FringeReview UK 2024
BBC Prom 5 Schoenberg and Zemlinsky
BBC Proms
Genre: Live Music
Venue: Royal Albert Hall, Kensington
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
A magnificent evening and one to replay on BBC Sounds.
The BBC National Orchestra of Wales under its principal conductor Ryan Bancroft perform BBC Prom 5 Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Melisande Op 5, and Zemlinsky’s The Mermaid.
Review
Nearly 120 years after these two works were premiered together in 1905, the very name of one composer is sufficient to scare away enough prommers to make this the thinnest-attended Prom I can remember in years. Hopefully some will be won over with the broadcast.
The BBC National Orchestra of Wales under its principal conductor Ryan Bancroft perform BBC Prom 5 Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Melisande Op 5, and Zemlinsky’s The Mermaid. Both date from 1902-03, both are symphonic poems lasting for 45 and 40 minutes respectively, though the Zemlinsky is in three separate movement.
Zemlinsky later withdrew his work, partly out of feeling Schoenberg’s was the finer score; and it lay unperformed till resuscitated in 1984. Its UK premiere was only in 1987. And only in 2013 did musicologist an biographer Anthony Beaumont manage to add lost parts in a new critical edition. Now both works are equally enjoyed and performed.
Zemlinsky’s work was warmly received and you wonder at his self-defeating lack of confidence at his (now) most popular score. By contrast Schoenberg’s amused comment still finds resonance now: “One of the critics suggested that I be put into an asylum, with music paper kept out of my reach.”
But surely not now for this post-Wagnerian, Strauss-infused early masterpiece. This Maurice Maeterlink symbolist fairytale from 1892 that inspired Fauré (1898), Sibelius (1905 too) and Debussy (1902) – Schoenberg was going to write an opera (now that would have been something) till he found out about Debussy’s long-delayed work.
Themed with a tritone, the backbone of that motif’s appearance is brassed out in the menacing Golaud theme, the king who finds a waif princess in his forest and marries her, only for her to fall for his younger half-brother: result, tragedy. Schoenberg tells it graphically enough but like Zemlinksy suppressed programme details.
The striking power of this work lies in memorable themes morphing and writhing in and out with sexual desire, post-Wagnerian anxiety and fin-de-siecle decadence. The tritone ABA heaves in and out, sometimes coming up for air, and the delight as Pelleas winds Melisande’s hair around his head as she lets it down. There’s dazzle too, and hope; but overall it’s Golaud’s orchestra. It’s still a work to listen to again and again. The thematic and musical resolution – sadly opening the windows for departed souls perhaps – lets in a chill radiance.
Bancroft, energetically gesticulating, marshals long symphonic form with bravura and energy. The Welsh brass (nine horns, four trumpets, five trombones and tuba) are particularly in evidence and can swamp the strings.
Zemlinsky presents fewer problems. The Anderson fairy-tale is mainly told in the first section, as the mermaid agrees to human shape on various conditions only to find the lover faithless and she (by becoming human) being mute to explain anything save sexual attraction. Bancroft whips up a tremendous central scherzo movement, the wedding, with its feast of lighter colours and violin solos led by Lesley Hatfield. Zemlinsky’s orchestral palette is always attractive, airier in texture than the magnificently focused Schoenberg. You can tell too he’s a born opera composer, and his operas are belatedly beginning to emerge in opera houses too with less apology.
Zemlinsky’s great descending theme for the Mermaid is as memorable as anything in the Schoenberg: lighter too, and more immediately attractive. His trouble is maintaining quite such a grip on the orchestral proceedings, particularly in evidence in the first half of the final movement.
Zemlinsky later taught Korngold (and the young Alma Schindler, from whom this work was a kind of exorcism) and was always an orchestral master. His themes though, in some cases going chromatically beyond even Schoenberg at this point, can be opaque.
There’s clumps of undigested post-Wagnerisms, not thematically quite as distinguished as most of this work (still a masterpiece, no question) that makes it less easy to follow at brief intervals.
Happily the lighter texture, the delicious violin and other solos, the pictorial elements, render this a delight. The discrete movements allow a rest too.
The impending cataclysms though abide. A magnificent evening and one to replay on BBC Sounds.
