Schoenberg - Pelleas und Melisande (1903)
I’ve been meaning to write about this piece for a long time now. I was first inspired to write about it last year, but I put this post off for a few reasons. The more personal reason is because, at the time, my mental health was not doing well. Along with the typical anxieties and depressions of everyday life, I was also feeling insecure about my ability to write about music anymore and felt incompetent in maintaining this blog. I spent too much time drafting and revising and collecting quotes, trying to create something that is “perfect” and feeling like my writing wasn’t good enough. But the main reason this task seemed too daunting was that this music had already been a tough nut to crack for me as a listener. Somehow, I had found Schoenberg's more demanding or confounding music (Pierrot Lunaire, or the Piano Concerto) to be much more readily understandable to me than the music of this tone poem. Pelleas und Melisande, op.6, is one of his early pieces that, like Transfigured Night, is still in the language of late 19th century Wagnarian Romanticism. So why did I keep turning it off halfway, unable to follow along or digest it?
As summer melts into autumn and the leaves begin to turn and cool air, all my favorite autumn memories as a child come back to me...of jumping in leaf piles and seeing Halloween decorations everywhere; pumpkins, ghosts, witches and such. By coincidence, Schoenberg's birthday is September 13, part of this twilight of Summer as the season sunsets for the Autumn moon to rise. Likewise, I think of Pelleas und Melisande to be this twilight of Romanticism. Debussy had once commented that Wagner was “a glorious sunset mistaken for a dawn”, and I'm inclined to agree with his assessment of Wagner's legacy; not as becoming a new chapter in music, but rather bringing about the end of an old chapter to music. If so, then Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande is the epilogue to this Old Chapter… It is the last 45 minutes of light and pinkish orange clouds after the sun has already vanished over the horizon, and the sky is turning darker and darker and the air becomes cold.
The subject matter comes from the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, who is apparently considered one of the more extremely difficult poets to read. This difficulty comes from love for ambiguity and understatement where most of the emotional expression is not what is being said but what is implied. Despite being based on Medievel Arthurian legend, this is a symbolist play and it was inspirational to different composers. Most notably, it inspired Debussy’s opera where his ‘impressionist’ style did not exist before and had in a way come off as a revolutionary work to young French composers. Schoenberg was also inspired to write it as an opera at first, but he ultimately settled on the tone poem. He had no idea that Debussy was writing from the same source material at the same time. It is interesting to see the contrast between two different artists and their aesthetics on the same subject matter. Debussy’s emphasis is on ambiguity and nuances of the text, which was already his attitude toward writing music, and the opera’s score is very delicate and understated throughout. Schoenberg was more interested in the extremity of passion between the words, and his work in many ways is the opposite of the Debussy opera; it is boldly stated and very dense, and with a more traditional attitude toward introducing and developing motivic ideas.
Even though the orchestration and the harmonic language is following Wagner's footsteps, Schoenberg increases the intensity of expression with higher levels of dissonance, more and more notes to make chords even harsher, and as the piece develops, the music becomes more and more immense to where there are stretches that feel as if you are listening to blocks of sound without any tonality. Everything is so freely chromatic and the dissonances are so noisy where, even if there is a logical and coherent harmonic progression on paper, the audience cannot perceive tonal chords anymore. The piece’s construction is also looking back at Liszt’s works in cyclical forms and in the tone poems. Here the poem is written as one long sonata movement that can be subdivided into four movement-like sections with the first ‘movement’ also being in sonata form (this is the same double function form that Liszt uses to organize his famous Piano Sonata in b minor). As a tone poem depicting the drama, the opening “movement” is in the forest with the marriage between Golaud and Melisande, and then Pelleas and Melisande falling in love with each other. The next section depicts scenes by the palace fountain, in the castle tower, and the castle’s vaults. The “slow movement” depicts a love scene by the fountain, and then Pelleas’ death. The final section depicts Melisande’s grief, and then her death. Pelleas, Melisande, Golaud, and the concept of Fate, are each given leitmotifs that develop through the course of the music, again following the example conceptualized in Wagner’s operas. But even with the extra-musical program and more concrete aspects like character melodies and scenes, the extremity of the music is overwhelming enough to disorient the listener, and the oversaturation of notes and instrumental color show Schoenberg’s aesthetic interest moving toward the free atonality and “liberation of dissonance” that he is still infamous for today. Schoenberg is one of my favorite composers, but it is much easier to find people who absolutely hate him and his music than it is to find people who genuinely love him beyond passive respect or acknowledgment. I hope some day Schoenberg will be less offensive to people.
