SCHOENBERG: Pelleas und Melisande; Verklärte Nacht – NBC Symphony Orchestra, with Leopold Stokowski, Erich Leinsdorf conducting – Pristine Audio PASC 724 (66:50) [www.pristineclassical.com] *****
In honor of Arnold Schoenberg‘s 150th birthday, Arnold Rose has resurrected two extremely rare NBC Symphony broadcasts, both indicative of the composer’s youthful (tonal) style, much influenced by Richard Wagner and late 19th Century, German chromatic harmony. In his accompanying note, Andrew Rose provides the background for the reissue: the 1941 season had seen the departure of Arturo Toscanini, and the concert season was to extend to only 60 performances of one hour’s duration. The venue, utilized on Tuesdays rather than Saturdays, shifted from Studio 8-H at Radio City to the Cosmopolitan Opera House, where the audience would pay entrance fees. ohis concerts on the hour but extended them; in the case of Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande (4 November 1941), he invited the audience to remain for what Stokowski deemed “the rehearsal.” The tape masters continued to record the session for posterity, though it is only here, some 83 years later, that the performance, assisted by some edits, re-emerges.
Akin to several of his musical contemporaries, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) felt a strong correlation between literature and music, a trend set forth by Robert Schumann and a host of Romantic composers. Inversely, Romantic music inspired by Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1892 Symbolist drama Pelléas et Mélisande. Maeterlinck’s plot echoes Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde in several thematic aspects: illicit love and death occur within the confines of an ancient castle in the legendary kingdom of Allemonde: a woman of mysterious origins is pursued by two half-brothers, Pelléas and Golaud; fratricide at the discovery of Pelléas’ avowal of love for his brother’s wife; the birth of Mélisande’s child by Pelleas; and the death of Mélisande of a broken heart.
Arnold Schoenberg took up the project of orchestrating Maeterlinck’s drama at the suggestion of admired role model Richard Strauss. Conceived as an uninterrupted symphonic poem, Schoenberg’s 1902-03 epic sets the drama in eleven scenes in the richly chromatic context of post-Wagner, leitmotivic harmony, the key of D minor – the same tonality that inhabits the equally expressive 1899 string sextet Verklaerte Nacht – unfolding in sonata form appropriate to a through-composed symphony in four movements, rich in dense, contrapuntal texture. Following Franz Liszt’s example of thematic transformation of an original ground-motif, Schoenberg invests instrumental colors to define his three characters and symbolic actions or affects, such as Love, Jealousy, Fate, and Death. The virtuosity of instrumentation makes itself felt in enraptured moments, like the use of trombone glissandos. Structurally, the last scene recapitulates the opening motifs and Love music, with a kind of epilogue in response to Mélisande’s death. The innate glamour of Schoenberg’s rich orchestral tapestry obviously appealed to Stokowski’s visceral attraction to instrumental colors and sonic effects, and his realization gleaned from attendant critic Olin Downes the remark, “one of the best performances of the evening.”
Schoenberg created an original form, a “program chamber music sextet,” in his 1899 “Transfigured Night,” taken from the 1896 poem of Richard Dehmel. Schoenberg re-worked his score in 1917, converting it to a full string orchestra, the version which has produced stunning documentation in recordings by Mitropoulos, Stokowski, and Horenstein. The Erich Leinsdorf performance preserved here dates from 14 November 1962, with the BSO strings in sonic splendor.
In the poem’s five stanzas, Dehmel recounts a moonlit night in which a couple, a man and a woman, converse while walking. The woman confesses to her pregnancy by another man, her guilt and shame having destroyed any possibility for her happiness. The man, however, embraces her situation as a means of mutual redemption, and the affirmation of life without moral recriminations. Schoenberg fashions a through-composed tone-poem, whose ground motif infuses and transforms the course of emotional upheavals and modulations of the characters. The grim D minor of the opening Grave will eventually become a luminescent D major, aglow with mercy and the transformative power of forgiveness. The contours of the music first reflect inner darkness and emotional hysteria, virtual paroxysms of despair, But with the consolation offered in the fourth section, Adagio, the character of the music assumes a diaphanous transparency, marked by an upward scale swathed in soft arpeggios. The prior, tormented passions replay inverted, seeking upward for salvation. With the closing coda, we feel the ineffable embrace of mutual faith, as expressed in the lines of Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” that we must “be true to one another.” The audience applause certifies the critical remark that Schoenberg’s counterpoint “was as clear as glass.”
Highly recommended.
—Gary Lemco
Schoenberg – Unheard Recordings – NBC Symphony
Pelleas und Melisande, Op. 5
Leopold Stokowski, conducting
Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4
Erich Leinsdorf, conducting
From Pristine Audio, historic recordings of Arnold Schoenberg “Verklärte Nacht” and “Pelleas und Melisande”. Classical Music Review by Gary Lemco.