- Person
- Arnold Schoenberg
- Lived
- 1874–1951
- Field
- Composition
- From
- Austrian-American
The story
Since 1910 the actress Albertine Zehme had toured Germany reciting poems from Pierrot lunaire, a cycle by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud in Otto Erich Hartleben's German translation, about the moonstruck clown Pierrot. The music she had been using, by another composer, was judged not strong enough, and in 1912 she commissioned Arnold Schoenberg, then living in Berlin, to write a new setting.
Schoenberg began on 12 March 1912 and finished on 9 July. He chose and reordered twenty-one poems into three groups of seven, tracing Pierrot's intoxication, his descent into darkness and his journey home. For the voice he used Sprechstimme, a style between speaking and singing in which the performer touches pitches only fleetingly. Instead of piano alone, he expanded the accompaniment to five players: flute doubling piccolo, clarinet doubling bass clarinet, violin doubling viola, cello and piano, with different combinations in almost every number.
After forty rehearsals Zehme, dressed as Columbine, and Schoenberg gave the premiere at the Choralion-Saal in Berlin on 16 October 1912. Some in the audience whistled and jeered, but there were fervent ovations from younger listeners, and Anton Webern reported an unqualified success. The American premiere followed in New York in 1923.
Pierrot lunaire became one of Schoenberg's most celebrated and frequently performed works. The critic Harold C. Schonberg ranked it as seminal as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Joyce's Ulysses and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Its line-up of instruments, now called the Pierrot ensemble, took on a life of its own.
In 1965 a group of British musicians formed the Pierrot Players to perform the work; as the Fires of London they commissioned and played new music for the same forces. Many contemporary groups since, such as Eighth Blackbird in the United States, are built around the Pierrot quintet, often with added percussion, and composers around the world have written a long list of works for it, including Steve Reich's Double Sextet, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Why it matters
Pierrot lunaire opened new possibilities for voice and chamber music and gave modern composers one of their most widely used ensembles.
About Arnold Schoenberg
Viennese composer who broke with traditional harmony, invented the twelve-tone method, and returned to Judaism in defiance of the Nazis, writing Moses und Aron and A Survivor from Warsaw.
More about Arnold Schoenberg
- Schoenberg's harmony textbook is still studiedArnold Schoenberg wrote his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony) in 1910, a teaching book that musicians still study more than a century later.
- Arnold Schoenberg created the twelve-tone methodIn 1923 Arnold Schoenberg announced his method of composing with twelve tones, a new way of organising music that shaped composition for half a century.
- Schoenberg's society gave 353 performances of new musicIn 1918 Arnold Schoenberg founded Vienna's Society for Private Musical Performances, which gave 353 carefully rehearsed performances of new music for its members.
- In America Schoenberg taught John Cage and Lou HarrisonAfter fleeing Nazi Germany, Arnold Schoenberg taught in Los Angeles, becoming a UCLA professor in 1936; his students included John Cage and Lou Harrison.
- Schoenberg taught Alban Berg and Anton WebernArnold Schoenberg's Vienna pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern became major composers in their own right, forming with him the Second Viennese School.
- Schoenberg's Transfigured Night became a beloved classicArnold Schoenberg's string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), written in 1899 when he was 25, remains one of the most performed works of its era.
- Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw honoured the murderedArnold Schoenberg's 1947 A Survivor from Warsaw, for narrator, men's chorus and orchestra, ends with prisoners singing the Shema as they face death.
- Schoenberg's Moses und Aron wrestled with an unseen GodArnold Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron, composed 1930–32, dramatises the Jewish idea of a God who cannot be pictured, through the clash of two brothers.
Sources
- Arnold Schoenberg Wikipedia
- Pierrot lunaire Wikipedia
- Pierrot ensemble Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.