The most popular and the most important of all Schoenberg’s choral works, Gurre-Lieder (Songs of Gurre), part oratorio, part dramatic cantata, is a setting of poems by the Danish botanist and writer Jens Peter Jacobsen, for speaker, five solo singers, four choirs, and a huge orchestra. First performed when Schoenberg had already immersed himself in atonality, this expressively opulent work charts the gradual intensification of love between King Valdemar and Tove. After Tove’s murder, Valdemar searches for her beyond death, rediscovering her in Nature. The Hymn to the Sun brings the work to a resplendent and affirmative conclusion by uniting the full choral and orchestral forces for the first and only time.