by Arnold Schonberg
Part 3
Mixed Chorus
Male choirs of the Princeton Glee. Fortnightly, and Mendelssohn Clubs
Philadelphia Orchestra
Conductor, Leopold Stokowski on gramophone records
Schönberg's 'Gurrelieder,' a setting of a cycle of poems by Jens Peter Jacobsen. is one of the last great products of nineteenth - century romanticism. Scored for four soloists, tour choirs, and a monster orchestra, the work carries the typical post-Wagnerian mania for the colossal to its extreme limit and, ironically enough, by the time the 'Gurrelieder ' was first performed-in 1913, twelve years after the bulk of the music had been written-Schönberg himself had led a violent reaction against both the romantic and the colossal in music. Very different in style from his later music, the ' Gurreiieder ' is among his most beautiful and most easily approachable compositions