Schoenberg: Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21

Pierrot lunaire, a vocal-instrumental suite composed in 1912 by the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), is widely regarded as one of the defining works of musical modernism. Igor Stravinsky called it “the solar plexus as well as the mind of early twentieth-century music.” Not only its broadly atonal harmonic language but its range of instrumental sounds, or colors—unusual for a chamber-music work at the time—mark it as seminal, particularly for young composers after the Second World War.

Introduction

The work is a song cycle for a vocalist (gender not specified, but originally—and usually—female) and an instrumental quintet of piano, flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin/viola, and cello. The texts are Expressionist verses by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud—21 poems, from a cycle of the same name (1884), translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. Apart from the remarkably varied instrumental coloring, the songs are notable for the fact that the vocal part, labelled “Recitation,” is mostly composed in what Schoenberg called Sprechstimme (“Speech-voice”): a delivery, somewhere between speaking and singing, that he had previously used in parts of his oratorio Gurre-Lieder (1900–11)—and that he describes (not altogether helpfully) in a preface to the printed score.

History

Schoenberg, a Viennese Jew, had moved to Berlin in December 1901 to take up a post as musical director of the recently founded Überbrettl theater company. The Überbrettl was a kind of superior cabaret (Brettl), with acts and songs of a typically German, dark, “gallows” humor, and, during his brief association with the company, Schoenberg himself composed and arranged songs of this type. But he went back to Vienna in 1903, and returned to Berlin only in 1911, after a time when his music had met with growing hostility and he personally had been subjected to virulent antisemitism. Pierrot lunaire was composed in the Prussian capital between March and July 1912 and was first performed in the Choralien-Saal on October 16th.

Since 1900, Schoenberg’s music had gradually increased in harmonic and polyphonic complexity—in the spirit of German late Romanticism—to the point that, in 1908, he consciously abandoned tonality (the sense of key). The actual turning point was his Second String Quartet, which begins in F-sharp minor and ends in a clear F-sharp major, but, in between, explores extreme, non-tonal harmonies, culminating in a finale without a key signature. The works that immediately followed have the brilliance of a trapeze artist who avoids disaster by masterly technique and sheer bravado: the Five Pieces for Orchestra and the one-woman opera Erwartung (both 1909) are works of genius, but behind their atonality lurks the need for some substitute discipline of pitch structure—a discipline that Schoenberg eventually crystallized in his 12-note serialist method of the early 1920s.

Schoenberg: Quartet No. 1 in D minor for Strings, Op. 7

Form

Pierrot lunaire, with its 21 short movements, is a different kind of response to this problem. Each song is a single sharp image in which the lack of a tonal structure is negated by the vivid coloring and theatrical vocal delivery, which calls for the combined skills of virtuoso singer and bravura actor (rather than specific adherence to Schoenberg’s somewhat stodgy Sprechstimme technique). Structurally the songs are braced by various counterpoint procedures, including canon, fugue, and thematic motives (short fragments of notes), and by the form of the poems—a variant of the rondeau, or villanelle, in which the first two lines are repeated at the end of the second stanza, and the first line at the end of the third. Schoenberg constantly varies the scoring, deploying the full ensemble in only six songs, and in the codas of three others. The whole effect is of a kaleidoscopic performance, like a slideshow, or T.S. Eliot’s “magic lantern” that “threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.”

Analysis

The full title is Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Giraud’s “Pierrot lunaire” (Three times Seven poems from Albert Giraud’s “Pierrot lunaire”), and the 21 songs are roughly grouped as the title implies. Why “lunaire” (“moonlike”)? Because the moon is the constant object of Pierrot’s attention—his confidant, almost his alter ego. Behind this obsession lie, it seems, the self-absorption of the Romantic poet, the sharing of his blighted passions with Nature, and what John Ruskin called the “pathetic fallacy”: that our fellow creatures, animate and inanimate, empathize with our sorrows and wish to alleviate them.

So, in Part I, Pierrot gazes at the moon—longingly, ecstatically—sucking up the emotion he feels flowing down on him in the waves of moonlight. But, soon, the moon turns ghostly and distorted: in the third song, the fountains emit a metallic laughter, and, in the fourth, the moonlight takes on the form of “a pale washerwoman,” washing faded clothes at night. By the seventh song the moon has become “sick,” its light tainted by flecks of blood.

In Part II the imagery turns more sinister—emotion twisted into something like madness: in No. 8, the light, now from the sun, is shut out by giant butterflies’ wings, and, in No. 10, Pierrot climbs down into the burial chamber to steal rubies from the coffins, but the rubies are the corpses’ eyes, red with blood. Religious symbolism begins to take over, distorted and blasphemous: No. 11 is a “Red [not Black] Mass,” the host dripping with blood, and, in No. 12, the “skinny wench,” Pierrot’s final lover, is a mere flick of the mind from Christ on the cross, a hint realized in No. 14, in which Pierrot himself—“the poet”—is imagined bleeding to death on the cross.

In the final part, Pierrot returns home to Bergamo, the home of the Commedia dell’Arte, but not before performing violent surgery on his fellow actors, specifically Cassandre, whose skull he trepans with a drill and smokes like a pipe (No. 16) then, in No. 19, “plays” like a viola, with an outsize bow. But now moonlight has become the rudder that will steer him home as he rejects the evil fantasies of overheated Romanticism in favor of his childhood fairytales.

Schoenberg’s music responds with disconcerting precision to these extraordinary images. But there is also irony in his treatment: while Romanticism is talked about as if it were a disrupting—even annihilating—influence, the music calmly organizes it into tightly controlled units, such as the ten-note figure that laps and overlaps, like the butterfly wings in No. 8 or the dazzling, high-speed retrograde canon of No. 18, which wittily turns Pierrot’s attempts to rub off “the fleck of moonlight” on the back of his coat into a strict, forward-and-back musical pyrotechnic. The final irony is that Pierrot’s homecoming, in No. 21, suggests, without at all reestablishing, a measure of tonality—as if all these torments could be assuaged by reversing everything that Schoenberg’s music now stood for.

Critical Thoughts

The obvious (if somewhat distant) derivation of the score from Schoenberg’s experience with the Überbrettl was pointed out by the first performance, in which the actress and diseuse Albertine Zehme (who had commissioned the work) appeared as the commedia dell’arte character Colombine (in keeping with the commedia figure Pierrot, the cycle’s hero). She performed alone on the stage, the musicians concealed behind a curtain. The grotesquerie, the gallows humor, the bloodthirsty sacrilege of Giraud’s texts, and the music’s harsh, bitter, but ruthlessly controlled response seem all to have been aspects of the Überbrettl—albeit presented in more palatable musical clothing. The beauty of Pierrot lunaire lies precisely in its unique reinterpretation of the popular in terms of the supremely artistic and modern.

Legacy

The work made an early impact. Stravinsky, who heard it in Berlin, was clearly influenced by it in his Three Japanese Lyrics (1912–13), with their scoring for flutes, clarinets, string quartet, and piano. And Maurice Ravel, who knew Pierrot lunaire only from the score, was probably imitating its imagined sound in his Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (1913) for the same ensemble as Stravinsky’s Lyrics. Perhaps it also influenced the motley ensembles of the music of Les Six in Paris, where it was first heard in 1922.

But its biggest impact by far came after the Second World War, at a time when Schoenberg had become a guru figure for a younger generation of modernists disillusioned with the softer tendencies of prewar modernism. The British group The Fires of London (1965–87; originally the Pierrot Players) was specifically based on the Pierrot lunaire ensemble, and commissioned a large number of works for variants of that scoring. A comparable band, the Da Capo Chamber Players, formed in the US in 1970 (the composer Joan Tower was a founding member), still (in 2026) exists. In no case was this impact a question of stylistic influence, but of the idea of a varied, musically significant color palette within a chamber-music context. The concept of an intellectual tradition harking back to the popular has often also been present—but secondary.

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Article by Stephen Walsh