Farewell, Romanticism

At the turn of the century, a 26-year-old song tinkerer in Vienna wrote a gigantic cantata that profoundly impressed an already influential German composer, Richard Strauss. To Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg's Gurrelieder heralded a new flowering of post-Wagnerian romanticism. But the work was, in fact, only a massive monument to a musical tradition about to decay. After it, Schoenberg was to begin the experiments with atonalism that eventually determined the direction of 20th century music. Once popular in Germany, Gurrelieder had its U.S. premiere under Leopold Stokowski in 1932, has rarely been performed since. Last week at Carnegie Hall, still on the crutches he has used since he broke his hip, Stokowski conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in a fine performance of Schoenberg's fascinating failure.

Originally, Schoenberg scored Gurrelieder for four choruses, five solo voices, and a greatly augmented orchestra, including four harps and a celesta (in last week's performance, Stokowski managed with a standard-sized orchestra and only one choir). All this musical effort supports a series of songs linked by orchestral interludes and based on a medieval Danish story somewhat similar to the Tristan and Isolde legend. King Waldemar has married for political reasons but continues to pine for the Princess Tove. to whom he has presented his castle at Gurre. Tove is put to death by the queen, and Waldemar, as punishment for blaspheming against the gods in his grief, is condemned to ride nightly across the skies in a Wilde Jagd (wild hunt).

In its heaving harmonies, its breast-beating emotionalism, its air of Teutonic mysticism, Gurrelieder has no style of its own, is almost a parody of the musical philosophy that Richard Wagner imposed upon whole generations and that survived in the more grandiose visions of Strauss and Gustav Mahler. Nevertheless, the composition is well worth an occasional hearing, if only because it preserves in a curiously suspended state all of the conventions of romanticism. At the end, the chorus launches into a hymn to the returning sun, with its suggestion of resurrection. A musical resurrection was certainly on the way when the work was written, but even Composer Arnold Schoenberg did not know at the time what it was to be. After Gurrelieder, the road led on to the forbidding atonal shrieks of Moses und Aron.

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