Schönberg scored the Gurre-Lieder for a colossal apparatus: five vocal soloists, a narrator, men’s and mixed choirs, and a huge orchestra, made up of 25 woodwinds, 25 brass instruments, four harps, a celesta, 16 different percussion instruments (including iron chains) and an extremely large string section. Each performance of the Gurre-Lieder, a masterpiece with every detail worked out, is thus a truly overwhelming experience. In his account of the work, the composer Alban Berg, a pupil of Schönberg’s, identified some 35 leading motifs depicting not only the main characters but also natural phenomena (sunset, sunrise, galloping horses, etc.) and a variety of emotional states (desire, Jupiter’s love, a peasant’s fear, the mourning for Tove, etc.). Noteworthy too is the fact that in the part of the Narrator of the Gurre-Lieder Schönberg employed for the very first time the Sprechgesang, a ”spoken singing” technique, which he would use throughout in his 1912 melodrama Pierrot lunaire.
The production is part of the Musica non grata cycle. Musica non grata is the international music and cultural project of the Czech Republic and Germany, initiated and organized by the National Theatre in Prague and financially supported by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany. Musica non grata revives the artistic legacy of male and female composers important to the musical life of interwar Czechoslovakia who were persecuted by National Socialism or for religious, racial, political or gender reasons.