Pierrot lunaire

Pierrot lunaire in a single stroke established the concept of avant-garde music theatre, combining staged and concert-hall elements in a radical masterpiece. Schoenberg’s 21 settings of Albert Giraud’s poems, in Otto Erich Hartleben’s German translations, are structured in three groups of seven numbers each, composed for solo speaking actor, violin (also playing viola), cello, flute (also playing piccolo), clarinet (also playing bass clarinet) and piano. Giraud was a Belgian Symbolist poet, whose Pierrot lunaire cycle (1884) presented the Pierrot figure of popular commedia dell’arte theatre as a moonstruck dreamer, with moods ranging from soulful pathos to shuddering nightmare. Schoenberg’s 40-minute work, composed in 1912, was the result of a commission from Viennese actress Albertine Zehme. He responded with a tour de force of technical virtuosity, filtering intricate classical forms (such as canon, passacaglia, fugue and rondo) through his newly developed brand of Expressionist modernism, in music searching out wild extremes of headlong ferocity and uneasy calm. The work also introduces the technique of Sprechstimme (speaking voice, also known as Sprechgesang, or speech-song), a development of the traditional melodrama genre: Pierrot’s role is declaimed in a way that occupies a surreal no-man’s-land between the contours of speech and true singing. The first performance, on 16 October, 1912, in Berlin, was greeted with wild enthusiasm and scandalised outrage by different parts of its audience. Over time Pierrot lunaire’s musical brilliance made it a major success for Schoenberg, admired by fellow composers as different as Stravinsky and Puccini.