 | This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from June 7, 2013. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/Pcast108 |
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This week’s throwback montage dates back a few years, as the original
commentary is in a bilingual format. The prevailing theme is music inspired by
Maurice Maeterlinck‘s 1893 symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande
about the forbidden, doomed love of the title characters.
Maeterlinck had studied Pythagorean metaphysics and believed that human
action was guided by Eros (love/sterility) and Anteros (revenge/chaos). The
juxtaposition of these two forces brings about a never-ending cycle of calm
followed by discord and then change. Pelléas and Mélisande are so much in love
that they disregard the value of marriage, provoking the ire of Anteros, who
brings revenge and death, which restores order.
The selections retained in this montage feature three specific musical
settings – Debussy’s setting is a full-length opera, musical highlights of
which Marius Constant repurposed as a symphony. Arnold Schoenberg proposes a
tone poem reminiscent of how Liszt and Tchaikovsky conjured Shakespeare, Goethe
and Dante to create narratives of light and darkness. This early tonal piece by
Schoenberg is more cosely aligned to his Transfigured Night than with his later
atonal output.
In 1898, Gabriel Fauré had written incidental music for performances of
the play in London and asked Charles Koechlin to orchestrate it, from which he
later extracted the suite featured this week.
Jean Sibelius also wrote incidental music for the play in 1905, which
was featured in a separate montage. As filer this week, a performance of
Sibelius’ suite from the incidental music, performed by the Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham.
I think you will (still) love this music too.
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