Five Orchestral Pieces and Pelleas und Melisande in Full Score Review

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(More customer reviews)Of the two pieces reprinted from Universal and Peters respectively in this volume, it's the former - the tone poem "Pelléas und Mélisande" (Op.5), using the same subject matter as Debussy's opera - that's the more accessible.It follows logically upon "Verklärte Nacht" (Op.4) and "Gurrelieder" (no opus number) both in terms of Schönberg's evolution as a composer from his home-base of Late-Romanticism to Expressionism (a sort of intensified Romanticism) and also in terms of his gradual departure from tonality.This departure didn't happen overnight (though it still was quick! - from "Verklärte Nacht", which is still quite tonal although it modulates a lot, to the "Songs of the Book of the Hanging-Gardens", where complete atonality is achieved, it took only 7 years!).However, once it happened, he never (with one exception - that of a piece commissioned by a school orchestra in the USA) returned to any true sort of tonality.

This earlier piece is still tonal, but it already is more dissonant and less key-anchored compared to the other two works mentioned already, notably Part 1 of "Gurrelieder" (excluding the Song of the Wood-Dove) as well as "Verklärte Nacht".There are fewer traditional cadential-type passages - even at the ending one has no true "V-I" progression of any sort to establish the final d-minor key.Those that remain are ever-more overlaid with (chromatically-linked) dissonance and less pre-cadential preparation so as to make key-establishment less and less definitive (let alone secure!).[Even in the first two pages of the score one can't say that the tonality of d-minor is truly established at all!]

Apparently it was this element that excited Schönberg just as much as inverting the whole idea of music to emphasise dissonance over consonance:whereas the traditional idea is to resolve dissonances into consonances, atonality utterly reverses that flow (with Schönberg, even minor dissonances eventually resolve into stronger discords)!It is this very idea of in essence turning the entire concept of music upside-down that is the essence of such works as virtually everything after Opus 14.So it is with the Three Piano-Pieces of Opus 11, the "Songs of the Book of the Hanging-Gardens" (Opus 15), and - in our case - the Five Orchestral Pieces of Opus 16.Here not only any sort of consonance and tonality is utterly abrogated:the music becomes virtually athematic to boot...

[As a curiosity (if I recall correctly):when Opus 16 was published initially, it was suggested to Schönberg that the individual movements have titles bestowed on them (not given in this publication).The result are the following "non-titles":1) Vorgefuhle (Premonition);2) Vergangenes (What's Past);3) Sommerfarben (Summer-Colours);4) Peripetie (Perpetual-Motion?);5) das Obligate Rezitative (The Obligato Recitative).]

In all events, there's positively no better bargain in getting to know these pieces than to have this score, which reproduces the definitive editions of both pieces, in hand!!Most unreservedly recommended!!!

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Two works richly displaying use of the whole-tone scale and a continuously evolving melodic line without thematic reference.

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