Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire Analysis

The source of the text for Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire was a cycle of poems in French by Belgian writer Albert Giraud. In 1892 Otto Erich Hartleben translated the poems into German Wealthy and socially prominent, she was also trained both as a singer, having been coached in Wagnerian roles by Cosima Wagner. She was particularly intrigued with the idea of performing melodramas. Reciting dramatic poetry to music was fashionable at the end of the 19th century and well suited Frau Zehme’s tastes.

Schoenberg wrote Pierrot Lunaire in 1912, after being commissioned by Albertine Zehme, an actress who organized evenings of poetry readings and recitations accompanied by piano or small instrumental (music) ensembles. The texts were chosen from a collection

National Socialists regard me as a cultural Bolshevik, but the communists reject me as bourgeois. Anti-Semites personify me as a Jew, my direction as Jewish, but almost no Jews have followed my direction.” Schoenberg had grown up with very little knowledge of Jewish tradition, though from youth he had been a student of the Bible — Luther’s German version. Around the time Mahler converted to Roman Catholicism (a requirement to be director of the Vienna Opera), Schoenberg converted to Lutheranism (which would be of no such professional help in Catholic Vienna). The more he encountered anti-Semitism, however, the more he came to embrace his Jewish heritage. One of Schoenberg’s biggest fans at the beginning of his career was the Russian

Only an imperious historical hindsight could claim that it was inevitable. But it should hardly surprise us, though Schoenberg historians have tended to let the originality, freshness, surprise of the composer’s Op.21 as a whole seep into its more or less predictable commedia aspect. The time was just right. Perhaps this is what Webern meant when he wrote to Berg about Schonenberg’s new commission, commenting that the maestro had had something of the sort in mind for a long time. This leads us back to the idea outlined above of how Schoenberg’s Pierrot made himself immortal, not only through the transformation of a genre(the melodrama), but also the death of a cult. Historians seem to be in general agreement that, if it can be argued that a commedia cult held sway from about 1890, it must also be argued that it disappeared during the 1930s. Western art is a mobile, fluid experience for any one observer. If it were not, a few seconds looking at a masterly painting would do for life, and nothing would be gained from attending Don Giovanni more that once. The concert-goer must be presumed to hold to this view of the mobility and fluidity of perception, for itf not the stock repertoire would become unbearably boring, and the