Schoenberg and Pierrot

1818 Words4 Pages

Arnold Schoenberg’s celebrated monodrama of 1912, Pierrot lunaire, op. 21, offers a compellingly personal perspective on Pierrot’s allegorical relationship to the artists of fin-di-siécle Europe. So too, in his fusion of music and poetry, does Schoenberg provide what may be the most powerfully illustrative example of the character Pierrot’s appeal to artists of the era.

Schoenberg’s libretto is drawn from Otto Hartleben’s German translation of the Belgian poet Albert Giraud’s Pierrot lunaire. In its original form, the work consists of fifty rondels (an antiquated poetic form structurally reliant on textural repetition) describing various commedia scenes and happenings. The poems vary widely in content, some depicting country idylls, others monstrous hallucinations or images of grotesque violence. Hartleben’s translation, by all accounts a significant improvement on the original, applies Expressionistic imagery and techniques to Giraud’s poems, heightening the already latent sensation of frenzied autobiographical narrative.

Albertine Zehme, who commissioned the monodrama and was the reciter at its first performance, had been performing twenty-two of Hartleben’s Pierrot poems in her own three-part arrangement – the first part dealing with relatively happy poems, the second with a dark series of “lurid and erotic nightmares,” and the third with images of death. Schoenberg, in crafting his own Pierrot lunaire, “…retained some elements of Zehme’s narrative progression from lightness, to darkness, to death, but he transformed them into a personalized narrative of the plight of the artist in society.” In selecting his twenty-one poems, the composer carefully omitted any that dealt with daylight (except, significantly, the fi...

... middle of paper ...

...spiration and the dictums of his past, was Schoenberg covertly commenting on the new musical vistas he saw before him? Always a composer keenly aware of his place in the history of musical development, did Schoenberg recognize that “Nacht” provided the groundwork for him to inherit the mantle of German developmental composition?

In all likelihood, it did not. While such speculation is entertaining, and even possibly illuminating, it amounts to little more than pseudo-musicological grandstanding. That Schoenberg viewed Pierrot as a metaphorical surrogate for artists is clear, and he says as much in a 1916 letter to Alexander Zemlinsky. That the more autobiographical interpretation of the song-cycle Schoenberg created can even be entertained is powerful testimony to the power of the character Pierrot and the sway he held over artists at the turn of the century.

Open Document