The Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester (GMJO) was founded in Vienna in 1986 by Claudio Abbado and is considered the world's leading youth orchestra, winning a European Cultural Foundation award in 2007.
Critical Reception
Schoenberg's orchestral work Pelleas und Melisande, completed in 1903, was considered opaque and unplayable by contemporaries, and even Gustav Mahler found the score "enormously complex."
Composer's Artistic Vision
Richard Wagner, the composer of Tristan und Isolde, described his opera's plot as "Yearning, yearning, insatiable longing ever reborn, thirsting and repining! The only release is to die, to perish, to fade away, nevermore to awaken!".
Compositional Technique
Pierre Boulez, the conductor on this album, describes the Prelude to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde as marking the "beginning of the chromatic era of our age."
Composition History
Arnold Schoenberg, the composer of Pelleas und Melisande, decided to set Maurice Maeterlinck's play to music as a symphonic poem in 1902, the same year Claude Debussy's opera based on the play premiered.
Historical Context
At the end of the 19th century, Richard Wagner's music dramas influenced French writers, including Maurice Maeterlinck, whose dreamlike play Pelléas et Mélisande is set to music on this album.
Performer Biography
Pierre Boulez, the conductor, has made a significant contribution to 20th-century music as a composer, conductor, and teacher, earning 26 Grammys for his recordings.
