It's not British, but...Pelléas and Mélisande: Schoenberg and Fauré

The listener needs to know that both these great works are predicated on Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck’s (1862-1949) five act play, Pelléas et Mélisande. This was completed in 1892 and was premiered the following year. I understand that it is regarded as a highlight of French Symbolist drama. This genre became popular in the late 19th century. It put an emphasis on atmosphere, feeling, and the numinous, using poetic language and abstract settings to explore themes of spirituality, dreams, and the subconscious.

The “plot” involves a love triangle between the three main characters: Pelléas, Mélisande, and a certain Golaud, who is Mélisande’s husband and Pelléas’s half-brother. The backdrop to the action is an imaginary country, during medieval times. Reviewers of the play have explained that Maeterlinck emphasises atmosphere over plot, by creating a “dreamlike fairy tale about the terrifying power of love.”

Over the years, composers have been inspired by the play, including incidental music by Jean Sibelius and the operatic masterpiece by Claude Debussy.

The two works on this disc are hugely different. Gabriel Fauré’s op.80 was originally incidental music for a London performance of the play in 1898 whilst Schoeneberg’s op.5 was a tone-poem written in a full-blown late-Romantic style.

Originally, there were twenty separate numbers of stage music, which Fauré had devised in under a month. His pupil Charles Koechlin produced the orchestral score in time for the play’s London premiere. Three years later, Fauré gathered up various fragments to create the Suite. There were originally three movements: Prélude, Fileuse, and La mort de Mélisande, with the famous Sicilienne being added some years later. This latter piece was originally part of an “uncompleted stage music project.”

The Prélude sets a serious tone, while Fileuse portrays Mélisande’s spinning wheel, creating a filigree of movement. The Sicilienne depicts the lovers’ short-lived happiness: it has a charming melody which is justifiably popular. Finally, La mort de Mélisande leaves the listener in a sad, but thoughtful mood. Overall, Fauré has captured the story’s “mysterious, enchanted, cryptic” tempers. This is aided by sophisticated orchestration and a rich harmonic palette.

I discovered Arnold Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, op.5 (1902) several years after having been introduced to his atonal and dodecaphonic music. And it came as a major surprise. Here was a strong, romantic sounding tone poem that sounded more Wagnerian or Straussian than the expressionist sound world of Pierrot Lunaire, the string quartets, or piano pieces with which I was familiar.

Richard Strauss had suggested to the 27-year-old Schoenberg that he should write a work based on Maeterlinck’s play. This was to have been an opera, but finally he decided to craft a tone poem.

The critic Harry Neville summed up the creative process (Sleeve Note Angel 36509): “Unlike the incidental music of Fauré and Sibelius, Schoenberg’s Pelleas is no mere delineation of character and atmosphere; in it the composer attempts not only to narrate musically the action of the drama, but to depict the psychological implications as well – all within the confines of a vast sonata form.”

Pelleas und Melisande is long, lasting for more than forty minutes. It is conceived as a single movement divided up into eleven interrelated sections. Schoenberg wrote that “Aside from a few omissions and minor alterations in the sequence of scenes…I tried to reflect every detail…”  In fact, it is customary to analyse it as a “symphony” rather than a “symphonic poem.” Alban Berg has suggested that “in the four principal sections of this work we can even identify clearly the four movements of a symphony.” The initial sonata form is followed by a scherzo, a slow movement, and a rondo-like finale, that recaps much that has gone before.

The progress of the tone poem is constructed from leitmotifs and themes associated with the individual characters in the play. Also represented by musical tropes are the various external forces at play: jealousy, fate, death, and love. These are often superimposed on each other, with deft contrapuntal skill. Berg categorized twenty themes. Also, instrumental colouring is used to identify the characters – Pelleas, trumpet; Golaud, horn; and Melisande, cor anglais.

The work was completed in 1903 and was premiered at the Musikverein in Vienna on 26 January 1905. This caused great consternation amongst the audience and the critics.

For the listener unacquainted with Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, the stylistic markers are Wagner and Strauss, with hints of Mahler and Brahms. Yet, this is not a pastiche, but a glorious synthesis of the received musical language of the late nineteenth century.

The playing by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra under Paavo Järvi is faultless, the recording is ideal. The booklet with notes by Adam Gellen is essential reading: it is printed in German, English and French.

This CD presents two wonderfully contrasting explorations of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Both are a pleasure to listen to.

Track Listing

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
Pelleas und Melisande, op.5 (1902)
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)
Pelléas et Mélisande, op.80 (1898/1901)
Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra/Paavo Järvi
rec. October 2012, Alte Oper, Frankfurt (Schoenberg), January 2016 HR Sendesaal, Frankfurt (Fauré)
Alpha Classics Alpha 1058