Rethinking the Symphonic Poem: Dialectical Form, Sequential Dissonances and the Chord of Fate in Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande

Abstract

This article addresses the issue with the ambivalent relationship between form
and content in fin-de-siècle symphonic poems. It elucidates the post-Wagnerian
symphonic poem’s absolute and programmatic concerns as the two coordinates of
an integrated structural logic, by exploring the applicability of Fred Lerdahl’s idea of
tonal/narrative path in a sonata environment informed by Steven Vande Moortele’s
theory of two-dimensional sonata form, mindful of the post-Romantic tonal practice
construed in terms of Richard Cohn’s concepts of double syntax and hexatonic cycles.
Through a case study of Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, Op. 5 (1902–1903),
I posit a model of dialectical form by reimagining the tension between absolute
and programme, symphony and drama, and sonata design and extended tonality
as a dialectical discourse housed in the formal process. Special attention is given
to what I theorise as sequential dissonances, which are constituted by what I call
the chord of fate and the Tristan chord: these breakthrough events culminate in a
structural moment characterised by Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of Augenblick,
which enables retrospective reinterpretation of the ongoing formal discourse as
a sonata process, engendering a reconceptualisation of the global formal and tonal
syntax that concurrently has significant programmatic implications. This approach
thereby gives equal consideration to the formal and programmatic properties of the
symphonic poem, acknowledging its status as a distinctive genre that has its origins in
both the symphony and the drama.