Schoenberg: Gurre-Lieder

We have talked a bit about what an outsider Arnold Schoenberg was, but while he had little formal music education, he was thoroughly self-taught to the point that he was capable of absorbing and working within the most advanced musical idioms of the day when he was young. Case in point, at twenty-six he wrote Gurre-Lieder a two hour oratorio/cantata for enormous orchestra, chorus and soloists. Mind you, it took ten years for him to orchestrate it, but the basic conception and composition was largely accomplished when he was quite young. In this piece he absorbed what Wagner, Mahler and Strauss were doing and quite successfully too. No "outsider" could possibly have achieved this. Bear in mind that Schoenberg was born in Vienna, at the very heart of the Austrian-German music tradition.

The piece is so large and challenging to mount that it is not as well-known as it should be. Here is a BBC Proms performance from 2002.

Four harps, five vocal soloists, four piccolos, two sets of tympani and lot of other percussion, three male choruses and an eight-part mixed choir, two English horns, ten horns! And a lot more, plus a string section to match. To tell the truth, I would just as soon listen to this as Wagner or Strauss and probably more than Mahler. But your milage may vary!