The only Belgian Nobel Prize winner for literature, Maurice Maeterlinck, wrote his theatre play 'Pelléas et Mélisande' in 1893. The play made a great impression on a select group of composers: both Debussy and Fauré, as well as Jean Sibelius, wrote music inspired by this Symbolist masterpiece. Less well-known, but no less brilliant, is Arnold Schoenberg's symphonic poem 'Pelleas und Melisande'. The still very young Schönberg lets go of all the brakes here and creates a colossal 45-minute work for an equally gigantic orchestral line-up. But the impetuous romanticism is especially striking: Schönberg brings the entire nineteenth century to an exuberant synthesis, his later radical modernism is still a long way off...

Recently, Het Collectief discovered a new version of this work. A young American, Levi Hammer, appeared to have reduced the work in 2019 to a chamber music ensemble of only 13 musicians. It is in this small line-up that Het Collectief is invited for a concert that also marks the beginning of a new academic year at KU Leuven. To clarify the musical narrative, videographer Lise Bruyneel transformed fragments of Maeterlinck’s theatre text into beautiful atmospheric images.