Gurre-Lieder

The Gurre-Lieder took an unusually long time for Schönberg to compose; he worked on them from 1900 to 1911, albeit with long interruptions. He dealt with the piece most intensively between March 1900 and March 1901 when, according to his own statement, he had already “finished” it. He was occupied with the orchestration between 1901 and 1903, after which he left the Gurre-Lieder untouched for fully seven years. During those years he ranged far away from the late-Romantic style which had influenced his earlier work on the Gurre-Lieder; when he finished the orchestration in 1910/1911, he considered the piece a document of a style of composition and an intellectual attitude which already seemed alien to him – although that did not detract from the work’s importance: “It is the key to my entire development. It shows sides of me which I do not reveal later on, or, from a different approach. It explains how everything had to happen as it did later on, and that is enormously important for my work – that one can follow the man and his development from that point on.”

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Agnes Grond © Arnold Schönberg Center