Schoenberg: Pelleas und Melisande, Op. 5

Recording locations: Jesus Christus Kirche, Berlin, Germany, January 1996 (Schoenberg); Konzerthaus Schauspielhaus, Berlin, Germany, June/August 1995 (Mahler)

Two gargantuan late-Romantic Austrian works are coupled on this very rare recording by Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Deutsches Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin. The recording had limited release in Germany and this is its first international release.

Mahler’s Third Symphony is the longest symphony by any composer to be part of the basic repertoire and, at first, had subtitles attached to each of the movements. But the composer had a distrust for programmatic music and by the time the symphony was published and premiered, these verbal explications had been removed.

Mahler and Schoenberg met in 1904 at a rehearsal of Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht. The older composer became a defender of Schoenberg’s work, conducting it when he could. Schoenberg, whose outlook on Mahler’s work was at first unfavourable, was bowled over by the Third Symphony and regarded it as a work of genius. His own Pelleas und Melisande based on Maurice Maeterlinck's play, is a gargantuan symphonic poem and was his first completed orchestral work. The orchestral forces (as with the Mahler Symphony) are huge, and although Schoenberg includes no vocal parts, the orchestra is handled with considerable bravura and includes 64 strings (plus two harps), 17 woodwinds, 18 brass and 8 percussion.

Schoenberg’s polyphonic tone poem Pelleas und Melisande is often compared to Debussy’s opera based on the same text by Maurice Maeterlinck.

According to the composer, “The first performance, 1905, in Vienna, under my own direction, provoked riots among the audience and even the critics. Reviews were unusually violent and one of the critics suggested putting me in an asylum and keeping music paper out of my reach. Only six years later, under Oscar Fried’s direction, it became a great success, and since that time has not caused the anger of the audience”.

The most innovative features of Erwartung, a “monodrama for soprano and large orchestra”, are the continual variation of orchestral textures, and the constantly changing tempi. Not only are the instrumental combinations new, but the instruments themselves are required to produce new sounds.

Pierre Boulez, renowned for championing the most daring music of the 20th century, leads this 2003 Tokyo concert, played in the presence of Japan’s Emperor and Empress. Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Melisande could have received no treatment more royal than Boulez gives it at Suntory Hall with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra

The Guardian observed, “For a quarter of a century now Boulez’s performances of all the modernists have set benchmarks . . . he remains unrivalled in the works of the Second Viennese School, and in Schoenberg in particular”

The catalyst for Schoenberg’s early symphonic poem based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s play ‘Pelleas et Melisande’ was provided by Richard Strauss. Strauss had provided encouragement and support for the young composer during his time in Berlin from 1901–3. Schoenberg was unaware that Debussy had recently completed his operatic masterpiece based on the same subject, and was certainly oblivious to the incidental music by Sibelius to the play written at the same time.

Indebted to Wagner and indeed Strauss, the composer commented ‘apart from a mere handful of omissions and minor changes to the order of the scenes, I attempted to reproduce every detail in music. The three main characters are reflected by three themes in the manner of Wagnerian leitmotifs’ Completed in 1903, ‘Pelleas und Melisande’ represents the crowning glory of Schoenberg’s early period, and a turning point in his creative life. ‘When I woke up I heard a sound, it grew louder, I could no longer imagine myself in a dream, music was sounding, and what music! After it died away, R came in with the five children and put in to my hands the score of his ‘Symphonic Birthday Greeting’. Cosima Wagner writing in her diary on Christmas day 1870. Although it is a wonderful small scale chamber work, based on themes from the opera Siegfried, it is also a very cleverly construct piece, with effective motivic links which are developed, transformed and dissolved. After he had completed Parsifal, the composer intended to complete a series of one-movement symphonies (he started one of these in 1882) and it may be that the ‘Siegfried Idyll’ was a prototype for these projected works.