With Halloween only days away, take a wild ride with the undead in Arnold Schoenberg’s opulent masterpiece “Gurrelieder.”
Jens Peter Jacobsen’s dramatic poem synthesizes Danish legends concerning the illicit love of King Waldemar for a beautiful maiden, Tove, and the vengeance of his wife, Queen Helwig. The King curses God for the loss of his beloved and is condemned to gallop, night after night, alongside a terrifying cohort of gibbering spirits.
The orchestra is enormous – with 25 woodwinds, 25 brass instruments, four harps, a celesta, and 16 different percussion instruments, including an iron chain – larger even than those of Gustav Mahler. The work sports no less than 35 major leitmotifs, and the length is comparable to Mahler’s Third Symphony.
Schoenberg conceived of “Gurrelieder” at the age of 26, in advance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and “Das Lied von der Erde.” The composer claims to have finished it, at least in short score, in 1901. However, financial need prevented him from completing the orchestration for Parts II & III until after Part I proved to be a mega-hit. It wasn’t until 1911 that “Gurrelieder” reached its final form.
By then, Schoenberg was over it. Like something a doomed king himself, already he was hurtling into freely atonal territory. Success had come too late for an artist who had suffered a decade’s worth of critical brickbats. He didn’t give a damn, even as Waldemar received one.
Prior to “Gurrelieder,” on today’s Noontime Concert, we’ll have chamber works by Ottorino Respighi and Ernest Chausson, as performed at the Lake George Music Festival. Enjoy Respighi’s rarely-heard Piano Quintet in F minor and Chausson’s Concert for Violin, Piano and String Quartet.
Then it’s a tale of love and death – and death and love – in 14th century Denmark. We’ll hear the whole damned thing, between 12 and 4 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
