Pelleas und Melisande

The orchestral symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande, completed in 1903, was one of the young Schoenberg’s major achievements. The work represents a pinnacle of his late-Romantic style, before this developed into the musical modernism for which Schoenberg was to become famous (and notorious). The play on which it is based, Pelleas und Melisande by the Belgian dramatist Maurice Materlinck, was first performed in 1893. A tragic love story, it is set in an unspecified place and time (resembling medieval-style fairyland), and was widely admired for its tone of elusive emotion, and restrained yet intense atmosphere. Composers drawn to respond musically to those qualities were Debussy (with his only completed opera), and Fauré and Sibelius (each with incidental theatre music). Schoenberg’s hyper-intense and strongly chromatic idiom produced a very different kind of work—a large-scale, single-movement symphonic poem, demonstrating its composer’s superlative technical command of a very large orchestra. Spectacularly adventurous moments include a passage depicting stagnant pools of water in the subterranean vaults of a castle; here, probably for the first time in the classical symphony orchestra, the trombones play glissando (sliding) effects. Schoenberg himself conducted the work’s premiere, in his native Vienna in 1905. Conservatively minded members of the audience, bewildered by the music’s dense and complex technical workings and unsettled by its flaring intensity, resorted to hissing through much of the performance. Today, Pelleas und Melisande is regularly performed by major orchestras, and is considered a late-Romantic masterpiece.