Gurrelieder is a gigantic, post‐Wagnerian cantata that, in retrospect, seems like the terminus ante quem for Romanticism in music, beyond which further elaboration or intensity was surely impossible, and led surely if not inevitably to the Expressionism which the prodigious Schoenberg felt compelled to explore in works such as Erwartung, and thence, infamously, to the 12‐tone system of musical composition from which, at least superficially, the work appears so distant in form and idiom.
The composer was just 26 when he began work on a song‐cycle, which in its fully orchestrated form became the first part of Gurrelieder, based on a poem within a novel by the Danish novelist, naturalist and atheist Jens Peter Jacobsen, which the author in turn had based on folk‐legends of the medieval King Waldemar – who, having taken a mistress, Tove, is driven to bitter madness by Tove's murder at the behest of his wife, condemns God and is in turn condemned to terrorise the land in ghostly form with his band of vassals until the passing of the seasons and the rising of the sun bestows the kind of redemption offered to the Flying Dutchman. The orchestration, including parts for iron chains and sundry kinds of drum, could hardly be more lavish, and it is faithfully conveyed both by the German radio recording and Herbert Kegel's patient approach to this massive score. Singers of aptly Wagnerian scale include (in the part of Waldemar) Manfred Jung, who was a favoured Siegfried at Bayreuth during the 70s and 80s.
