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Monday, November 11, 2024
Pierrot Lunaire
Schoenberg, Self-portrait, 1910
In preparation for the first performance of Pierrot Lunaire in Berlin in 1912, they held forty rehearsals! For comparison, a typical orchestral concert these days would likely have two, perhaps three rehearsals and the recording of an orchestral soundtrack for a motion picture would have no rehearsals. Yep, they just sightread it. Now, of course, chamber music is different and a piece using new techniques for an entirely new kind of ensemble with a singer using an entirely new kind of vocal technique would require quite a few rehearsals. But I very much doubt that any performance of any kind of music whatsoever gets forty rehearsals these days. So, yes, this is a different kind of piece than pretty much anything else you have encountered. You have to listen very closely and very carefully. Let's start by listening to this fine performance (especially by the pianist, Pierre-Laurent Aimard who I heard play a huge program focussed on Schoenberg in Salzburg this past August, and the soprano, Kiera Duffy) with English sub-titles:
What you should do now, is, wait for it, listen to it again! In that special concert series Schoenberg organized, the Society for Private Musical Performances, they actually did this in concert: the same piece might be played twice.
Now for some context: Schoenberg was a very creative person across various genres: the self-portrait at the top of the post was painted just before he composed Pierrot Lunaire and is a quite respectable artwork in the German expressionist tradition. He was also very influenced and inspired by poetry. As we learn from the Wikipedia article, Pierrot Lunaire is a setting of 21 poems from the cycle of the same name by the Belgian symbolist poet Albert Giraud.
Schoenberg's career came at a moment of severe transition in music history spanning the movement from late 19th century lushly orchestrated works for large orchestra, such as his Gurrelieder, through a period of free atonality, where Pierrot falls, through a Neo-classic period with reference to older forms, to a serialist phase using 12-tone technique. Schoenberg was a leading figure in all of these phases.
He was obsessed with numerology which in this piece involves the numbers 3 and 7: three main sections, each with seven poems, many seven-note motifs throughout, the ensemble (including conductor) comprises seven performers, and so on.
Here is another performance of the piece:
And here is an analysis by Samuel Andreyev:
After walking through a piece like Der Mondfleck with its multiple canonic imitations, motivic density and palindrome structure, you can certainly see why it took a lot of rehearsal. The corollary to that is that it requires that we listen to it lots of times. Here is yet another performance, this time by an Irish ensemble:
I might come back to this piece in a followup post, but for now this will serve as an introduction.
Thanks Bryan, for provoking me to listen to Pierrot Lunaire, a piece I heard live about 12 years ago, performed at the Yale Cabaret. Today I listened to a French version! I had a long frive home from work and driving alone is an excellent way to listen without any interuptions, so I searched Spotify and found a 2024 recording and listened to the whole thing. I didn't expect it to be in French! And the recording follows your recommendation to listen AGAIN, since after the vocal version there was another version purely instrumental, which was easier to study because the emotional charge of the vocalist was not there. Her name is Jessica Martin Maresco.
I have many subjective reactions (not much objective analysis) but that will have to wait another day, since it's already after midnight meaning in less than 7 hours I'll be back to that stupid 75-90 minute drive. I'll look for a German version for that ride.
The really excellent thing about the first performance I posted is that there are subtitles in English for all the texts. I kind of think this is essential, unless you are following in the score. The only problem there is you have to watch the video, so not recommended while driving!
This has always been a hard nut to crack for me. For one, the poetry is not very good; there’s a reason that Albert Giraud is basically forgotten outside of contributing the libretto to Schoenberg’s piece. Secondly, Schoenberg was writing with a certain kind of caberet-ish live performance in mind, and I think audiences listening at home are missing an essential ingredient.
I think that there are historical reasons why Schoenberg was drawn to this kind of poetry and I'm planning on doing another post locating the work in the historical context. But don't you think it is just amazing to listen to?
Some years ago now I did a post here where I talked about acknowledged masterpieces that people don't read or listen to. Two examples I gave were Pindar's Odes and Pierrot Lunaire. Part of the issue as Bryan alludes to is the echt Viennese ambiance that these works draw upon. ( NB I also made a later post concerning Webern's vocal works that made the same point about his songs.) It must be remembered that there was a thriving cabaret and operetta scene, what the Viennese called Volkstheater up to WW2. Unfortunately this style is kaputsky now. You have to hear recordings from the 20s and 30s or see German movies of that era on how the style was performed. There are a few recordings from the 50s which still have some of that flavor without being full bore; Merry Widow with Schwarzkopf and Giuditta with Hilde Gueden.
With that said, I do not find any of these posted vocal performances of Lunaire remotely adequate. The singers are all over the place regarding sprechstimme and overall are very bland and generic in their approach. Technically the musicians are excellent but lack any sense of the style either. While there is no great performance I would suggest one recording that at least is in the ballpark: Boulez with Helga Pilarczyk. The recording is a bit rough though.
Schoenberg with sprechstimme and that operettaish musical style guaranteed unwittingly that the piece would become completely dated in a style sense. It would take a stylistic excavation similar to HIP Baroque music to re-establish but I don't see anyone making that kind of effort. Sprechstimme is too difficult for most classical singers and probably would require actresses who can sing if they were willing to practice for hours.
Pierrot Lunaire is a complex and challenging piece, and part of the complexity is certainly the fact that it is a very innovative piece, musically, that at the same time on the surface makes reference to the musical style of a cabaret. He makes this interesting comment in the foreword to the score:
"The performer's task here is at no time to derive the mood and character of the individual pieces from the meaning of the words, but always solely from the music. To the extent that the tonepainterly representation [tonmalerische Darstellung] of the events and feelings in the text were of importance to the composer, it will be found in the music anyway. Wherever the performer fails to find it, he must resist adding something that the composer did not intend. If he did so, he would not be adding, but subtracting."
That certainly has implications for the performance practice.
Composer manifestos are all very interesting but if Schoenberg were serious about what he said he should have written a wordless vocal.The medieval contrapuntalists were far more successful in maintaining music over words by paying no attention to any speech pattern for the words they set.
In any event, my main objection to the posted vocalists is that they are not doing sprechstimme but just some idiosyncratic way of singing. They also seem to have no sense of following the accompaniment in the requisite style demanded by Schoenberg, perhaps because the instrumentalists aren't doing it either. Cleo Laine with the Nash Ensemble did a better job of it without being great.
The fact that these sprechstimme vocals are not to be sung but spoken in a very theatrical way also makes it difficult for vocalists to ignore the words. For those who don't know, sprechstimme is speaking a vocal part that is still notated with (approximate) pitch and exact rhythmic values. The note pitch should not be maintained the way a singer would normally do but as one would in speaking it. This is why classical singers are a poor fit for sprechstimme because it requires them to forget everything they have been taught. It is much closer to the way many less trained vocalists sing cabaret songs, half speaking them. I again recommend using cabaret/theater singers instead if they are willing to practice it adequately.
Here is a quote from Schoenberg: the singer “immediately abandons [the note] by falling or rising. The goal is certainly not at all a realistic, natural speech. On the contrary, the difference between ordinary speech and speech that collaborates in a musical form must be made plain. But it should not call singing to mind, either." Pierre Boulez noted "the question arises whether it is actually possible to speak according to a notation devised for singing. This was the real problem at the root of all the controversies. Schoenberg’s own remarks on the subject are not in fact clear.” By all accounts Schoenberg himself was dissatisfied with many performances of Lunaire.
Asking singers to ignore the words (poetry) they are speaking as actual words and grammatical phrases when their setting is fairly close to the norm is a bit much. But what you end up with now are younger classical singers and musicians without any stylistic awareness playing it as generic classical songs sung oddly.
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7 comments:
Thanks Bryan, for provoking me to listen to Pierrot Lunaire, a piece I heard live about 12 years ago, performed at the Yale Cabaret. Today I listened to a French version! I had a long frive home from work and driving alone is an excellent way to listen without any interuptions, so I searched Spotify and found a 2024 recording and listened to the whole thing. I didn't expect it to be in French! And the recording follows your recommendation to listen AGAIN, since after the vocal version there was another version purely instrumental, which was easier to study because the emotional charge of the vocalist was not there. Her name is Jessica Martin Maresco.
I have many subjective reactions (not much objective analysis) but that will have to wait another day, since it's already after midnight meaning in less than 7 hours I'll be back to that stupid 75-90 minute drive. I'll look for a German version for that ride.
The really excellent thing about the first performance I posted is that there are subtitles in English for all the texts. I kind of think this is essential, unless you are following in the score. The only problem there is you have to watch the video, so not recommended while driving!
This has always been a hard nut to crack for me. For one, the poetry is not very good; there’s a reason that Albert Giraud is basically forgotten outside of contributing the libretto to Schoenberg’s piece. Secondly, Schoenberg was writing with a certain kind of caberet-ish live performance in mind, and I think audiences listening at home are missing an essential ingredient.
I think that there are historical reasons why Schoenberg was drawn to this kind of poetry and I'm planning on doing another post locating the work in the historical context. But don't you think it is just amazing to listen to?
Some years ago now I did a post here where I talked about acknowledged masterpieces that people don't read or listen to. Two examples I gave were Pindar's Odes and Pierrot Lunaire. Part of the issue as Bryan alludes to is the echt Viennese ambiance that these works draw upon. ( NB I also made a later post concerning Webern's vocal works that made the same point about his songs.) It must be remembered that there was a thriving cabaret and operetta scene, what the Viennese called Volkstheater up to WW2. Unfortunately this style is kaputsky now. You have to hear recordings from the 20s and 30s or see German movies of that era on how the style was performed. There are a few recordings from the 50s which still have some of that flavor without being full bore; Merry Widow with Schwarzkopf and Giuditta with Hilde Gueden.
With that said, I do not find any of these posted vocal performances of Lunaire remotely adequate. The singers are all over the place regarding sprechstimme and overall are very bland and generic in their approach. Technically the musicians are excellent but lack any sense of the style either. While there is no great performance I would suggest one recording that at least is in the ballpark: Boulez with Helga Pilarczyk. The recording is a bit rough though.
Schoenberg with sprechstimme and that operettaish musical style guaranteed unwittingly that the piece would become completely dated in a style sense. It would take a stylistic excavation similar to HIP Baroque music to re-establish but I don't see anyone making that kind of effort. Sprechstimme is too difficult for most classical singers and probably would require actresses who can sing if they were willing to practice for hours.
Pierrot Lunaire is a complex and challenging piece, and part of the complexity is certainly the fact that it is a very innovative piece, musically, that at the same time on the surface makes reference to the musical style of a cabaret. He makes this interesting comment in the foreword to the score:
"The performer's task here is at no time to derive the mood and character of the individual pieces from the meaning of the words, but always solely from the music. To the extent that the tonepainterly representation [tonmalerische Darstellung] of the events and feelings in the text were of importance to the composer, it will be found in the music anyway. Wherever the performer fails to find it, he must resist adding something that the composer did not intend. If he did so, he would not be adding, but subtracting."
That certainly has implications for the performance practice.
Composer manifestos are all very interesting but if Schoenberg were serious about what he said he should have written a wordless vocal.The medieval contrapuntalists were far more successful in maintaining music over words by paying no attention to any speech pattern for the words they set.
In any event, my main objection to the posted vocalists is that they are not doing sprechstimme but just some idiosyncratic way of singing. They also seem to have no sense of following the accompaniment in the requisite style demanded by Schoenberg, perhaps because the instrumentalists aren't doing it either. Cleo Laine with the Nash Ensemble did a better job of it without being great.
The fact that these sprechstimme vocals are not to be sung but spoken in a very theatrical way also makes it difficult for vocalists to ignore the words. For those who don't know, sprechstimme is speaking a vocal part that is still notated with (approximate) pitch and exact rhythmic values. The note pitch should not be maintained the way a singer would normally do but as one would in speaking it. This is why classical singers are a poor fit for sprechstimme because it requires them to forget everything they have been taught. It is much closer to the way many less trained vocalists sing cabaret songs, half speaking them. I again recommend using cabaret/theater singers instead if they are willing to practice it adequately.
Here is a quote from Schoenberg: the singer “immediately abandons [the note] by falling or rising. The goal is certainly not at all a realistic, natural speech. On the contrary, the difference between ordinary speech and speech that collaborates in a musical form must be made plain. But it should not call singing to mind, either." Pierre Boulez noted "the question arises whether it is actually possible to speak according to a notation devised for singing. This was the real problem at the root of all the controversies. Schoenberg’s own remarks on the subject are not in fact clear.” By all accounts Schoenberg himself was dissatisfied with many performances of Lunaire.
Asking singers to ignore the words (poetry) they are speaking as actual words and grammatical phrases when their setting is fairly close to the norm is a bit much. But what you end up with now are younger classical singers and musicians without any stylistic awareness playing it as generic classical songs sung oddly.
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