Gabriel Fauré
Pelléas et Mélisande Suite, op. 80
Pelléas et Mélisande, the drama by the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck, exerted an enormous influence on musicians throughout Europe in the years around the turn of the last century. It provided the subject for Claude Debussy’s striking and influential opera of the same title, and it engendered several orchestral works. The two most important of them are presented on this recording.
The story of Pelleas and Melisande is a dark romance. During a hunting trip, Prince Golaud comes upon a mysterious maiden, Melisande, alone in the wood. Moved by her vulnerability, he offers her the refuge of his ancestral castle and
his hand in marriage. Though she accepts this charity, Melisande finds a more sympathetic companion in Pelleas, Golaud’s young half brother. He returns her affection, and with mounting anguish Golaud observes their friendship grow into
a smoldering love. Inevitably, his jealousy leads to their deaths. Throughout the drama there are allusive references to a sunken crown and ring, a spinning wheel, and other symbols.
Gabriel Fauré composed incidental music to accompany a London production of the play in 1898. Because he had to supply the work on short notice, he wrote out the music—a song and a series of other pieces, some quite brief—in piano score and entrusted the instrumentation to his student Charles Koechlin, who arranged the piano draft for the small theater ensemble that would be on hand in London. Early in 1901, Fauré rescored three pieces from the incidental music for concert orchestra, in which form they were performed as a three-movement concert suite in Paris. In 1909 he added another movement to the work, orchestrating a Sicilienne that had previously been scored only for cello and piano. The resulting four-
movement suite received its premiere three years later.
The suite opens with music that Fauré used to preface the London production. Charles Koechlin observed that this prologue anticipates not so much the setting of the first scene as its spirit (“un état d’âme”), its legendary and timeless quality. An atmosphere of reverie prevails, broken only by a horn call announcing Golaud’s approach as the play begins. The second movement imagines Melisande at her
spinning wheel. Its whirring motion is depicted in rapid moto perpetuo figures in the strings, which the woodwinds answer with more sustained melodic ideas.
Next comes a Sicilienne, which Fauré had originally written in 1893 as part of music for another play, Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, then pressed into service to fill out the Pelléas et Mélisande incidental music. The buoyancy and wit of Molière’s comedy could hardly be farther removed from the dark symbolism of Pelléas.
Remarkably, however, the Sicilienne, with its vaguely antique melody unfolding over a rippling accompaniment in the harps, seems very much at home in its new
setting. Fauré then closes the suite with a beautiful elegy for Maeterlinck’s heroine, one that is all the more moving for its refinement and austerity.
Arnold Schoenberg
Pelléas und Mélisande, op. 5
Arnold Schoenberg’s symphonic poem Pelléas und Mélisande is an early work by this
provocative composer, and like his huge dramatic cantata Gurrelieder, it represents
an ultimate expression of late Romantic musical thinking. Its rich and far flung harmonies, programmatic structure, and use of a very large orchestra bespeak the influence of Mahler and, especially, Richard Strauss. Strauss, in fact, prompted the
work’s creation. Schoenberg had made that composer’s acquaintance in 1901 upon
moving to Berlin, where he had obtained work arranging and conducting music
in a popular theater. Strauss was at the time the director of the Berlin Court Opera and one of the most famous musicians of the day. Although his failure to understand
Schoenberg’s later compositions eventually led to a falling out between the two men,
relations between them initially were cordial. Strauss tried to help the impecunious Schoenberg obtain financial assistance, gave him work copying parts, and encouraged
his composing efforts. As the two grew more familiar, Schoenberg ventured to
seek advice about a subject for an opera. (One that pleased Strauss clearly stood a better chance of being accepted by the Court Theater.) Strauss recommended Maeterlinck’s drama.
Unaware of Debussy’s setting, which had just received its premiere in Paris, Schoenberg began writing an operatic version of Pelléas in the summer of 1902.
By autumn, however, he had abandoned this ambitious project and instead turned
his sketches into an elaborate tone poem, which he completed early in 1903.
Because of its length, its wealth of dramatic detail, and its association, in the manner of Wagner, of various musical themes with specific characters and situations in the play, Schoenberg’s composition has been described as an opera without stage action or voices. But Alban Berg, Schoenberg’s student, pointed out that the work’s structure
closely approximates that of a symphony, with the traditional four movements compressed into one. Each of these approaches has validity: the operatic perspective
underscores the music’s emotional immediacy and attention to dramatic details, whereas the symphonic one reveals its broad structure.
The initial measures, corresponding to the introduction of the first movement
in Berg’s symphonic scheme, set the tone of the work and present several of its
important melodic leitmotifs. Chief among those emblematic figures are one
associated with fate, sounded by a solo clarinet; a lyrical subject, announced by the oboe, representing Melisande, the drama’s tragic heroine; and the theme of Prince Golaud, heard in the horn. A variant of Golaud’s theme, signifying his winning of
Melisande and their marriage, then swells ardently in the strings and, soon, through
the entire orchestra. A brief and ominous appearance of the fate motif cuts short this music and leads to the theme of Pelleas, first heard in the trumpet and described
by Schoenberg as being “youthful and knightly in character.”
The second “movement” begins with a brightly orchestrated scherzo section meant to suggest Melisande sporting with Pelleas by a fountain. This blithe music, however, is abruptly pushed aside by an angular figure in the brass signifying Golaud’s jealousy. At once the marriage theme reasserts itself, and the fate motif also
appears in the passage that follows. A second episode presents Melisande at her window, letting down her hair as Pelleas passes. Beginning with an atmospheric circling of flutes and clarinets in close echo, this section also culminates with a climactic appearance of the jealousy motif in the brass. Almost at once Schoenberg transports us to the subterranean grotto, where Golaud’s warning to Pelleas sounds in threatening tones.
The third part of the score (the “slow movement” of Berg’s symphonic conception)
depicts the final meeting of Pelleas and Melisande, their love now suggested by a new and warmly romantic melody assigned to the strings. Once again, however, the motif of jealousy appears, and a violent climax signifies Golaud’s murder of his young half brother.
The final portion of Pelléas und Mélisande gives us the denouement of the tragedy, beginning with a reprise of material heard in the opening section. Melisande on
her deathbed is poignantly portrayed, both the love theme and that of Golaud
playing significant roles. A final recollection of the fate motif brings the work to a stark conclusion.
Schoenberg recalled in 1949 that the first performance of Pelléas und Mélisande “provoked great riots among the audience and… critics.” Although probably an
exaggeration, his statement does reflect how bold the music’s harmonic idiom appeared in 1905. This may seem surprising today, when we cannot but hear the music in the context of the far more radical works Schoenberg later wrote. Yet the composer himself declared that the music of Pelléas und Mélisande embodies “many features that contributed towards building up the style of my maturity.” The piece is,
in other words, an important link between the sound world of the late Romantics and the quite modern musical terrain into which Schoenberg soon would venture.
Paul Schiavo © 2008
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