
after the play by Maurice Maeterlinck op.5 (1902-3)
Erwartung, op.17, monodrama in one act for soprano
and orchestra (1909)
Sara Jakubiak (soprano), Bergen Philharmonic
Orchestra/Edward Gardner
Rec. Grieghallen,
Bergen, Norway,11-14 June 2019
CHANDOS CHSA 5198
With thanks to MusicWeb International where this review
was first published.
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