Schoenbergs’s Pierrot lunaire is a masterpiece of early 20th century expressionism. The sparce musical score for Chamber Ensemble and singer/speaker is perfectly suited to the mostly dark poetry. For me it expresses the state of mind of a man in turmoil alienated from society. Pierrot is dissociated and detached, living in a world of his own, unable to connect with others in a “normal” way. Hoping to find his way back to a place where peace can be found, even if this place is a fantasy.
Arnold Schoenberg: 13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian composer and painter, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School.
Schoenberg’s approach, both in terms of harmony and development, is among the major landmarks of 20th-century musical thought; at least three generations of composers in the European and American traditions have consciously extended his thinking or, in some cases, passionately reacted against it. During the rise of the Nazi Party in Austria, his music was labeled, alongside jazz, as degenerate art
Schoenberg was widely known early in his career for his success in simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify pioneering innovations in atonality (although Schoenberg himself detested the term “atonality” as inaccurate in describing his intentions) that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century art music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, a widely influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation, and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.
Schoenberg was also a painter, an important music theorist, and an influential teacher of composition; his students included Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, and later John Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, Leon Kirchner, and many other prominent musicians. Many of Schoenberg’s practices, including the formalization of compositional method, and his habit of openly inviting audiences to think analytically, are echoed in avant-garde musical thought throughout the 20th century.
Pierrot lunaire Op. 21
(“Moonstruck Pierrot” or “Pierrot in the Moonlight”), is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of twenty-one selected poems in three parts of seven from Otto Erich Hartleben’s German translation of Albert Giraud’s cycle of French poems of the same name. The première of the work, which is between 35 and 40 minutes in length, was at the Berlin Choralion-Saal on October 16, 1912, with Albertine Zehme as the vocalist.
The narrator (voice-type unspecified in the score, but traditionally performed by a soprano) delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called “melodrama”, in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-Lieder, and it was a genre much in vogue at the end of the nineteenth century. The work is atonal but does not use the twelve-tone technique that Schoenberg would devise eight years later.
A history of Pierrot form the Italian Commedia dell’ Arte to Schoenberg’s Op. 21
http://www.lunanova.org/pierrot/history.html
The below link leads to a very good introduction to Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire by Steve Hicken
http://thehighhat.com/PopsClicks/007/schoenberg_hicken.html
English translation care of:
http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/assemble_texts.html?LanguageId=7&SongCycleId=180
Part I
1. Moondrunk
The wine we drink through the eyes
The moon pours down at night in waves,
And a flood tide overflows
The silent horizon.
Longings beyond number, gruesome sweet frissons,
Swim through the flood.
The wine we drink through the eyes
The moon pours down at night in waves.
The poet, slave to devotion,
Drunk on the sacred liquor,
Enraptured, turns his face to Heaven
And staggering sucks and slurps
The wine we drink through the eyes.
2. Columbine
The moonlight’s pale blossoms,
The white wonder-roses,
Bloom in July nights.
O could I pluck but one!
To soothe my deepest sorrow,
Through darkening streams I seek
The moonlight’s pale blossoms,
The white wonder-roses.
All my longings would be satisfied,
Dared I as gently
As a fairy sprite to scatter
Over your brown tresses
The moonlight’s pale blossoms.
3. The dandy
With a ghostly light ray
The moon illumines the crystal flasks
Upon the dark altar-the holy Washbasin
Of the taciturn Dandy from Bergamo.
In the resonant bronze basin
The fountains laugh a metallic clangor.
With a ghostly light ray
The moon illumines the crystal flasks.
Pierrot with waxen complexion
Stands deep in thought: What makeup for today?
He shoves aside the red and oriental green
And paints his face in sublime style
With a ghostly light ray.
4. A pale washerwoman
A pale washerwoman
Washes faded garments at nighttime.
Naked, silver-white arms
She stretches down into the flood.
Breezes tiptoe through the clearing,
Lightly ruffle the stream.
A pale washerwoman
Washes faded garments at nighttime.
And the gentle maid of heaven,
Softly fondled by the boughs,
Spreads her linen spun from moonbeams
Across the dusky meadows-
A pale washerwoman.
5. Chopin Waltz
As a bleached drop of blood
Stains a sufferer’s lips,
So lurks within this music
The lure of annihilation.
In untamed strains the chords disorder
Despair’s icy dream-
As a bleached drop of blood
Stains a sufferer’s lips.
Fierce, exulting, sweet, and yearning,
Melancholy dismal waltzes,
You cling to my consciousness,
You are borne on my thoughts
Like a bleached drop of blood.
6. Madonna
Ascend, O Mother of All Sorrows
The altar of my verses!
The sword’s fury has drawn blood
From thy withered breasts.
Thy eternal open wounds
Are like eyes, red and open.
Ascend, O Mother of All Sorrows
The altar of my verses!
In thy shriveled hands
Thou holdest thy Son’s body,
Revealed to all mankind-
But mankind’s gaze is turned away
From thee, O Mother of All Sorrows.
7. The sick moon
You dark moon, deathly ill,
Laid over heaven’s sable pillow,
Your fever-swollen gaze
Enchants me like alien melody.
You die of insatiable pangs of love,
Suffocated in longing,
You dark moon, deathly ill,
Laid over heaven’s sable pillow.
The hotblooded lover
Slinking heedless to the tryst
You hearten with your play of light,
Your pale blood wrung from torment,
You dark moon, deathly ill.
Part II
8. Night
Giant black butterflies
Have blotted out the sunshine.
A closed book of magic spells,
The horizon sleeps-silent.
Vapors from lost abysses
Breathe out an odor, murdering memory.
Giant black butterflies
Have blotted out the sunshine.
And from Heaven earthward
Gliding down on leaden wings
The invisible monsters
Descend upon our human hearts…
Giant black butterflies
9. Prayer to Pierrot
Pierrot! My laughter
I’ve unlearned.
The image of splendor
Melted away.
To me the flag waves black
Now from the mast.
Pierrot! My laughter
I’ve unlearned.
O give me back–
Horse-doctor to the soul,
Snowman of Lyric,
Your Lunar Highness,
Pierrot! my laughter.
10. Theft
Princely red rubies,
Bloody drops of ancient glory,
Slumber in the coffins,
Down there in the sepulchers.
Nighttimes, with his drinking buddies,
Pierrot climbs down-to steal
Princely red rubies,
Bloody drops of ancient glory.
But look-their hair stands on end,
Fear roots them to the spot:
Through the darkness-like eyes!-
Out of the coffins stare
Princely red rubies.
11. Red mass
At the gruesome Eucharist,
In golden glitter,
In flickering candlelight,
To the altar comes-Pierrot!
His hand, consecrated to God,
Tears open the priestly robes
At the gruesome Eucharist,
In golden glitter.
Signing the cross,
He shows the suffering souls
The dripping red Host:
His heart-in bloody fingers-
At the gruesome Eucharist.
12. Gallows song
The scrawny whench
With the long neck
Will be
His last lover.
Stuck in his brain
Like a nail is
The scrawny whench
With the long neck.
Thin as a pine tree,
Pigtail down her neck-
Lasciviously she’ll
Embrace the knave,
The scrawny whench!
13. Beheading
The moon, a shining scimitar
On a black silk cushion,
Preternaturally large-glowers down
Through night’s pall of sorrow.
Pierrot wanders about restlessly
And stares aloft in deadly fear
At the moon, a shining scimitar
On a black silk cushion.
His knees tremble,
He collapses senseless.
He fancies it’s already whistling down
In vengeance on his guilty neck,
The moon, the shining scimitar.
14. Crosses
Poems are poets’ holy crosses
On which they bleed in silence,
Struck blind by phantom swarms
Of fluttering vultures.
Swords have feasted on their bodies,
Reveling in the scarlet blood!
Poems are poets’ holy crosses
On which they bleed in silence.
Dead the head, the tresses stiffened,
Far away the noisy rabble.
Slowly the sun sinks,
A red royal crown.-
Poems are poets’ holy crosses.
Part III
15. Homesickness
Sweetly lamenting-a crystalline sigh
Out of the old Italian pantomime,
It resonates in our time: Why’s Pierrot become
So wooden, so sentimental modern?
And it sounds through his heart’s wasteland,
Sounds an undertone through all his senses,
Sweetly lamenting-a crystalline sigh
Out of the old Italian pantomime.
Then Pierrot forgets the mask of tragedy!
Through the moon’s pale fireshine,
Through the sea’s light-tide-sails his yearning
Bravely forth, heavenward home,
Sweetly lamenting-a crystalline sigh.
16. Practical joke
Into the gleaming pate of Cassander,
Who’s crying bloody murder,
Pierrot drills with a disingenuous air,
Gently, with a trepan [skull-borer]!
Then tamps in with his finger
His genuine Turkish tobacco
Into the gleaming pate of Cassander,
Who’s crying bloody murder.
Then screws a cherry pipestem
Into the bald spot behind
And smugly puffs away on
His genuine Turkish tobacco
From the gleaming pate of Cassander.
17. Parody
Knitting needles gleaming and flashing
In her gray hair,
The duenna sits there muttering
In her little red dress.
She’s waiting in the arbor;
She loves Pierrot to distraction,
Knitting needles gleaming and flashing
In her gray hair.
Of a sudden-hark!-a whisper!
A breath of wind softly snickers:
The moon, wicked aping scoffer,
Beams down a simulacrum of
Knitting needles gleaming and flashing.
18. Moonfleck
A white fleck of bright moon
On the back of his black coat,
Pierrot sets off one balmy evening,
To seek his fortune.
Suddenly something’s awry in his toilette;
He casts about until he finds it-
A white fleck of bright moon
On the back of his black coat.
Drat! he thinks: a fleck of plaster!
Wipes and wipes, but-can’t get it off!
So on he goes, his pleasure poisoned,
Till break of day, rubbing and rubbing
A white fleck of bright moon.
19. Serenade
With a grotesquely outsized bow
Pierrot scrapes on his viola.
Like a stork on one leg,
He plucks a doleful pizzicato.
Suddenly here’s Cassander — raging
At the nighttime virtuoso —
With a grotesquely outsized bow
Pierrot scrapes on his viola.
He tosses the viola aside,
With his left hand delicately
Takes Sir Baldy by the collar —
Dreamily he plays on his pate
With a grotesquely outsized bow.
20. Homeward journey
Moonbeam is the rudder,
Waterlily serves as boat:
Thus Pierrot fares southward
On a fair following wind.
The stream hums deep scales
And rocks the fragile craft.
Moonbeam is the rudder,
Waterlily serves as boat.
To Bergamo, to Homeland,
Pierrot now wends his way;
Faintly in the east
Glows the green horizon.
–Moonbeam is the rudder.
21. O sweet fragrance
O redolence from fairytale times,
Bewitch again my senses!
A knavish swarm of silly pranks
Buzzes down the gentle breeze.
A happy impulse calls me back
To joys I have long neglected:
O redolence from fairytale times,
Bewitch me again!
All my ill humors I’ve renounced;
From my sun-framed window
I behold untrammeled the beloved world
And dream me out to blissful vistas…
O redolence from fairytale times.