Schoenberg 150 – DG Launches Complete Orchestral Edition with the DNSO and Fabio Luisi

Working with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and its Chief Conductor,
DG is to release the most comprehensive survey ever of Schoenberg’s music for orchestra

The new complete edition will present over 30 works, including Pelleas und Melisande, Chamber Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2, Gurre-Lieder, the Violin & Piano Concertos, and many more

The first release will be Verklärte Nacht, issued digitally on
the composer’s 150th birthday, 13 September 2024

“Art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! 
Not one’s … acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive”
Arnold Schoenberg, writing to Kandinsky in 1911

The visionary composer, theorist, teacher and artist Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was a pivotal figure in 20th-century music, as controversial as he was influential. To mark this year’s 150th anniversary of the birth of the father of musical modernism, Deutsche Grammophon announces plans to record the most comprehensive edition of his works for and with orchestra ever produced. This will be achieved in partnership with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and its Chief Conductor Fabio Luisi. Projected to encompass over 10 hours of music, the edition will be issued as a series of albums between now and the end of the decade. The first of these presents Schoenberg’s ravishingly beautiful tone-poem Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”; 1943 version). The album will be released digitally on the composer’s birthday, 13 September 2024, and will feature cover artwork based on one of Schoenberg’s own paintings, as will all future albums in the series.

“In any discussion of music’s great revolutionaries, the name of Arnold Schoenberg has to be one of the first to come up,” says Dr Clemens Trautmann, President Deutsche Grammophon. “And nowhere is the scale of his ambition and innovation more strikingly demonstrated than in his works for and with orchestra. These range in style from the late Romanticism of his youth to free atonality and serialism, not forgetting the tributes he paid to earlier musical innovators through his inspired transcriptions. We at DG were keen to explore this universe in its entirety for the first time through high-quality recordings made with the equally enthusiastic DNSO and Fabio Luisi. We’re delighted to be continuing our highly successful partnership with the orchestra and its Chief Conductor in the realm of 20th-century music, building on our award-winning Nielsen symphony cycle and on our forthcoming recordings of the complete Scriabin orchestral works.”

“Arnold Schoenberg is one of the most profoundly original artists in the history of music,” confirms Fabio Luisi. “His music is both historically crucial, deeply personal and yet universal. Throughout his life, Schoenberg was on a continuous journey, both literally, personally and figuratively. In an artistic and intellectual sense, he moved from Brahmsian and Wagnerian ideals towards recognizing the limits of tonality, inspired by the artistic movements of his time (as well as the earliest film music). Only by seeing him as an artist and a human in constant motion can we understand his unique development, including his late return to the world of tonality, which I believe was never interrupted after allI am incredibly pleased to embark on this important recording cycle which has been a dream for many years, unveiling the beauty and the importance of Schoenberg’s music to a greater audience together with Deutsche Grammophon and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.”

As part of his attempt to capture the unconscious in music, Schoenberg reinvented the traditional limits of tonality, spearheading a new era in composition through his work and his teaching. His music is still however sometimes assumed to be mathematically based, ascetic and lacking in emotional appeal. DG’s new complete edition will dispel such myths, offering a true reflection of the exploratory but varied approach taken by the largely self-taught and hugely versatile composer throughout his career. It will cover the full range of Schoenberg’s writing for orchestral forces, including works for chorus/solo voice and orchestra, and arrangements of scores by other composers.   

Among the more than 30 works that will make up the edition are the oratorios Gurre-Lieder and Die Jakobsleiter, as well as Kol Nidre and A Survivor from Warsaw, both for speaker, chorus and orchestra; orchestrations of music by Bach, Handel, Monn and Brahms; the orchestral Lieder, Opp. 8 and 22; and pure orchestral works as varied as the early Notturno for harp and strings and Serenade for small orchestra, Chamber Symphony No. 1 (1906), and the Violin and Piano Concertos (1936/1942).

The first work to be released, Verklärte Nacht, began life in 1899 as a string sextet inspired by a poem by Richard Dehmel. Schoenberg arranged the sextet for chamber orchestra in 1917, reworking it for a much larger string ensemble in 1943, by which time he was living in the United States. While knowledge of the poem is unnecessary to enjoyment of the score, the glorious music captures the gradual transfiguration that occurs in the text, as the power of love transfigures a nocturnal conversation between two lovers into a tale of redemption and hope rather than one of potential tragedy. This is a work that looks both back to Brahms and Wagner and, by pushing at tonal boundaries, ahead to the techniques with which Schoenberg would revolutionise western music.

Summing up the aims of the Schoenberg project, Kim Bohr, CEO of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, says: “It is with great pleasure that we announce this large-scale collaboration with Deutsche Grammophon, hoping to bring out new colours and dimensions in Schoenberg’s orchestral music together with our dedicated Chief Conductor Fabio Luisi. We believe that the time and occasion are ideal to present the first complete recorded cycle of Schoenberg’s orchestral works, and we are convinced that the music has immense potential to reach new audiences, both in concert halls and in recordings and broadcast worldwide.”