Pelléas et Mélisande

Description

No fewer than four important composers – Fauré, Debussy, Schoenberg, and Sibelius – were inspired by the drama written by Maurice Maeterlinck in 1892, Pelléas et Mélisande. While we celebrate Fauré and Schoenberg in 2024, Paavo Järvi presents his interpretation of their Pelléas et Mélisande with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, of which he was music director for nearly ten years. It was because Debussy was too busy with his own opera Pelléas that the famous English actress Mrs. Campbell commissioned Gabriel Fauré to create stage music, which became a four-movement orchestral suite, regarded as the composer’s symphonic masterpiece. In 1902, on the advice of his then-admired model Richard Strauss, Schoenberg composed the symphonic poem Pelléas et Mélisande. His complex combinations of musical motifs and the rich texture of the large orchestra captivate us and allow us to perceive his own vision of this both archaic and universal story.