Pierrot lunaire

Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg that sets 21 poems from Albert Giraud’s cycle, translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The work originated from a commission by former actress Albertine Zehme, who had performed a melodrama based on the same poems by composer Otto Vrieslander. Dissatisfied with that music, she was advised to approach Schoenberg. He began composing on March 12, 1912, and completed the piece on July 9, expanding the forces from voice and piano to an ensemble of flute (doubling piccolo), clarinet in A (doubling bass clarinet and clarinet in B), violin (doubling viola), cello, and piano. The premiere took place on October 16, 1912, at the Berlin Choralion-Saal, with Zehme in Columbine dress as the vocalist after forty rehearsals. Reaction was mixed; Anton Webern noted whistling and laughter but declared it an unqualified success. The American premiere occurred on February 4, 1923, at the Klaw Theatre on Broadway, New York, organized by the International Composers’ Guild. The work is structured in three groups of seven poems. The first group addresses love, sex, and religion; the second, violence, crime, and blasphemy; the third, Pierrot’s haunted return to Bergamo. Schoenberg, fascinated by numerology, employed seven-note motifs, and the ensemble with conductor numbers seven. The piece is opus 21, contains 21 poems, and was begun on March 12. Each poem has 13 lines, with the first line repeated three times. Though atonal, the music does not use the twelve-tone technique. The vocalist delivers the text in Sprechstimme, a style where specified rhythms and pitches are not sustained but allowed to drop or rise like speech, indicated by small x’s through note stems. Schoenberg occasionally marks passages to be sung. The instrumental combinations vary between movements; the full ensemble plays only in nine of the 21 movements. A typical performance lasts 35 to 40 minutes.