Schoenberg's 1912 Breakthrough—Pierrot Lunaire
Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire
Schoenberg’s song cycle essentially ushered in musical modernism and established an eclectic chamber ensemble as the primary vehicle for contemporary music.
While Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring gets all the credit for starting the revolution of musical modernism, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire composed a year earlier may have greater claim to that title. Its atonal language was already far more advanced than the famous dissonances in Stravinsky’s ballet. With it, Schoenberg created not only a new style of singing, sprechstimme, but an entirely original chamber ensemble that became a predominant template and expressive vehicle for 20th century composers.
The complete title of his cycle is Three Times Seven Poems from Albert Giraud’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’. In 1912, Schoenberg was commissioned by an actress to compose a work for speaker and piano based on Giraud’s poems in their German translation. Schoenberg expanded the scoring for a unique chamber ensemble and premiered it in Berlin only after 40 rehearsals!
Many people hated it. Music critic James Huneker wrote:
The very ecstasy of the hideous!...Schoenberg is...the cruelest of all composers, for he mingles with his music sharp daggers at white heat, with which he pares away tiny slices of his victim’s flesh. Anon he twists the knife in the fresh wound and you receive another thrill...There is no melodic or harmonic line, only a series of points, dots, dashes or phrases that sob or scream, despair, explode, exalt, and blaspheme.
Richard Strauss ungraciously wrote:
The only person who can help Schoenberg now is a psychiatrist…I think he’d do better shoveling snow instead of scribbling on music paper.
Many listeners, especially composers, including Stravinsky, were captivated. Years later, Stravinsky wrote:
I did not know then what I know now, which is that in the three years prior to Pierrot, Schoenberg had written a body of works we now recognize as the epicenter of the development of our musical language. The real wealthof Pierrot – sound and substance, for Pierrot is the solar plexus as well as the mind of early twentieth century music – was beyond me, as it was beyond all of us at that time.
What is usually not said amid all the superlatives
Schoenberg’s work is so esteemed now that the early negative criticisms only invoke a knowing laughter. But what scholars and aficionados don’t permit mentioned is that Pierrot Lunaire plunges an unprepared listener into an alien landscape with no map.. An honest first impression
may easily be of an unpleasant sensation of chaos and noise. Without tonal guideposts, it is no easy task to distinguish foreground and background—what’s melody and what’s accompaniment? Even beginnings and ends of sections are obscured without traditional cadences. But that’s not the main challenge. What’s truly new and startling in Pierrot Lunaire are the sheer originality and complexity of its musical textures and sound: pointillism, unpredictable atonal outbursts, and vast timbral variations all shift abruptly. Above all, the klang, or sound mass, of different parts seem to play in different tempi simultaneously independent of each other, creating a thicket of sound difficult to penetrate on first listening. If that isn’t difficult enough, the instruments often obscure the voice, playing right over and through the singer/speaker. Schoenberg clearly wants that complexity. He cautions the singer to avoid deriving “mood and character of the individual pieces from the meaning of the words,” but instead “solely from the music.”
How then can we beginners make sense of such a bewildering new work? For one thing, the songs are all quite short; repeated listening familiarizes the ear eventually to hear the different layers more clearly. Further, one becomes aware of repetitions in the music itself.
For instance, in the first song, what might at first seem to be a random organization of notes gradually reveals a tight and simple structure. The opening descending piano “moonbeam” motif repeats 4 times and recurs at the end of the song. That’s the first clue. But with repeated listening, we notice the moonbeam motif transfers from the piano to the flute, and then back and forth between both flute and piano. In fact, practically every measure of the song includes this descending motif either literally or in variation. That’s a key to hearing Schoenberg’s intention, a thread that pulls along through the entire song. But there are other motifs that recur as well. A plucked rocking back and forth of the violin accompanies the piano at the beginning, but also often recurs, especially in the middle of the song. The unique timbre of the piece and its atonality obscure this clear structure at first. But once you hear these “anchors,” the flow of the song is not really so different than Schubert or Brahms! This was Schoenberg’s contention all along. But he never acknowledged that his complex atonal textures made these structures extremely difficult to hear on first listening.
There is a substantial reward for taking time to understand and appreciate Pierrot Lunaire beyond the work itself. As wild and cutting edge as it was at the time, its sonic landscape quickly became idiomatic, even formulaic, for atonal and serial music that followed in the 20th century. In other words, to become familiar with the harmonic language of Pierrot Lunaire is to have a key to understand a great deal of 20th century music that continues to turn off and confuse most concert goers.
The Pierrot Ensemble
Voice plus an instrumental quintet—flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano. Combining just two wind and two string instruments with piano and singer was a unique combination at the time. It’s like a miniature orchestra translated to chamber music. Possibilities for different colors are enormous because each player switches between an instrument and its auxiliaries. Flute doubles with piccolo. Clarinet doubles with bass clarinet. Violin doubles with viola. That creates not five, but eight different instrumental possibilities. One of the spectacular qualities of Pierrot Lunaire is that its color is continually so rich and varied. That’s largely because the individual songs are scored for unique instrument combinations: song 1 flute, violin, piano, cello; song 2 violin, piano, flute, clarinet; song 3 piccolo, clarinet, violin, etc.
What is not at all obvious is that most of the songs don’t even include the full ensemble. Pierrot ensemble with different variations became a common chamber ensemble for 20th century composers. Often percussion is added for even more color. The Pierrot ensemble also provides an economic benefit: it provides a wide palette to explore the farthest reaches of timbral possibilities with relatively few musicians.
Sprechstimme
Schoenberg envisioned an original stylized form of singing for Pierrot he called sprechstimme, halfway between speaking and singing. Schoenberg’s explanatory notes are filled with negatives: “not intended to be sung…no more freedom [than] if it were a sung melody…take great care not to lapse into a singsong speech pattern…The goal is certainly not a all a realistic, natural speech…But it should not call singing to mind, either.” The result is a rhythmic declamation that first touches on the notated pitches of a melody, but quickly falls back to speech. This unique timbre often has the effect of making the voice more like another instrument in the ensemble than a soloist. Many listeners find it haunting and unsettled, closely attuned to Pierrot’s teetering on the brink of madness. There have also been comparisons to the highly stylized speech in Yiddish theater.
Pierrot the character
Pierrot was a standard character in the 17th century Italian commedia dell’arte, a popular traveling troup of players. Pierrot was the sad clown, an irreverent valet of Cassander, the father of Columbine. Pierrot is in love with Columbine, who dumps him for the Harlequin. Pierrot is white faced with a white blouse with large buttons and wide white pants. Pierrot was originally a naïve fool, but the Symbolists identified him as a fellow artist, a lonely sufferer, exquisitely sensitive, friend only to the moon.
Schoenberg identifying as Pierrot, the moonstruck misunderstood artist
Schoenberg identified with Pierrot, the misunderstood clown lost in search for love and art. The artist goes mad, sacrifices himself to his art, finally trapped between his imagination and a sad nostalgia for what has passed.
It is banal to say that we [artists] are all moonstruck fools; what the poet means is that we are trying our best to wipe off the imaginary moon spots from our clothing at the same time that we worship our crosses. [In Hartleben’s “Die Kreuze” poems are said to be the crosses on which the poet is hung to receive the derision of society.] Let us be thankful that we have our wounds [from the cross]: With them we have something that helps us to place a low value on matter. From the scorn for our wounds comes our scorn for our enemies and our power to sacrifice our lives to a moonbeam. One could easily get emotional by thinking about the Pierrot poetry. But for the cuckoo is anything more important than the price of grain?
Giraud’s Poems
Each poem has an identical rondeau structure of 13 stanzas in three groups: 4 + 4 + 5. The first two stanzas unify the poem, repeating for stanzas 7 and 8, and the final stanza 13: A B C D E F A B G H I J A
The writing style comes from the Symbolist movement that believed a flood of images and emotions revealed a deeper truth and reality than traditional narrative. In Pierrot Lunaire, a dazzling flood of images centered around the images of moon beams and blood place us in a dreamscape that turns into nightmares and madness.
Harteleben’s German Translation
Schoenberg likely read the foreword to the 1911 Otto Erich Hartleben translation, written by Franz Blei. Blei calls Pierrot a “moonstruck cynic who wears a black veil over his red heart, the last grandchild of romantic irony, the supplicant with the most fragile modesty, the most chaste of lechers.”
Numerology
Schoenberg’s fascination with numerology adds another structural layer to the work with obsession of threes, sevens, and thirteens. The grouping of the poems is in three parts each of seven poems. The main motif of the piece is a descending 7 note figure that represents a moonbeam. Many of the motifs are in groups of three, seven, and thirteen. The Pierrot Ensemble is 7 musicians—six players plus conductor. The work in Schoenberg’s catalog is op. 21 (again 3 times 7).
After Pierrot
Pierrot Lunaire was clearly a breakthrough piece for Schoenberg. It may well be imagined that it would be a launching pad for many similar works to follow. Instead, it made Schoenberg acutely aware of the limitations in his new language. Above all, he realized that by departing from the tonal harmonic language, his music could not be built on its traditional narrative forms that provided the foundation for longer pieces. Pierrot Lunaire, like the Five Pieces for Orchestra, is a collection of 21 brief pieces. This limitation especially was what drove Schoenberg to a writing crisis, during which time he continued to search for a logical way to structure his new language, one that was hitherto fueled, but limited, primarily by intuition.
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Link to Robert Greenberg’s website with a wonderful video of Pierrot Lunaire