FULL PIERROT LUNAIRE (Schoenberg) Philadelphia 2013 Anna Davidson
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: Gould Rehearsal Hall, Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Recorded: May 6, 2013
- Type: Concert Live
- Singers: Anna Davidson
- Conductor:
- Orchestra: Instrumental Ensemble
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: Curtis Institute of Music
- Format: DVD
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
It’s not hard to imagine how the public reacted to Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot Lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot) when it premiered in 1912. To start, there’s the text, full of grotesque, blasphemous, and graphic, lascivious imagery. Then there’s the singer’s declamation technique: a highly stylized, pitched speech that Schoenberg called “sprechstimme” (“spoke-voice”). Then there’s the music itself, from Schoenberg’s early period of abstract “free atonality”—before he discovered the method of serialization of pitches to destroy all sense of key, but still jarring to traditional ears.
Schoenberg was commissioned to write Pierrot by a well-known cabaret singer. At the time these performers sang, danced, and acted with a deep sense of melodrama, captured well by his use of the “sprechstimme” technique. The composer chose to set 21 poems by Albert Giraud that had been translated into German. They centered on Pierrot Lunaire, a deadly mischievous clown from the “commedia dell’arte” tradition of Italian theatre, encompassing Pierrot’s terrifying interactions with his rival Cassander and ruminating on his dark and strange world.
The narrative throughout the cycle is less a story than a series of macabre impressions, but after all his adventures Pierrot travels home on a lily pad to his native Bergamo. In the first song, the poet compares moonlight to wine, drunk in by the eyes. In another, giant black moths rise up from the horizon to blacken out the sun and cast darkness over the forest. In one particularly disturbing passage, the singer describes Pierrot drilling a hole into Cassander’s head (with an appropriately shrieking flute) and filling that hole with tobacco to smoke out of the skull.
Artistically, Pierrot is a triumph of 20th-century chamber music. The ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano (some doubling on related instruments) has determined the instrumentation of many contemporary music groups in the century since. The music is both highly traditional (using forms like waltzes and passacaglias) and avant-garde for its time. Schoenberg felt that music of his contemporaries had been pushing toward total abstraction in its overflowing themes and complex harmonies. For him the next logical step was to make music entirely composed of an amalgam of loosely connected motives layered on top of one another. He would choose strands of three to six notes for his motives and vary them throughout the work, in a tapestry of pitch and rhythm.
Over a decade after composing Pierrot, Schoenberg came upon the idea of creating one single uber-theme using all twelve notes of the octave, and thus “serialism” or “twelve-tone” music was born. But he always called himself a “Romantic” composer, and the best performances of this music are not mathematically precise, but instead full of expression, a sense of breath and flexibility, and great dramatic moments.
The audience of 1912 was, of course, scandalized and shocked by Pierrot Lunaire. What is more surprising, perhaps, is that the work continues to shock its listeners today, more than a century after its premiere. Schoenberg may have been a Romantic composer at heart, but his approach to composing was in so many ways wholly new, and it would influence composers who embraced or rejected his techniques for the next century to come.
—David Serkin Ludwig