Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire: il Surrealismo Sardonico dell’Arte

DSM: The UMKC Schoenberg Ensemble (Jessica Goldring, soprano; Brendan Kinsella, piano; Luke Fitzpatrick, violin & viola; Wilfredo Pasamba, cello; Jonathan Borja, flute & piccolo; Mauricio Salguero, clarinet & bass clarinet; all exuberant 20-somethings) gave quite a nice performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire Op. 21 last night.

CMT: Yes! Composed in 1912, it’s a musical setting for singer-speaker(s) and chamber ensemble—a setting of 21 poems by Albert Giraud—and still, almost 100 years later, one of the most important music theater works written so far. What about the artistic environment around the turn of the century from which Pierrot emerged? What about Schoenberg’s working methods and intentions in composition at the time—he would’ve been 65 years old then. It’s clear and imaginative—each one of these twenty-one melodramas is very imaginative. But how to understand the music and the narrative?

DSM: It’s one of the first pieces of program music ever written for a chamber ensemble. To this day, Pierrot Lunaire is one of Schoenberg’s best-known works. I think it’s often said that it’s an ironic-satiric work. Schoenberg uses all of his notorious atonal composing techniques and the spoken-singing delivery called ‘Sprechstimme.’ This took the hinges off.

CMT: Though freely atonal, it doesn’t fully bear Schoenberg’s trademark tonal style: it includes canons like “The Moonspot” written in traditional canon form, as well as meandering duets like “The Sick Moon.” Just the same, Schoenberg managed to capture the sense of the poems through their surface and texture. Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire is a liminal sketch inspired by the text. It can’t really be a German satiric commentary on French elite aesthetics, could it? It can’t really be taken as an ironic broadside against Romantic artistic values. This isn’t shock-art at the audience’s expense. No, there’s a dark, surreal pulse to Giraud’s poems, just as there is in Schoenberg’s music. The liminality of it is sculptural. Isn’t Pierrot Lunaire musically coherent with the work of Picasso and Braque and other Cubists and Expressionists at about this same time?

DSM: I have no way of knowing if Jessica Goldring’s rendering of the Sprechstimme – Schoenberg’s invention of a style between speaking and singing – was performed as intended by the composer. I might give a listen to one or more of the recordings in the links below, to take stock of others’ interpretations. I know from Schoenberg’s own writings that he wanted razor-sharp rhythm as well as speech in a musical form. Schoenberg also warned that the performer must not produce singing speech but speech in a musical form, as he put it. Though Schoenberg was at pain to notate his score with great accuracy, the interpretation of his Sprechstimme instructions seems to be pretty variable. Unfortunately, Schoenberg’s full instructions are lost, and last night there were no subtitles to help us to understand the German text. And it was too dark in White Recital Hall to read the translation that was provided in the program.

CMT: And, unfortunately, Jessica Goldring’s German diction was not easy to understand. At one point in between two of the poems one of the UMKC recording staff approached the stage to check the microphone. White Recital Hall is a bit cave-like.

DSM: Looking at Schoenberg’s own writing, Pierrot’s character is in the music. But, surely you’re right, the words are crucial. Though I was unable to follow the score in the dark auditorium, the ensemble between singer and instrumentalists appeared to be fine. And I can definitely vouch for fine instrumental playing by the musicians.

CMT: The ad hoc flood-light they improvised from a hardware-store trouble-lamp and covered with a film of yellow plastic, sitting on the floor near Jessica’s feet and casting an upward glare on the underside of her chin and cheeks, and on beyond to the other players! The eerie shadow cast against the white acoustic reflection panels upstage from the piano! In shadow, Luke Fitzpatrick’s bowing looked like someone gleefully slicing a turkey on a Cotters’ Saturday Night! Or maybe Vladimir or Estragon in Waiting for Godot, sucking chicken bones clean . . .

W  ith a giant bow grotesquely
Scrapes Pierrot on his viola –
Like a stork on one leg standing
Sadly plucks a pizzicato.”
  —  A. Giraud, Serenade.

DSM: The references to night and the apparent madness of many of the Giraud poems also has echoes of Beckett’s Godot or maybe Kafka. Kafka’s Metamorphosis was 1915. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was 1907; Kirchner’s Self-Portrait with Model was 1910; Juan Gris, The Guitar, was 1914; Kasimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting, was 1916. Vasily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, was 1912; Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, was 1907); Fillipo Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto, was 1909; Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est, was 1918; John Singer Sargent, Gassed, was 1918; Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was 1913, Satie’s Parade, 1917. What we see in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire is a snapshot of the cultural and political milieux circa 1912! Alienation was in the air! When was Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time? Does that piece not owe some intellectual debt to Schoenberg?

CMT: It was 1940-41, while Messiaen was imprisoned. But there is much humor in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire compared with, say, the Hölderlin-Gesänge.


DSM: Well, it’s a black, bad, dodgy humor then. Whatever mirth there is is suddenly dispelled in the outbursts in several songs. The English text of ‘Gebet an Pierrot’ reads: “My laughter have I unlearnt! The picture’s brightness dissolves. Black flies the standard now from my mast.” This has echoes of the outcry on ‘Pallaksch’ at the end of the Hölderlin settings: a final cry of frustration. The bleakness is all the more palpable for this sudden contrast. Despite the humorous touches, though, Schoenberg resists the temptation to overdo the comic effects—except for the moments of comic vocalisation where words are sung glissando and ‘quasi-Flatterzunge.’

T hrough the bald pate of Cassander,
As he rends the air with screeches –
Bores Pierrot in feigning tender
Fashion with a cranium-driller.
He then presses with his finger
Rare tobacco grown in Turkey
Into the bald pate of Cassander,
As he rends the air with screeches –
Then, screwing a cherry pipe stem
Right in through the polished surface,
Sits at ease and smokes and puffs the
Rare tobacco grown in Turkey
From the bald pate of Cassander.”
  —  A Giraud, Gemeinheit

CMT: You don’t imagine that the translation of Giraud’s French by O. E. Hartleben, in Leipzig and Berlin between 1887-1893—which was then the basis for Cecil Gray’s translation of the poems into English in the 1920s—had an effect? No possibility of translators’ errors in accurately rendering Giraud’s intentions, transmuted through those different languages and cultures? These 21 songs have predominantly restrained dynamics and gentle textures in spite of the array of percussive passages. The timbres that Schoenberg devises for the ensemble are often very beautiful. The song “Mondestrunken” combines a flowing, gentle vocal line above four-note chords played tremolo. The song “Enthauptung” combines the soprano at the bottom of her register with quiet tremolo cello goo-gaws. Occasionally the texture is given impetus by loud outbursts from the piano. It is as if a malevolent troll were directing the proceedings. There are echoes of Pozzo’s aggression; in fact, the song “Gemeinheit” brings to mind Pozzo “riding” Lucky in Waiting for Godot. I wonder whether Beckett’s writing was informed by Schoenberg’s music . . .

DSM: Well, consider the evidence: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; two tramps are waiting by a sickly looking tree for the arrival of Godot; they quarrel, make up, contemplate suicide, try to sleep, eat a carrot, gnaw on chicken bones. Two other characters appear, a master and a slave, who perform a grotesque scene in the middle of the play. A young boy arrives to say that Godot will not come today, but that he will come tomorrow. Godot does not come and the two tramps resume their vigil by the tree, which between the first and second day has sprouted a few leaves, the only symbol of a possible order in a thoroughly alienated world.

CMT: Pozzo and Lucky, the master and slave—they are half commedia dell’arte characters and half marionettes. The language of the play has gravity, intensity, and conciseness—much like Pierrot Lunaire. And in Pierrot Lunaire we have bravura passages that are seemingly meaningless, reminiscent of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.

DSM: The simplicity of Pierrot Lunaire, in the histrionic sense, places it in the tradition of French playwriting. The adherence to three unities is evidence that this is Pierrot Lunaire’s dramaturgical lineage. The unity of place: Columbine and the other characters simply hanging around. This place is any place. It is perhaps best characterized as being the place where Godot is not. Godot—Pierrot Lunaire’s moonstruck unreasonable expectations—are not to materialize in any place comparable to the setting of Schoenberg’s play. The unity of time might be any sequence of days in anyone’s life. Time is really immobility, a social and existential molasses, although a few minor changes do take place during the play: the beheading, the journey home. But the act of waiting is never over. It mysteriously starts up again each day. Nothing is completed because nothing can be completed. The unity of alienation: despair is crucial to this piece, and it pervades all the lack of action and gives the piece its metaphysical color. In scene after scene the permanent, structural absurdity of the world is stressed. Absurd struggle, the human condition!

S  choenberg has created a whole world of strange fascination and enchantment, of nameless horrors and terrible imaginings, of perverse and poisonous beauty and bitter-sweet fragrance, of a searing and withering mockery and malicious, elfish humor, which the poet most assuredly never contemplated. All the diablerie of the Romantics pales beside its demoniac intensity, and the much-vaunted irony and cynicism of Stravinsky appear childish and insipid in comparison with the sardonic and inhuman laughter of Schoenberg’s sinister and menacing evocation. In all art and literature one can only think of Hoffman who has anything to compare to it. Even the creations of Poe seem colourless, mechanical, and soulless when placed by the side of Pierrot Lunaire.”
  —  Cecil Gray, Survey of Contemporary Music, 1929

CMT: Despite all that, Schoenberg’s portrayal of life’s obstacles asserts that the journey, while difficult, is worth the effort. It seems that Schoenberg’s expressed ‘pessimism’ is not so much a despairing of the human condition but instead a despairing of the established cultural and societal structures that stultify and depersonalize otherwise hopeful individuals. He’s inherently optimistic about the human condition, but acknowledging tension in a violent, oppressive world that strips people of their dignity, that robs their lives of meaning. The Giraud poems were a pretext for Schoenberg’s composing an incisive musical manifesto for the 20th Century! Amazing, for 1912! Well done, UMKC Schoenberg Ensemble!

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