Moon-Drunk Pierrot

The concert last night was centered around the 1912 composition by Arnold Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire. The creative intelligence behind this performance was Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the virtuoso violinist, born in Moldova. Her parents moved to Vienna when she was twelve and she now lives in Switzerland, but performs all over the world. I had previously heard her in an excellent performance of the Stravinsky Violin Concerto. Last night she was the singer/speaker leading the ensemble. The setting is for violin doubling on viola, flute, clarinet doubling on bass clarinet, cello and piano.

The way the program was laid out showed considerable aesthetic ingenuity. The three parts of Pierrot, which consists of twenty-one poems by the Belgian symbolist poet Albert Giraud translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben, each contain seven poems. Kopatchinskaya inserted waltzes by Johann Strauss in arrangements by Schoenberg and Webern, between the sections and preceded the program with her own arrangement of a Presto by C. P. E. Bach in a very hocketized texture. The whole worked extraordinarily well. The second waltz, Schatzwalzer op. 418, brought the house down. At the end of the performance the artists were called back on stage numerous times. A brilliant evening for a unique and uniquely challenging piece of music.

The poems are set in the form known as rondels bergamasques where each poem has thirteen lines in three stanzas of four lines, four lines and five lines. The first two lines are repeated as lines seven and eight and the first line is repeated again at the end. Schoenberg sets the poetry in a freely atonal style--the work comes at the peak of his expressionist phase--but uses a variety of historic musical forms including canon, fugue, rondo and passacaglia. The whole work ultimately derives from the seven-note motif we hear in the piano at the very beginning.

To get a taste of the poetry, here is a translation of the first poem:

The wine that one drinks with one's eyes

Is poured down in waves by the moon at night,

And a spring tide overflows

The silent horizon.

Lusts, thrilling and sweet

Float numberless through the waters!

The wine that one drinks with one's eyes

Is poured down in waves by the moon at night.

The poet, urged on by his devotions,

Becomes intoxicated with the sacred beverage;

Enraptured, he turns toward heaven

His head, and, staggering, sucks and sips

The wine that one drinks with one's eyes.

Here is a recording of Patricia Kopatchinskaja performing this same piece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjRSpdymHvY

Here is the Webern arrangement of the Strauss waltz:

That should give you a pretty good sense of the performance.

I am rather a fan of the music of Arnold Schoenberg, which I know is not very common. But I very early on encountered his Verklärte Nacht and have found nearly everything he has done to be expressively powerful. This is music with real individual character and that is a rare quality these days. So yes, I quite enjoyed the concert. It was held in the Mozarteum Grosser Saal, which is a really resplendent environment:

I just missed getting a good shot of the performers acknowledging applause. Patricia, in Pierrot costume is just exiting to the right.

And finally, next to the Grosser Saal, is one of the older buildings belonging to the Mozart Stifftung (Foundation):