The OSM begins its 2024-2025 season with the Gurre-Lieder by Arnold Schoenberg. The project is titanic, fascinating, and the composer’s name should not dissuade music lovers from trying a rare and precious experience.
This fall we are celebrating the 150the anniversary of the birth, on September 13, 1874, in Vienna, of Schoenberg. The composer has, in a way, bad press among many music lovers lulled by the harmonies of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, stars of the “First Vienna School”.
This is because Schoenberg embodies, with his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern, what is called the “Second Viennese School”. As such, he is seen as the father and leader of a movement that led to dodecaphony, atonality and serialism, in short to everything that, to simplify a little, leads to conceiving or experiencing music with the head rather than with the heart… the comparison of the Violin Concerto Schoenberg’s, at least cerebral, with that of Berg, oh so symbolic, even sensual, showing the limits of schematization.
A laboratory
THE Gurre-Lieder, in three parts, are a fascinating score in themselves, but also because their orchestration is spread out over time. Their presentation at this stage of the collaboration between Rafael Payare and the OSM makes sense, because the conductor and the Orchestra met with The Transfigured Night by Schoenberg and that they have just recorded this last work with the symphonic poem Pelléas and Mélisandea record to be released at the end of October by Pentatone.
Or Schoenberg composed precisely the Gurre-Lieder between The Transfigured Night And Pelléas and Mélisande in the years 1900-1901. We are at the time of the 4e Symphony by Gustav Mahler or Pelléas and Mélisande of Debussy, and Schoenberg was not yet the theoretician of a new music, but a post-romantic expressionist.
What makes Gurre-Lieder a fascinating laboratory, is that the first two parts were orchestrated from the outset and the third and last was orchestrated in 1910-1911. Schoenberg assumed the evolution in his work: “Part 3 […] is of an instrumental style other than the 1D and 2e parties. I had no intention of hiding it, quite the contrary.
The history of Gurre-Lieder is that of a medieval Nordic legend. A king, Waldemar, is in love with Tove, for whom he has built the castle of Gurre. The queen has Tove assassinated (part I) and Waldemar rebels against God (part II). Waldemar and his vassals are transformed into ghosts for having blasphemed. They set out to storm the sky. At dawn, the choir sings an ode to the sun that regenerates life.
Immensity
This plot allows Schoenberg to mix the themes of passionate but impossible love, of revolt against divine injustice, of death, of eternal wandering, of terror (cf. the hunt in the third part), to end with a great pantheistic hymn to nature.
Attend a performance of the Gurre-Lieder Schoenberg’s Theodore Roosevelt is an event in the life of a music lover, because the opulence of the sound means is unique. The score theoretically requires five soloists, three 4-part male choirs, an 8-part mixed choir and a gigantic orchestra with 10 horns, 6 trumpets, 6 timpani, 4 small flutes, 4 large flutes, 4 harps and the rest to match. The OSM promises us the presence of 350 artists on stage to serve a score that is reminiscent of Wagner in the musical management of the narration (leitmotif), by Strauss for certain colors and by Mahler for the hymnic and incantatory aspect.
When Charles Dutoit presented the Gurre-Lieder in Montreal in 1986, for its 50th anniversary and its 10 years of presence in Montreal, it was then the Canadian premiere of this composition created in 1913! Kent Nagano had insisted on conducting the Gurre-Lieder very (too) early in his mandate, in 2006. A concert that did not make history.
THE Gurre-Lieder offer three major interpretative paths: full-on Wagnerization (Riccardo Chailly’s choice), opulent spectacle (Seiji Ozawa or Claudio Abbado), and sharpened play on cooler colors (Kubelik, Ferencsik). Another choice to be made: should we clearly differentiate the color spectrum of parts I and III or create as much continuity as possible? We will be paying close attention, on Wednesday and Friday, to the choices of Rafael Payare, who has so far proven himself to be a passionate interpreter of Schoenberg’s works from this period.