Page 246 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained

244 PIERROT LUNAIRE, OP. 21

The unsettling nature of the with a distinctive structure of tone
free chromaticism employed by intervals, which could then be
Schoenberg is due largely to its subjected to freer atonal treatment.
lack of formal structure; without
some kind of organization or sense A new music takes shape
With a grotesque giant of progression, it is unpredictable In 1912, the Viennese actress
bow, Pierrot scratches on and offers little relief or resolution. Albertine Zehme commissioned
his viola. Like the stork Schoenberg, nevertheless, felt the Schoenberg to write a song cycle,
on one leg, He bleakly need to harness this freedom to setting verses from Pierrot lunaire:
plucks a pizzicato. avoid a musical anarchy that could rondels bergamasques by Belgian
Albert Giraud limit his expressive range. He symbolist poet Albert Giraud.
turned to some pre-classical formal Schoenberg chose 21 of Giraud’s
structures in which the emphasis 50 poems for his Pierrot lunaire,
was more on counterpoint than using the German translation by
harmony. These included imitative Otto Erich Hartleben. He saw the
devices, such as canons and work, though, not as a collection
fugues, as well as simple forms, of songs sung in sequence but as a
The resulting music chimed well such as the rondo and passacaglia melodrama. It was to be a dramatic
with expressionism and had a (a style using the repetition of recitation accompanied by a small
disturbing, often nightmarish effect. a theme or sequence of chords ensemble of instruments, in a
Where Wagner’s unresolved over which there are certain “light, ironical, satirical tone,”
harmonies evoked anticipation, variations). Within these structures, with echoes of both the Italian
yearning, or unrequited love, Schoenberg used as his building comedy form commedia dell’arte,
Schoenberg’s created anxiety and blocks small fragments or motifs from which the Pierrot character
apprehension. Rather than express that consisted of a handful of notes originated, and contemporary
emotions, his atonality dealt with cabaret performances.
psychological states. Schoenberg The poems present surreal
would have been aware of the Pierrot and Columbine, played by and often grotesque glimpses of
Alexander Zaitsev and Mara Galeazzi,
research being carried out in look to the moon in a production of the world of the commedia dell’arte.
Vienna at the time by the founder Pierrot lunaire at the Royal Opera Their mystical quality is matched
of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. House, London, in 2007. by Schoenberg’s settings. Without
tonality, the music creates an

To call any relation
of tones atonal is as
little justified as to
designate a relation
of colors aspectral or
acomplementary. Such an
antithesis does not exist.
Arnold Schoenberg

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