FULL PIERROT LUNAIRE (Schoenberg) Manchester 2020 Psappha Ensemble, Claire Booth
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Pierrot lunaire aka Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire"
- Composer: Schoenberg Arnold
- Libretto: Albert Giraud
- Venue & Opera Company: Hallé St.Peters, Manchester, England
- Recorded: 2020
- Type: Concert Live
- Singers: Claire Booth
- Conductor:
- Orchestra: Psappha Ensemble
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: PsapphaEnsemble
- Date Published: 2020
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: yessubs, ensubs, gensubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Schoenberg’s composing life swerved between intensity and inaction. His first atonal works – songs, orchestral pieces, a one-act opera – came at a rush in 1908-9, releasing pressure that had been building up in such works as his Chamber Symphony. During the next two years he completed only six little piano pieces and a tiny song. Pierrot lunaire, a half-hour work he then composed between March and July 1912, moves back towards normality, in that it restores past musical procedures – especially contrapuntal procedures, such as passacaglia and canon, but also tonal harmony near the end. However, when the abnormal has become the norm, normality itself is strange.
In venturing into atonality Schoenberg had gone beyond every boundary previously placed on music, including limits of rhythm, timbre, texture and form, as well as harmony. Nothing now could be taken for granted; any rule would have to be suspect; and Pierrot, in re-establishing rules, cannot hope to re-establish full trust. Hence its nature as masquerade, Pierrot being the melancholy outsider of the commedia dell’arte (‘from Bergamo’), a character whose Russian cousin Petrushka had been the central figure of Stravinsky’s ballet composed the year before. The passions that Pierrot claims for himself – sexual longing, unmotivated violence, blasphemy – are fully backed by the expressionist music, especially in the second of the three equal parts into which the composer divided the succession of twenty-one numbers; Otto Erich Hartleben had provided preparation in his fierce translations of the poems by the Belgian writer Albert Giraud (poems one might imagine Debussy having set). At the same time, though, we are left unsure how much of Pierrot’s confession is fantasy – how much he is trying to shock, scandalize or entertain us, how much he has lost grip on reality.
This can happen because Pierrot, when faced with two alternatives, generally chooses both. The cycle is a drama (Albertine Zehme, who commissioned it, was an actress and gave the first performance in costume) and at the same time a concert work. Its five-piece ensemble, used in a new combination in every number, is at once a miniature orchestra and a chamber group. It is high art and it is cabaret (of which Schoenberg had gained practical experience in Berlin ten years earlier). It uses a kind of vocalization intermediate between speaking and singing, Schoenberg’s term for this being Sprechstimme (speaking voice), though the technique is more often called Sprechgesang (speech-song). The vocalist is sometimes identified with Pierrot, sometimes not, describing him as another person. The central character is an artist, who refers to ‘my verses’, which would imply he is his own invention – as perhaps any artist’s creative persona is. Often the expression is violent, and yet Schoenberg himself called the work’s tone ‘light, ironic, satirical’. And Pierrot himself is, like any clown, at once a tragic hero and a fool, eliciting sympathy and mockery together.
Schoenberg made his own selection from the fifty poems in Giraud-Hartleben, all of them rondels, which is to say that the opening couplet in every case comes back at the close of the second verse, with the opening line repeated again at the very end. This highly structured form provides yet another layer of doubleness in its contrast with the poems’ seeming intensity and immediacy. An idea that comes across first as weird, psychotic or grotesque becomes, through its repetitions, a kind of memento, or a verbal tic. We end, each time, where we started, but the place is very different.
This simultaneous inevitability and impossibility of return is written into the musical language and also into the form Schoenberg gave the whole piece, with the third set of seven poems addressing subjects of homesickness, also of ‘pastsickness’, of longing for former times. But Pierrot has experienced or imagined extremes of behaviour and nightmare visions that make any restoration impossible. Home is now as irretrievable as the past. He cannot get there again, and nor can we. This may be cause for pessimism, but there is also in the work a wild humour.
Pierrot lunaire was first performed in Berlin over a century ago, on October 16, 1912, by Zehme and an ensemble directed by the composer, who took the production on tour soon after. It caused understandable consternation among some, but was in Schoenberg’s terms a hit, becoming the work by which he was best known (as perhaps he still is). Composers as different as Stravinsky (who called it the ‘solar plexus’ of twentieth-century music), Ravel and Webern all learned from it, as have many since.