Moonstruck

Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire

by Lloyd Schwartz

In 1912, the year before the premiere of Stravinsky's La sacre du printemps triggered the most notorious musical riot of the century, Arnold Schoenberg was creating a quieter revolution. He was slowly obliterating the system of tonality as it had been known for centuries, and his expressionistic masterpiece, Pierrot Lunaire, which might be translated as "Moonstruck Pierrot," was a major step on that thorny path. It was so influential that many later composers have written works for the same ensemble just so they could be performed on programs that include Pierrot Lunaire.

For someone who was unraveling musical structure, Schoenberg was also obsessively organized. Pierrot Lunaire was his Opus 21, so he assembled 21 poems, in three sets of seven, by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud about the lovesick clown Pierrot, the commedia dell'arte character in whiteface and loose, baggy white silks. The complicated form of these poems is the rondeau -- 13 lines (one line short of a sonnet) in three stanzas. The first two lines of each poem reappear at the end of the second stanza. Then the opening line comes back again as the last line of the poem. Each poem is a closed circle, claustrophobic, returning to where it started with no way out.

The most conspicuous effect is the way the words are recited. Schoenberg used the term "Sprechstimme," or "Sprechgesang," a kind of sung speech. Each syllable has a specific pitch and duration. It's like a very expressive parent reading to a child. But these poems are hardly for children. They deal symbolically, and sometimes in moments of grim comedy, with questions of art, sexual longing, nostalgic yearning, terror and guilt.

Chopin Waltz

As a lingering drop of blood
Stains the lip of a consumptive,
So this music is pervaded
By a morbid deathly charm.

Wild ecstatic harmonies
Disguise the icy touch of doom,
As a lingering drop of blood
Stains the lip of a consumptive.

Ardent, joyful, sweet and yearning,
Melancholic somber waltzes,
Coursing ever through my senses,
Leaving an insipid aftertaste
Like a lingering drop of blood.

Schoenberg surrounds these poems with a prismatic chamber ensemble, five players playing eight instruments: piano, three strings, and four woodwinds (from piccolo down to bass clarinet). In various recombinations they capture the icy, glistening-but-disjointed moonlit world of Giraud's creepy poems. All the instruments appear together only in the lovely, very last song, "Oh ancient scent from far-off days."

There's often been a question about how much expression the "reciter" should have. Some feel the poems should be delivered with a cool detachment. Schoenberg's own half-century-old recording (Sony) is grandly passionate. So is this scintillating new Boulez recording (Deutsche Grammophon) with his luminous Ensemble InterContemporain and soprano Christine Schäfer, who can also sound almost like an instrument herself.

Boulez, that master conductor of 20th-century music (and practically everything else), recorded Pierrot no less than three times. The very first of these, from 1961 (re-released on Ades), is worth seeking out for the extraordinary performance by soprano Helga Pilarczyk -- darkly seductive, infinitely nuanced, and terrifyingly expressive.

Boulez's new DG recording also includes Christine Schäfer singing the short Schoenberg song that preceded Pierrot by a year, a setting of Maurice Maeterlinck's Herzgewächse ("Heart's Foliage"), with harrowing high notes and magical accompaniment by celesta, harmonium, and harp; and Schoenberg's oddball Second World War work, the Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, a declamatory setting of a long declamatory and ironic poem by Lord Byron featuring narration by baritone David Pittman-Jennings.

Other recent Boulez recordings of 20th-century music include Bartók's moody, gloomy, yet moving symbolic opera, Bluebeard's Castle, with American superstar soprano Jessye Norman a little bland as Bluebeard's too-curious wife, the deeply sympathetic Hungarian bass László Polgár as the suffering hero, and the smoldering Chicago Symphony Orchestra. And in a completely different vein, there are glittering performances of Maurice Ravel's elegant and snappy G-major Piano Concerto, with Krystian Zimerman and the spectacular Cleveland Orchestra, and Valses nobles et sentimentales, with the superb London Symphony Orchestra (all on DG). Boulez brings to all of these works the profound insight and clarity -- the refined musical ear -- he's famous for and a controlled but Vesuvial passion that critics somehow prefer to overlook.

Nineteen-ninety-nine marks the 125th anniversary of Schoenberg's birth. No composer of this century challenged our common assumptions about music more. Many people still hate his music. He might be the most controversial composer of all time, though he was confident that someday he'd be better understood -- perhaps even loved. Maybe that's what really drew Schoenberg to a group of poems about a moonstruck clown.