Schoenberg - Pelleas und Melisande; Erwartung

The Guardian 80

Sara Jakubiak/Bergen Philharmonic/Gardner
(Chandos)
Edward Gardner finds the links between Schoenberg’s early orchestral score and the paranoid musical expressionism of his later symphonic poem

No two works in Schoenberg’s output better illustrate the scale of the musical journey he undertook in the first decade of the 20th century than Pelleas und Melisande and Erwartung. Just six years separate the composition of his first score for full orchestra and his first venture into music theatre, yet the stylistic distance between them is vast. The symphonic poem, which follows the narrative of the same Maeterlinck play that provided the source for Debussy’s great opera just a few years earlier, is still informed by the language of late romanticism, and in its orchestral colouring especially, makes its debt to Richard Strauss obvious. In fact, Strauss had suggested the play to Schoenberg as a subject when the two composers met in Berlin in the winter of 1901. Erwartung, on the other hand, is often seen as the epitome of musical expressionism, a psychological monodrama that depicts a woman in a nightmarish world of paranoia and rejection, which is mirrored in music from which almost all the old certainties of tonality have leached away.