Arnold Schoenberg Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Paul Rosenfeld

Critical Essay by Paul Rosenfeld

SOURCE: "Gurrelieder," in Musical Impressions: Selections from Paul Rosenfeld's Criticism, edited by Herbert A. Leibowitz, Hill and Wang, 1969, pp. 71-77.

In the following essay, originally published in 1936, Rosenfeld discusses Schoenberg's Gurrelieder.

An artist's expression infrequently is completely individualized by the time of his twenty-seventh year, and that of Schoenberg was not exceptional. When in 1900 he began to set the poetic cycle which the seraph of Danish literature, Jens Peter Jacobsen, had formed from the legend of King Waldemar I of Denmark and the fair Tove and called the songs of Gurre, the castle with which the legend associated their tragic love, the future heresiarch still was, regularly enough, under the domination of the expressions of his immediate predecessors. These were the Wagnerian, the Straussian, the Brahmsian, and the Mahleresque. His setting of Gurrelieder for giant orchestra, choruses, and solo voices thus is largely traditional; like the youthful...
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