Pelleas und Melisande, Op. 5

Program notes

About the Work

Schoenberg was in his late twenties and living in Berlin when he wrote Pelleas und Melisande, between 1902 and February 1903. It was his first completed work for orchestra. The subject came from Richard Strauss, who pointed the younger man towards Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande, first staged in 1893. Schoenberg did not know that Debussy’s opera on the same play was about to reach the stage in Paris.

His first thought was also an opera. He gave it up for a symphonic poem, the form Strauss had cultivated in Don Juan and Ein Heldenleben, and later claimed to regret the decision a little: “It would have differed from Debussy’s. I might have missed the wonderful aura of the poem; but I might have made my characters more singing.” He also saw what he had gained. The symphonic poem, he said, “taught me to express my characters in precisely formulated units.”

Maeterlinck’s story is simple and dark. Prince Golaud finds Melisande weeping in a forest and marries her. She and his younger half-brother Pelleas are drawn to each other; Golaud, consumed by jealousy, kills Pelleas, and Melisande dies soon afterwards. Schoenberg set out to follow the play closely, and wrote that apart from a few omissions and small changes of order he had tried to reflect every detail.

He conducted the first performance himself in the Vienna Musikverein on 25 January 1905 (a few sources give the 26th). According to the Arnold Schönberg Center it was also his debut as a conductor. It went badly. “The first performance, 1905 in Vienna, under my own direction, provoked great riots among the audience and even the critics,” he remembered. “Reviews were unusually violent and one of the critics suggested putting me in an asylum and keeping music paper out of my reach.” Opinion changed within a few years, and the piece is now one of the more often played of his early scores.

The orchestra is very large, with eight horns, four trumpets, five trombones and a big woodwind section. The key is D minor, and the harmony, though still tonal, is stretched about as far as tonality will go. For listeners who know Schoenberg only as the inventor of twelve-tone music, the opulence of this score, with its debts to Wagner and Strauss, tends to come as a surprise. In these concerts it returns to the hall where it was first heard.

What to Listen For

The work plays without a break for a little over forty minutes. Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg showed that its four main sections correspond to the movements of a symphony, and that is the easiest way to keep your bearings.

First part: the forest. The quiet opening, in a swaying 12/8, belongs to Melisande; Schoenberg himself linked this motif to her. A short, ominous “fate” motif follows at once and will return at every turn of the story. Golaud’s theme is heard first in the horns. Pelleas arrives later with a youthful, knightly theme that is often given to the trumpet.

Scherzo. The music lightens for the scene at the fountain, where Melisande plays with her wedding ring and loses it. Schoenberg called this passage “the game with the ring”. Darker episodes follow before the music slows.

Slow movement. Schoenberg’s own list of landmarks for this part names “the scene with Melisande’s hair” and the love scene. It is the broad, passionate centre of the work, the lovers’ farewell, and it ends when Golaud kills Pelleas.

Finale. The themes of the opening come back in what Berg described as a recapitulation, and the love theme is recalled. Schoenberg’s summary of this last part names the dying Melisande, the entrance of the ladies in waiting and her death.