Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
Gurre-Lieder
Although he began to compose in his seventh year,
Schoenberg produced little of real significance until
1897, when a String Quartet in D was successfully
premièred under the auspices of the Wiener
Tonkünstlerverein, and won praise from the redoubtable
critic Edward Hanslick and the ailing Brahms. Two
years on, however, the Tonkünstlerverein rejected
Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht on account
of its advanced harmonic idiom. It was at this time that
the organization announced a competition for a new
song-cycle, Schoenberg taking up the challenge by
setting poems from the 1869 verse-cycle Gurresange by
the Danish botanist and writer Jens Peter Jacobsen
(1847-1885).
Jacobsen translated Darwin into Danish. His writing
is pervaded by social alienation and religious
scepticism: qualities which likely commended
themselves to the young Schoenberg – largely selftaught
out of financial necessity – and whose conversion
from Judaism to Lutheranism in 1898 was less out of
concern for social advancement than from a need to
mark out his own ‘world view’. Such was confirmed by
his decision to turn the song-cycle into a setting of
Jacobsen’s ballad for speaker, five solo singers, three
four-part male choruses and eight-part mixed chorus,
and an orchestra requiring two dozen each of woodwind
and brass, a large percussion section and strings to
match. By mid-1900, he had completed the short scores
of Parts 1 and 2 and, despite pressure of ‘hack work’ –
score copying and operetta orchestration – that of Part 3
emerged the following year. Yet for all the
encouragement of such figures as Richard Strauss, the
task of orchestration proved incompatible with earning a
living, Schoenberg breaking off work on the project
barely a year later.
Not that Gurre-Lieder itself was forgotten. In 1907,
Alban Berg transcribed the score for piano and, in 1909,
Anton Webern (Schoenberg’s other most significant
pupil of the period) transcribed both the prelude and
interludes from Part 1 for eight hands at two pianos, this
latter publicly performed in Vienna on 14th January
1910. Although Webern’s musical language had
advanced considerably in the interim (the monodrama
Erwartung had just been completed and the ‘song’-
cycle Pierrot Lunaire was soon to follow), Schoenberg
was inspired to resume work on the cantata, completing
the orchestration on 8th November 1911. In Vienna on
23rd February 1913, Gurre-Lieder was first performed
under the baton of Franz Schreker, a performance
destined to remain one of Schoenberg’s greatest public
triumphs.
RW
The Gurresänge, a poem of passion, loss, and despair,
Jacobsen’s most moving work, was written when he was
21, before any of his prose, and also published only after
his death. It is based on the great legend of medieval
Denmark, the love of King Valdemar the Great
(1131–1182) for his mistress Tove, or, as the Valdemar
in Jacobsen’s poem (Valdemar the Fourth, c.
1320–1375), calls her, Tovelille, little Tove. During
Valdemar’s absence, his jealous queen, Helvig, induces
her lover Folkvard to kill Tove by locking her in her
bathhouse and scalding her with steam. Valdemar, in his
grief, incurs his own eternal damnation by placing the
blame on God:
Lord, do you not blush with shame?
Killing a beggar’s only lamb …
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The castle at Gurre, on the lake at Gurresco, not far
from Elsinore, was excavated in the nineteenth century
(from 1835) and is now restored. It is first mentioned in
court chronicles in 1364, when Pope Urban V sent a gift
of relics to its chapel, and it is recorded that Valdemar
the Fourth—the Valdemars ruled from the twelfth to the
fourteenth centuries—died there in October 1375. In the
Tove and Valdemar ballads (Folkeviser), first written
down in the fifteenth century, upon which Jacobsen
based his poem, Valdemar the Great—Jacobsen
transposed people (Tove) and events (the manner of
Tove’s death) to the later King—discovers Tove living
in a small castle on a Baltic island and falls in love with
her. In the original, Helvig, holding a torch, which in
Jacobsen’s version corresponds to the “vengeance
aflame in her heart,” follows Folkvard as he locks the
door of Tove’s bath. Valdemar’s vengeance on him is as
grisly as Tove’s scalding death: he is stuffed into a
barrel bristling with nails and rolled about, which was
the actual fate of a Danish criminal called Folkvard
Lavmandsson. But Jacobsen eliminates the violence in
both cases.
The first part of Jacobsen’s poem is narrated by
Valdemar and Tove in alternation, and, after her death,
by the Voice of the Wood Dove (“Wood doves of
Gurre! Woeful tidings I bear over the island sea”), the
Voice of the Peasant, the Voices of Valdemar’s men, the
Voice of Claus the Fool, and the Voice of the Poet. This
dramatization is Jacobsen’s invention, as is the character
of Claus, who is intended to provide comic relief.
Jacobsen’s identification of Tove with a forest
wood dove—Taube—exploits the alliterative
relationship in their names; in Old Norse, Tove is Tofa
and “gurre” the onomatopoeic word for the sound
emitted by the dove. As the symbol of purity, fidelity,
and happiness, the dove is contrasted with other birds—
“Helvig’s falcon it was that has slain Gurre’s dove,” and
“howling hawks cry from the spire of the church over
Tove’s grave”—which are associated as well with times
of night and day, the raven, the owl, the chanticleer.
Like Pelléas, the Gurresänge begins at twilight in a
forest at the edge of the sea. It ends, following a night of
love and horror, at sunrise.
After Tove’s murder, Valdemar searches for her
beyond her death and even beyond his own:
My Tove is here, and Tove is there.
Tove is far and Tove is near.
Tove bound by magic to the lake and the wood.
Tove, Tove, Valdemar yearns for you.
And he rediscovers her in Nature:
With Tove’s voice whispers the wood,
Through Tove’s eyes shines the lake…
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The most memorable music in Schoenberg’s mammoth
cantata was inspired by the “Song of the Wood Dove”
and the “Voice of the Poet” in The Summerwind’s Wild
Hunt (“Sir Ganderfoot and Mother Goose”). The wind is
compared to a horseman (“In the corn stalks hear the
wind go by like a rider”), and some of the verse is
Tennysonian: “White horses all over the lake are
prancing / And through the meadow crickets are
dancing.” Perhaps the heroic attitudes, the medieval
atmosphere, and the fin-de-siècle symbolism (though
Gurresange was written in 1869) are greater in concept
than in poetic realization, but one would have to know
Danish to say. Jacobsen’s champions regard it as the
pinnacle of Danish poetry.
Robert Craft
