Search - Schoenberg, Webern, Eschenbach :: Schoenberg: Pelleas und Melisande/Webern: Passacaglia

Maurice Maeterlinck's mysterious play about love between two people who have absolutely no idea who they are and what they're doing (or why) exercised an extreme fascination on composers at the turn of the century. Debussy wrote an opera on the subject, and both Fauré and Sibelius composed music for the original play. Schoenberg wrote this Straussian symphonic poem in 1905, well before he "went atonal"; and while its opulence and harmonic density caused a scandal at the premiere, it has since become one of the composer's best-known and, yes, even most popular, works. Christoph Eschenbach has a special way with "hothouse" music like this, and he turns in a performance of extraordinary communicative power that's very well recorded to boot. --David Hurwitz