At the end of the nineteenth century, nearly every theater company in Europe apparently felt compelled to put on a performance of Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist drama Pelléas et Mélisande. Those who could afford it would hire a composer to write incidental music for it. In Finland there was a production of Pelléas, and, naturally, Jean Sibelius was hired to compose the incidental music. There are many reasons to prefer Fauré's incidental music to that of Sibelius, not the least of which is that Fauré comprehends the work ...
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At the end of the nineteenth century, nearly every theater company in Europe apparently felt compelled to put on a performance of Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist drama Pelléas et Mélisande. Those who could afford it would hire a composer to write incidental music for it. In Finland there was a production of Pelléas, and, naturally, Jean Sibelius was hired to compose the incidental music. There are many reasons to prefer Fauré's incidental music to that of Sibelius, not the least of which is that Fauré comprehends the work as a symbolist drama while Sibelius seems to have understood it as a fairy tale with adult content. But as independent music rather than incidental music, Sibelius's music is worthy; it creates in a few pages an atmosphere of doomed love. That, at any rate, is how John Barbirolli conducts the work in his performance of the suite recorded in 1967 with the Halle Orchestra. From the opening immense string sonorities of "At the Castle Gate," to the exquisitely tender...
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