Arnold Schoenberg was born on September 13, 1874. This means that, a little less than two months ago marked the 150th anniversary of his birth. Sadly, this passed, for the most part, with little (if any) notice. The only sign of attention seems to have come from Pentatone, which announced the “forthcoming” release of a commemorative (of sorts) album. “Forthcoming” means that the album is scheduled for one week from today. However, Amazon.com has already created a Web page which will accept pre-orders.
Conductor Rafael Payare on the cover of the album being discussed (from the Amazon.com Web page)
That album consisted of two performances by the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal led by its Music Director Rafael Payare. Considering the many stages in Schoenberg’s life in which he explored imaginatively different approaches to composition, this “commemorative” album confined itself to the first of the composer’s three principal explorations. This was the period in which Schoenberg took the sprawling expressionism of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler as a point of departure and decided to distill it into shorter (and, therefore, more intense) durations.
Payare selected two of those “distillations” for his album. The better known of them is the Opus 4 “Verklärte Nacht” (transfigured night), a tone poem composed in 1899, first conceived as a string sextet, which was then “extended” into a full string orchestra. The composition took its title from a poem of the same name by Richard Dehmel. This involves a man and woman in a dark forest lit only by the moon. She confesses that she is carrying the child of a previous lover; but her new companion is sympathetic, vowing to treat the child as his own. The nighttime setting is thus “transfigured” as is expressed in the final line of the poem, whose English translation is “Two people walk on through the high, bright night.”
I suspect that many listeners know Schoenberg only through this one composition. It was followed by the Opus 5 tone poem “Pelleas und Melisande,” whose narrative is based on the full-length play Pelléas and Mélisande by Maurice Maeterlinck. When Schoenberg began work on this piece in 1902, he was unaware that Debussy was composing an opera based on Maeterlinck’s play.
If the protagonists in “Verklärte Nacht” advance into a “high, bright night,” the “Pelleas” narrative is an unremitting descent into darkness that concludes with Melisande’s death. In Opus 5 Schoenberg departs from the usual path of a narrative with thematic progressions that “stray from the path” and wander into ambiguity. While the ambiguity of the narrative is resolved when Melisande dies, the “thematic defocusing” persists in the music.
My guess is that Opus 5 took a lot out of Schoenberg. I would further guess that many listeners come away from the experience with the same feeling. That may explain why, on this new Pentatone album, Payare decided to have Opus 5 precede Opus 4. Opus 5 is the more unsettling of the two, both in narrative and in the ambiguous harmonic progressions. Perhaps because it is more familiar to more listeners, Opus 4 is there to “smooth things out” after all that ambiguity in both music and narrative.
On the personal side, however, I think that, in spite of my interest in Schoenberg’s music from all of his periods, this was my first encounter with Opus 5. As a result, it provided what amounted to “a new light” on the composer’s earliest published efforts. I salute Payare for selecting his for this “anniversary” album; but I must confess to being more than a little disappointed that other albums have not emerged reflecting the other stages in Schoenberg’s journey as a composer.
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