Pelleas und Melisande (Schoenberg)

It was premiered on 25 January 1905 at the Musikverein in Vienna under the composer's direction in a concert that also included the first performance of Alexander von Zemlinsky's Die Seejungfrau.

[1] The work is based on Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas and Mélisande, a subject suggested by Richard Strauss.

When he began composing the work in 1902, Schoenberg was unaware that Claude Debussy's opera, also based on Maeterlinck's play, was about to premiere in Paris.

[2][3] Theme groups, similar to the leitmotif, which are associated with individual scenes or people, form the building-blocks of a symphonic development, which has its beginning in the forest scene introducing the first movement, where Golaud meets Melisande and they marry, and continues on through the inner segments of the Scherzo, which portrays the scene at the fountain where Melisande loses her wedding ring and encounters with Golaud's half-brother Pelleas, and Adagio, which portrays the farewell and love scene of Pelleas and Melisande, where Golaud kills Pelleas, and leads to the recapitulation of the thematic material in the Finale, which portrays the death of Melisande.

Influenced by Pillar of Fire, a ballet version of his Verklärte Nacht by Antony Tudor, which premiered in 1942 in New York, Schoenberg, in American exile, decided for commercial reasons to modify and arrange the work's score for ballet as well, by expanding the one-movement symphonic poem into a multi-movement suite.