The BBC National Orchestra of Wales is appearing in six Proms at the Albert Hall this summer, and in the first of them the orchestra’s principal conductor, Ryan Bancroft, reunited two works that received their premieres in the same concert in Vienna in 1905, at that moment in music history when late romanticism was on the point of tipping over into modernism.
Both Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Melisande, based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck that was also the source of Debussy’s opera and inspired incidental music from both Fauré and Sibelius, and Alexander von Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau, after Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Little Mermaid, are symphonic poems, broadly following the model of Richard Strauss’s early examples. The Schoenberg is a single-movement work, requiring a huge orchestra (quadruple woodwind, nine horns) while the forces required for the Zemlinsky, which he called a “symphonic fantasy” in three movements, are almost as massive.
