Maurice Maeterlinck's 1892 play Pelléas et Mélisande provided inspiration for an opera by Claude Debussy, a tone poem by Arnold Schoenberg, and incidental music by Gabriel Fauré and Jean Sibelius. This Supraphon double-disc compilation invites side-by-side comparison of these interpretations of the famous Symbolist drama, and listeners will find they share brooding and tragic moods that fit Maeterlinck's story of forbidden love. Yet each retelling of the story unfolds in a dramatically different musical style: Debussy's ...
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Maurice Maeterlinck's 1892 play Pelléas et Mélisande provided inspiration for an opera by Claude Debussy, a tone poem by Arnold Schoenberg, and incidental music by Gabriel Fauré and Jean Sibelius. This Supraphon double-disc compilation invites side-by-side comparison of these interpretations of the famous Symbolist drama, and listeners will find they share brooding and tragic moods that fit Maeterlinck's story of forbidden love. Yet each retelling of the story unfolds in a dramatically different musical style: Debussy's five-act opera, represented here as an orchestral "symphonie" arranged by Marius Constant, is one of the masterpieces of Impressionism, while Sibelius' suite is cast in his passionate post-Romantic vein; and though Schoenberg's intensely chromatic and harmonically unsettled work anticipates the expressionism of his atonal period, Fauré's four-movement suite (source of the popular Sicilienne) conveys fin de siècle sentiment with neo-Classical poise. These live recordings by Serge...
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