The Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg started work on Pierrot Lunaire 100 years ago this month, on March 12, 1912. It was one of the most dramatically new-sounding pieces of the 20th century and helped pave the way to Schoenberg’s “Method of Composing with Twelve Tones Which Are Related Only with One Another,” also known as the 12-tone technique or serialism, a rigorous system of atonal composition that has fallen in and out of favour through the decades.
In Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg introduced a vocal technique he called Sprechtstimme, where the performer rhythmically speaks the text in a way that approaches, but never fully blooms into, singing. The 21 poems find a moonstruck Pierrot discussing death, love, blasphemy and religion. It must have sounded like an early 20th century equivalent of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll to the audience, who reacted with laughter and whistling at the Berlin premiere in 1912.
Éva Gauthier says ‘no’ to Arnold Schoenberg
As reported in a previous blog post, Schoenberg had hoped to have the accomplished Canadian soprano Éva Gauthier premiere the work in North America, but she refused. This was out of character for Gauthier, a singer known for her adventurous spirit and close collaborations with other early 20th-century composers. It was the only time she refused to premiere a major work. Why?
Thanks to information provided by Montreal-based educator and musicologist Nadia Turbide, we know that Gauthier was not impressed by the work. In an excerpt from a 1985 issue of Music Magazine, Turbide wrote: “In the fall of 1922, Edgard Varèse’s International Composers’ Guild had invited [Gauthier] to participate in the North American premiere of the work, but she wrote to Carl Engel, a close friend and colleague, that studying such a work from miniature score was highly difficult, and she felt a certain antipathy for the work which was ‘neither this nor that.’”
In the end, Gauthier’s concerns about it being a difficult study may have been well founded. The first performance required 40 rehearsals, an enormous time commitment by any measure.
Pierrot Lunaire has been performed and recorded many times by various artists, including jazz singer Cleo Laine, and pop singer Björk, as well as Christine Schäfer, Yvonne Minton and Canadian contralto Patricia Rideout-Rosenberg, with Glenn Gould at the piano.
The music has proved to be a masterpiece composed by one of the 20th-century’s most interesting and provocative composers.
Does Pierrot Lunaire speak to you 100 years later?
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