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The
sensation of such soaring
sounds makes me want to swoon.
Anton Webern on the Gurrelider
This
work is the key to my whole
development. It shows me from
sides from which I later no
longer show myself or, if I do,
then on another basis. It
explains how everything was
bound to turn out later and -
something immensely important
for my work - that one can
follow the man and his
development from here on.” Like
so many of Schoenberg's other
comments on his works, these
lines from a letter of summer
1912, in which he urges his
publisher, Emil Hertzka, to
bring forward publication of the
Gurrelieder, can be read
on more than one level.
Superficially, his aim in
writing to Hertzka was to
promote a piece whose completion
he had put off for more than ten
years. In the longer term,
however, Schoenberg was pursuing
what a later age would call a
“marketing strategy”: “Even
greater than the harm that I
would suffer through lack of
performances and sales is the
harm it would mean for my other
works if I were to be deprived
of the great success that I
fully expect the Gurrelieder
will be. I am certain that the
success of this work will be
enornously beneficial to the
spread of my other works.”
Schoenberg’s situation at this
time makes it understandable
that he should have held out his
Gurrelieder as a means of
advertising his works in
general: since 1907,
performances of his other
compositions had invariably
resulted in near riots in
Vienna’s conservative musical
world, whereas the first part of
the Gurrelieder had gone
down relatively well when first
performed in a piano arrangement
in 1910. When the work was heard
for the first time in its
entirety at the Vienna
Musikverein on 23 February 1913,
its success with audience and
critics alike was so
overwhelming that the composers
pupil, Anton Webern, was moved
to write to him: “What a moment
in my life. Unforgettable [...],
that I was allowed to live to
see the moment when your fellow
creatures recognised your
greatness without reservation,
perhaps for the first time.”
Throughout his life,
Schoenberg's public isolation
obliged him to justify every
stage in his compositional
development. But for the Gurrelieder
to be classified as an artistic
“success” was subsequently to
prove a drawback rather than an
advantage. Schoenberg himself
later felt that his main
achievement lay in the fact
that, with his twelve-note
technique, he had discovered a
“new sense of order” in the
apparent “chaos” of atonality,
with the result that he now
insisted that the Late Romantic
idiom of the Gurrelieder
was merely a preliminary stage
in his development. Looking back
on the work from the
vantage-point of 1951, he sought
to explain his reasons for
delaying completion of the
piece, the bulk of which had
been written in 1900/01, only
for it then to be set aside and
not finished until 1911: “I had
also gained many new
experiences, my technique had
improved and my range of
expression increased. [...] I
had discovered new things and
understood how to formulate my
ideas better. [...] As a result,
I had lost interest in the Gurrelider.”
The avant-garde movement of the
post-war period echoed this
assessment and identified
Schoenberg primarily as a
composer of twelve-note music.
Typical of attitudes in the
years after 1945 is an entry in
Fasquelle's Encyclopedia de
la musique of 1958-61, in
which the composer and conductor
Pierre Boulez dismisses the Gurrelieder
as a piece that “clearly does
not yet allow us to pass
judgement on Schoenberg's real
talent: the work can easily be
set alongside comparable scores
by Richard Strauss and the
bombastic excesses of Strauss’s
world of ideas”.
In an age when reductionism and
succinctness were regarded as
compositional ideals, the length
of the work and the vast
resources for which it is scored
(resources that place in the
shade contemporary pieces by
Mahler and Strauss) were bound
to seem a stumbling-block.
Although Boulez later revised
his opinion, he tended at this
date to judge the Gurrelieder
from the standpoint of the
serial composer, complaining
that Schoenberg had “unduly
inflated the Romantic orchestral
idiom, in which mass effects
play a preponderant role; Mahler
had already embarked on this
course with a kind of Romantic
abandon that culminates in
Baroque exuberance”.
With the passage of time,
it is now possible to take a
somewhat less dogmatic view of
Schoenberg's works- In
conversation with the present
author Giuseppe Sinopoli stated
that he regards the size of the
forces involved not as a mere
decorative adjunct or “Baroque”
flourish but as the piece's
actual essence: “In the case of
both Schoenberg and Strauss,
these vast forces reveal a very
real need to treat the medium as
the message. The actual sound
expresses a complex,
multilayered psychology and thus
reflects people’s fragile,
conflictual, psychodynamic
feelings at that time.
Hofmannsthal, Freud, Schoenberg
and the rest of them all sounded
out their age, an age in which
interest had shifted from an
intellectual understanding of
the world to a psychological
system; and the expressive means
that most closely corresponded
to this psychological system in
music was not rhythm or thematic
writing but timbre, the whole
orchestral palette.” Schoenberg
uses this palette to produce
extraordinarily subtle shades of
tonal colour, so that, for
Sinopoli, what is important is
not bombastic mass effects but
“translucency and lightness of
sound. The Dresden Staatskapelle
can look back on a long
tradition of performing
Strauss’s operas, with the
result that they are able to
combine this transparency and
precision with a specific beauty
of sound and phrasing. Thanks to
this experience, this orchestra
seems to me ideal for performing
world by the Viennese School,
especially Schoenberg’s early,
so-called post-Romantic works.”
Sinopoli sees in this blend of
beauty and transparency the
expression of a general feeling
shared by all who were alive at
the turn of the century. “The
Viennese School is the last
radiant dusk of the 19th
century, not the dawn of New
Music. It was an age marked by a
sense of loss, the loss of a
tradition and of a view of the
world, and by the collapse of
ideals. And Schoenberg
translates this sense of
collapse into thoroughly
instinctive, expressionistic
terms by attacking the language
of tradition in parts, treating
it almost as rubbish, tearing it
apart, breathing new life into
it, reworking it and, in that
way, creating a vision.” The
diversified language of the Gurrelieder
combines elements of a song
cycle and dramatic oratorio with
ballads and a melodrama, and in
that way produces a formal ideal
that sets little store by
integrated unity; “It still
seems an a priori requirement
that homogeneity should be a
basic principle of both
composition and interpretation.
But it is very much the
stylistic variety of the Gurrelieder
that constitutes the piece’s
novelty a variety moreover, that
is bound up with the text on
which it is based.”
In
this respect the Gurrelieder
may perhaps be reinterpreted,
from a biographical point of
view, as a key work in
Schoenberg’s œuvre and
as the expression of a
longed-for creation myth enacted
against the background of the
loss of traditional values.
Forrnally speaking, it depicts
progressive stages in a changing
concept of art: the orchestral
introduction portrays the onset
of night, its fluttering
arpeggios describing a triad of
E flat major (with added sixth)
and thereby evoking a conscious
allusion to the prelude to
Wagner's Das Rheingold,
a prelude which, also in E flat
major, was intended by Wagner to
portray themusical origin of
things. The opening pages of
Schoenberg's score thus acquire
a symbolic force, with the
music’s gradual downward sweep
contrasting with Wagner's
ascending line and so reversing
the symbols meaning. The idea of
the Romantic art song as a
subjective expression of human
emotions still appears largely
intact in Part I, where it is
realised with often
folksong-like naïveté, as in
Waldemar's love song, “Never
have angels danced”.
With Tove’s death, the subject
vanishes: while the loving woman
returns as an image of idealised
Nature (“With Tove’s voice
whispers the wood”), the lyrical
self no longer figures as a
sentient human being in the
depiction of nature in the
melodrama, “Sir Goosefoot”,
but as the “mouthpiece of things”,
which is how Schoenberg saw
himself as an artist. In this
way, what Sinopoli terms the “honest,
almost naïve enthusiasm” of the
final hymn to the sun, with its
radiant C major, becomes the
programmatical expression of a
sunrise which, as Schoenberg
wrote in 1957, offers “the
promise of a new day of sunlight
in music such as I would like to
offer to the world”.
An aura of tourist
lyrics lies over Gurre's
meadows: What man is meant to
feel here he knows from the
famous songs.
Jens
Peter Jacobsen on his Gurrelieder
The
cycle of legends surrounding
King Waldemar, his young lover,
Tove, and her ultimate death at
the hands of his jealous queen
was so popular in 19th-century
Denmark that the Danish poet
Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-85)
initially wanted to publish his
1869 cycle of poems on the
subject with an introduction
designed to place an ironical
distance between himself and the
work. The subject had been
treated by countless Dansh
Romantic poets, the castle ruins
at Gurre had been excavated as a
tourist attraction in 1835 and a
preservation order placed on
them. The medieval legend has
survived in different versions,
with a link being forged between
the 14th-century King Valdemar
IV (“Atterdag”), who lived at
Castle Gurre in the northern
part of Zealand, and the
12th-century King Valdemar I
(“the Great”), who is said to
have loved a young woman by the
name of Tove. Only later did
this tale become associated with
the legend of the “Wild Hunt”,
according to which the dead King
Waldemar is forced to wander
restlessly, at night following
his blasphemous outcry against
God.
So familiar was the subject that
Jacobsen was able to dispense
with an epic account of the
action. Instead, the opening
section - the actual love story
- consists of a series of
lyrical monologues, the
impressions and visions of which
afford only the merest glimpse
of the underlying action. Night
has already fallen when Waldemar
arrives on horseback at Castle
Gurre, where his lover, Tove, is
impatiently awaiting him.
Midnight strikes as they
consummate their love: “Swelling
to life, there now streams down
upon me / a purple rain of
burning kisses.” The dream of
union is associated with the
idea of transience, a transience
that Waldemar fears but Tove
longs for: “So let us drain our
golden goblets in a toast to
him, / mighty, adorning Death.”
Toves murder at the hands of
Queen Helwig and the king's
cortège are merely hinted at in
the lament of the Wood Dove
(“Helwigs falcon / ’twas, that
cruelly has slaughtered / Gurres
dove”). The brief second section
is given over entirely to
Waldemar's outburst against God
and is followed, in the opening
section of Part III, by a
description of the dead riding
abroad to the castle at Gurre,
with the “Wild Hunt” of Waldemar
and his vassals viewed from
different standpoints to create
a sense of distance. Waldemar's
threat to be avenged if God
seeks to part his soul from Tove
(“I shall gain the strength / to
crush your angel guard, / and
barge with my wild huntsmen /
into heaven”) has an ironical
counterpart in the song of Klaus
the Jester, who feels it to be
unjust that he should be forced
to join the nightly throng of
haunted souls: “Then I must
surely enter into heavens
grace... / forsooth, and then
may God have mercy on Himself.”
In much the same way, Waldemar's
pantheistic vision, with its
Romantic anthropomorphisation of
Nature (“With Toves voice
whispers the wood”), acquires a
ridiculous pendant when the
Peasant pulls his blanket over
his head in his terror at
hearing the clattering sound of
dead men riding past: “So I am
protected from phantoms of
night, from the darts of elves
and the menace of trolls.” The
final section, “The Wild Hunt of
the Summer Wind”,
describes the resurrection of
Nature in the daily and annual
cycle: as the plants and small
animals stir unceasingly in the
morning dew the wind in the
withered leaves vainly seeks
“springs blossoming verges blue
and white”, before whirling
upward into the treetops, from
where it can see the “slender
beauties” return
to life. In his lovingly
detailed description, Jacobsen
proves a keenly observant
natural scientist profoundly
influenced by contemporary
speculations on the inner life
of plants. It comes as no
surprise to learn that he
studied botany in Copenhagen and
published an essay On
Movement in the Plant World.
The cycle of poems ends with a
hymnic greeting to the rising
sun as a symbol of renewal.
Corinna
Hesse
(Translation:
Stewart Spencer)
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