the Gurre-Lieder project

a presentation of Arnold Schönberg's early masterpiece

last offered: sunday, june 8, 2003, 2:15 pm
next presentation TBA

Arnold Schönberg's Gurre-Lieder (Songs of Gurre) is not only one of the greatest of all large-scale works for voices and orchestra, it may be the greatest artistic critique of Romanticism in existence. Besides, I'm obsessed with this dang piece. There's nothing like it in the history of music.

A song cycle for solo singers and a speaking part, accompanied by the largest orchestra ever called for in one place, along with a huge eight-part mixed chorus and three full four-part men's choruses, this immense work is nevertheless extraordinarily delicate in handling the gigantic forces involved. The settings of poems by Danish poet Jens-Peter Jakobsen tell a mediaeval Danish legend that has been described as part Tristan and Isolde and part Flying Dutchman. Huge, passionate, erotic, dreamlike, macabre, humorous, deeply thoughtful, spiritually sensitive, it takes a step beyond the musical language of Wagner as large as that taken by Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, and Strauss, in a direction entirely Schönberg's own.

This is an opportunity to get to know the work under what I hope are near-ideal conditions. I'll introduce the work with a brief multimedia (gads I hate that word) presentation, and we'll hear a superb recorded performance, with simultaneous text and translation on-screen, so you can experience the drama unfolding in real time.