This is a really intimate choice, almost a kind of mystical experience for me. In my teens, I heard Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder on the radio and it immediately marked me. Schoenberg wrote the basic melodic line before [he embraced] atonality and then orchestrated it afterwards, so it’s not just externally a work of passage between late-expressionist, neo-romantic music and properly atonal modern music, but the work itself reproduces this passage. I’m still joyfully addicted to it. Go to YouTube and find the 1965 recording conducted by Rafael Kubelik. That’s absolutely the version. It is breathtaking.
A suggestion from Slavoj Žižek: