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Yesterday, 12
March, I wrote the first of
the Pierrot lunaire
melodrarnas. I think
it’s turned out very well.
It provides lots of new
ideas. And I feel I’m really
moving in the
direction of a new form of
expression. The sounds are
starting to
express
physical and psychological
impulses of literally
animal-like immediacy.
Almost as
though
everything were transmitted
directly.
Arnold Schoenberg, Berlin
Diary
“Emanations of
the Soul” - Schoenberg’s
Pierrot lunaire and
Erwartung
From the
vantage point of the late
twentieth century, writers on
Schoenberg now tend to see in
him an innovator in terms of
compositional technique: in
works such as Erwartung
and Pierrot lunaire,
he was one of the first
composers to experiment with
free atonality, a propensity
that he later sought to curb
by “inventing” twelve-note
technique. For Schoenberg
himself, however, these
technical innovations were
merely a means to an end in
his search for a new mode of
expression in which the notes
would not follow historically
established rules but have an
emotional life of their own:
“Art is a cry for help on the
part of those who have
first-hand experience of the
fate of humanity. It is
inside, within them, that the
world stirs; only the echo -
the work of art - finds its
way into the outside world.”
In this respect, the works of
Schoenberg’s early atonal
period are his most radical:
they reflect the inner turmoil
and anxieties felt by modern
man in an age of social
upheaval. As a result, the
composer encountered violent
opposition in conservative
circles, so much so that in a
review of one of the first
Berlin performances of Pierrot
lunaire we read:
“Schoenberg is the cruelest of
all composers for he mingles
with his music sharp daggers
at white heat, with which he
pares away tiny slices of his
victim’s flesh. Anon he twists
the knife in the fresh wound
and you receive another
horrible thrill.”
From 1907 onwards, lack of
public understanding went hand
in hand with a profound crisis
in Schoenberg’s private life,
a crisis that even led him to
consider taking his own life:
“I had to fight for every new
work; I had been insulted by
critics in the most shameless
manner; I had lost friends and
had lost all faith in the
judgement of my friends. And I
stood almost alone in a world
full of enemies.” In short,
the Works of this period may
be seen as attempts at
self-assurance: it was also at
this time that Schoenberg
began to paint - largely
self-portraits that reveal the
vast distance that had opened
up within him, such was his
self-alienation. In this
context, the monodrama Erwartung
and the cycle of melodramas Pierrot
lunaire acquire a
powerful autobiographical
edge, while at the same time
providing a subtle atmospheric
portrait of their age: both
works use night as a location
and as a metaphor; in both,
the words describe not real
events but psychological
projections; and both
protagonists are social
outsiders with twisted minds -
creatures of the night who
cease to haunt the world when
the new day dawns. As a
result, Schoenberg now turned
his back on a genre that had
played an important role in
his early works: the
piano-accompanied solo song as
the epitome of Romantic
subjectivity.
The
second element of the title -
the French word “lunaire”
- has the idea of fanciful
otherworldliness. The
expression “être dans la
lune” means “to have
one’s head in the clouds”,
a state of distraction that is
true not only of the pierrot
figure in Ctto Erich
Hartleben’s free translation
of Albert Giraud’s cycle of
poems but also of the nameless
woman in Erwartung.
From time immemorial,
moonlight as a purely
reflective source of light has
signified the unconscious and
the demonic: the moon is
associated here with
fickleness and folly. In the
cold moonlight, there is no
emotional warmth, no sense of
community and in contrast to
Richard Dehmel’s poem, Verklärte
Nacht, which had earlier
inspired Schoenberg to write
his string sextet of the same
name, these later works no
longer have anything to do
with the Romantic yearning for
reconciliation beneath night’s
protective mantle. Here it is
fear that is the dominant
factor, with menacing
hallucinations betraying the
characters’ defencelessness
and lack of direction.
Theodor W
Adorno once described
Schoenberg’s early atonal
works as “psychoanalytical
dream case studies”: “Passions
are no longer simulated, but
rather genuine emotions of the
unconscious - of shock, of
trauma - are registered
without disguise through the
medium of music.” This is
especially true of Erwartung,
where the disjointed sentences
of the woman wandering through
the forest by night suggest a
rambling stream of
consciousness with no linear
development or cohesion to it.
“It is impossible”,
wrote Schoenberg, “for a
person to feel only one
thing at a time. People feel
thousands of things at once.
And these thousands of things
can no more be summed up than
apples and pears. They
diverge. And this variety,
this multiplicity, this lack
of logic that our
feelings reveal, this lack of
logic demonstrated by the
associations revealed by a
rising wave of blood or by
some physical or nervous
reaction - it is this that I
should like to have in my
music.”
The libretto
that Schoenberg commissioned
from Marie Pappenheim has
often been criticised for its
austere artlessness, but this
was in fact precisely what
Schoenberg wanted from a
stylistic point of view. Words
and music are said to have
been written within a matter
of weeks, hence the fact that
the work comes closest to the
composer’s goal of creating
“emanations of the soul”.
Against
this background, Pierrot
lunaire, which dates
from three years later,
appears as an ironical
counterpart to Erwartung,
depicting, as it does, the
same states of mind, but as
though seen in a distorting
mirror. Writers have expressed
surprise that the
“expressionist” Schoenberg
turned to Giraud’s fustian and
aestheticist verses at so late
a date in his development.
Initially, it is true, it was
merely out of financial
necessity that he accepted
this commission from the
Viennese diseuse,
Albertine Zehme, but later he
worked on it with real
enthusiasm. From the distance
of Berlin, where he was
temporarily living at this
time, he seems to have adopted
an ironical attitude to
turn-of-the-century Vienna,
with the historical pierrot of
the commedia dell'arte
tradition serving merely as a
surface on to which to project
stereotypical psychological
processes, thereby making it
possible for him to strike
what he himself called a
“light, ironical and satirical
tone”. Inspired by these
poems, which are cast in the
strict literary form of the
rondeau and thus in stark
contrast to Pierrot’s confused
hallucinations, the stream of
musical ideas that flows along
unimpeded in Erwartung
is tamed in Pierrot
lunaire by means of
knowing borrowings from
historical forms such as the
waltz and barcarolle, the
passacaglia and the Baroque
trio Sonata.
Corinna
Hesse
(Translation:
Stewart Spencer)
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