About this Piece

Given the buttoned-up nature of classical music concerts today, it may be hard to believe that world-premiere performances in the first decades of the 20th century were sometimes riotous affairs. If audiences didn’t care for the music being performed, they were only too happy to convey their displeasure with catcalls, derisive laughter, and even bare-knuckle brawls. 

Such was the tense atmosphere Arnold Schoenberg expected during the premiere of his Gurrelieder (Songs of Gurre) in February 1913. Many of those who filed into the gilded halls of Vienna’s Musikverein—where the symphonies of Austro-German titans like Johannes Brahms and Anton Bruckner received their first performances—were prepared to riot. After all, they considered Schoenberg to be a composer changing the face of classical music for the worse. With each new work, listeners had to confront icy sonorities, puzzling melodies, and jarring, unresolved dissonances that stood worlds apart from the lush harmonies and probing emotionality they adored in music of the Romantic era. 

By the end of the evening, however, the audience wasn’t rioting—they were cheering, weeping, and chanting Schoenberg’s name with fevered ecstasy. The ovation lasted 15 minutes, and when the composer appeared onstage, he was crowned with a laurel wreath. But Schoenberg never once acknowledged this adoration. Instead, he stood with his back to the audience, restricting his bows of gratitude to the hundreds of musicians assembled onstage. 

What was the reason for this supreme act of disdain? A deep-seated anger toward the concertgoing public had taken root in Schoenberg, a result of the hatred and condescension both he and his music had received over the previous decade. Yes, the Gurrelieder premiere was an absolute triumph, but it was the only one he would experience over the course of his long career. 

The irony is that Schoenberg had no desire for provocation and didn’t consider himself a musical revolutionary by any means. He idolized many Romantic composers, particularly Richard Wagner and Brahms, and his earliest compositions display many of the techniques those composers had applied to their own work. Schoenberg merely thought he was taking the tradition of tonality, which had ruled over classical music for centuries, to the next logical place in its evolution—a realm where harsh dissonances could stand on their own, and not merely serve as a passageway toward soothing resolution. 

But Gurrelieder was different from the thorny modernism the public had come to expect from Schoenberg. An epic retelling of a medieval legend of love, death, and the healing power of nature, Schoenberg’s work for mammoth orchestral and vocal forces was firmly steeped in Romanticism’s grand, hyperemotional world. 

So, had Schoenberg reverted back to the world of 19th-century tonality? Did the displeasure of Viennese audiences finally force the composer to change direction? Not at all—for although Gurrelieder received its premiere in 1913, Schoenberg had actually composed it 12 years prior. 

Flip the calendar back to 1900 and we encounter a very different Arnold Schoenberg—a 26-year-old, self-taught composer struggling to make a name for himself in Vienna, the musical capital of fin-de-siècle Europe. The only public performances of his music had been a string quartet and a handful of songs; the controversial premiere of his first major work, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), was still two years away.  

Hot on the heels of composing Verklärte Nacht—a brooding work for string sextet based on a poem of love and spiritual transcendence by Richard Dehmel—Schoenberg was inspired to begin a new vocal work after discovering a text swimming in a similar pool of emotion.  

Gurresange (Songs of Gurre), an 1868 poem by the Danish writer and botanist Jens Peter Jacobsen, recounts the 14th-century tale of King Waldemar and his love for the maiden Tove. Against the backdrop of Gurre Castle, at the shore of a silent lake shimmering with starlight, the pair meet under the cover of night to profess their love. But when Waldemar’s wife, Queen Helwig, discovers the affair, she has Tove murdered. Consumed with grief and punished by God for blasphemy, Waldemar is condemned each night to raise an army of the dead to join him in his quest to find Tove. Only with the arrival of the first warm winds of summer, as nature itself is born anew, are the souls of Waldemar and Tove reunited. 

Schoenberg first envisioned his new work as a set of songs for tenor, soprano, and piano that follow the opening section of Jacobsen’s poem, in which the lovers meet on the castle grounds. The impetus for composing the work was a songwriting competition hosted by Vienna’s Musical Artists’ Society, but Schoenberg never submitted the score for consideration. Instead, based on encouraging words from his mentor Alexander Zemlinsky, the composer greatly expanded Gurrelieder’s scope. By the end of 1901, Schoenberg had largely completed a 90-minute, three-part spectacle requiring a 150-piece orchestra, four men’s choirs, a large mixed choir, five vocal soloists, and narrator.  

Although the only tasks left to complete were the choral ending and some final orchestrations, Schoenberg stepped away from his sprawling score for nearly 10 years. He recognized how challenging it would be to mount such a massive work by a young composer, and given his need for regular income to support his growing family, he had to focus his efforts on paid work arranging other composers’ music for cabaret companies. As the years went by and Schoenberg began to explore music’s future without a strict allegiance to tonality, he was hardly compelled to return to Gurre. 

Schoenberg finally decided to finish Gurrelieder in 1910 after a private performance of Part I, presented in an arrangement for two pianos and two singers by his student Alban Berg. With the score finally complete in late 1911, Gurrelieder was ready for performance, a work that to this day defies categorization—part song cycle, part poetic fantasy, part opera of the imagination, brought to life with forces that eclipsed even the largest works of Schoenberg’s most famous contemporaries, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. 

Part I transports us to Gurre Castle, where Waldemar and Tove sing nine songs joined seamlessly by orchestral transitions that amplify the scene’s passionate atmosphere. Voiced alternately by tenor and soprano, these songs move from Waldemar’s excitement as he makes his way to the castle grounds to the ecstasy of the lovers’ reunion and the king’s fear that the two will one day be parted. Tove responds with words of comfort and consolation, assuring him that death cannot prevent the eternity they’re destined to spend together. Waldemar’s nightmare comes true, however, as we learn in the “Song of the Wood Dove,” which recounts Tove’s death at the hands of Waldemar’s wife: “Helwig’s falcon it was that cruelly tore apart the dove of Gurre!” 

In the brief Part II, Waldemar curses God and threatens to invade Heaven himself should he not be reunited with Tove. As fragments from the lovers’ songs heard in Part I return in the orchestra, the king’s anger boils over. “Lord, You ought to blush for shame,” he rails, “to kill a beggar’s only lamb!” 

Part III greatly expands the scope of the story. After Waldemar beckons his army of zombies—voiced by four men’s choirs—to join him in a ride through the night sky in search of Tove, we meet two characters who act as witnesses to the scene: a village peasant who expresses his fear witnessing the ghostly army’s nightly flight; and the king’s jester, Klaus, whose riddle-laced monologue adds a touch of sardonic humor to the horrors taking place around him. 

Finally, as night gives way to day, Waldemar’s henchmen return to their graves and a narrator enters to recite “The Wild Hunt of the Summer Wind.” Using Schoenberg’s technique of Sprechstimme—in which the speaker delivers the text using specifically notated rhythmic patterns—the narrator’s poetry praises the enduring power of rebirth and renewal found in the natural world. Just as nature’s majesty has swept away death and tragedy with the sunrise of a new day, the narrator exclaims, so too can Waldemar and Tove be reunited in an act of spiritual transfiguration. 

With a final call to “Awaken to bliss, you flowers,” the narrator’s voice gives way to the dawn—and the first entrance of the mixed choir, whose praise of the sun’s rapturous glory brings Gurrelieder to its earth-shaking conclusion: “It rises smiling / from the ocean of night, / letting the splendor of its radiant tresses / fly from its bright brow!” 

It’s no wonder Gurrelieder’s ending, with its life-affirming message of love and renewal, brought people to their feet at the work’s premiere. But with each passing minute of the audience’s ovation, resentment festered underneath Schoenberg’s chilly exterior. “I stood alone against a world of enemies,” he later recalled. 

In the unrestrained applause that filled the Musikverein that night, Schoenberg knew the audience was praising not only a work that no longer represented his artistic ideals, but also a style of music that wasn’t long for the world. Schoenberg heard only echoes of the past in his Gurrelieder—its breathtaking sunrise was, in fact, a sunset for Romanticism and classical music’s tonal tradition. 

But Schoenberg never lost hope that all of his music would eventually be embraced. At the close of a 1937 speech titled “How One Becomes Lonely,” he wrote: “All my music [has] been found to be ugly at first; and yet…there might be a sunrise such as is depicted in the final chorus of my Gurrelieder. There might come the promise of a new day of sunlight in music such as I would like to offer the world.” —Michael Cirigliano II