 |
| The original ensemble at the premiere. Schoenberg is third from the left. |
I just realized why I have always felt a special connection to Pierrot Lunaire. Way back in my late teens when I was first discovering classical music, including 20th century music (I found Stuckenschmidt's book on 20th century music in the local library), I had listened to some Schoenberg and found the idea of atonal music fascinating. At the same time a friend of mine who played piano and I (on electric bass) had a gig every Friday night at the local legion (the Canadian equivalent of the VFW) playing cocktail music. He was also into Schoenberg so sometimes, after midnight, when everyone was pretty liquored up, we would start doing surreal music. We would take a popular song but modulate up a semitone every verse. Then, as a finale, we would do free, atonal improvisations in the style of Schoenberg. Here's the funny thing, no-one ever came over and said, "hey, what is that crap, stop it!" I guess they just didn't notice. So when Malcolm MacDonald calls Pierrot Lunaire "a kind of surrealist cabaret act," I'm right there. I've felt very at home with Schoenberg's surrealist side from a young age.
(I have this fantasy that one night on her tour, Taylor Swift comes out and sings a Schoenberg lieder, maybe Herzgewächse! That's his op 20, written just before Pierrot. Now that would be actually cool. Instead of having pop music culture infiltrate the classical world, let's have the opposite.)
Forgive me a slight digression: I was very lucky in first year university to have an outstanding professor for my English literature class. We had been assigned to read the short story, written in 1914, by Franz Kafka titled "In the Penal Colony." The story is rather grim:
The story is set in an unnamed penal colony and describes the last use of an elaborate torture and execution device that carves the commandment that the condemned prisoner has transgressed on his skin as he slowly dies over the course of twelve hours.
At the next class our professor strode into the room, dumped some books on his lectern and said "This is a very funny story." And so it is, once you realize how comic the excesses in the story are. Also, it is interesting that Richard Taruskin in his discussion of Pierrot Lunaire (composed in 1912) describes Der Mondfleck as a "thoroughgoing irony ... and a much funnier one (in a bewildering sort of way)." He also says "From a bogus masterpiece of counterpoint, Der Mondfleck becomes a genuine masterpiece of self-mocking irony." All the theorists, including Charles Rosen, seem to have missed the joke, failing to notice that canon, fugue and palindrome present no challenge once you have emancipated dissonance. [Taruskin quote is from The Oxford History of Western Music, volume 4, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, pp 462-465]
Another delightful irony is that Pierrot Lunaire was, at the time, Schoenberg's breakaway hit: he and the original "singer" Albertine Zehme toured Pierrot for more than a decade. Nowadays, due to the tireless efforts of generations of theorists, we are forbidden to notice the jokes and the delicious delirium of this masterwork of expressionism.
Speaking of theorists, general writers on Pierrot have also missed the boat, an excellent example being the only book in English specifically devoted to the piece, Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire by Jonathan Dunsby. This book is so stifled by the author's academic Englishness that it goes to great lengths to avoid actually saying anything about the piece.
With the genre and the cult gone, the 'thorny surface' of Pierrot remains, and, though 'baffle' is a strong term, threaded throughout this volume will be found indications of how inherently ungraspable Pierrot is. [op. cit. p. 9]
Compare Taruskin's discussion of the first piece, Mondestrunken:
The music is very easy to analyze, since its all-important Grundgestalt--the intervallic shape or "cell" that provides the melodic and harmonic raw material--is presented at the very outset in the form of an ostinato in the piano part. It may be very easily traced throughout the piece... [The Oxford History of Western Music, volume 4, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, p. 461]
Yeah, "inherently ungraspable." Later on Professor Dunsby casually mentions that "elaborate, music-theoretic description .. would be inappropriate here." Though he details the shifting orchestration and dates of composition of the various pieces, actual discussion of the specific musical detail is avoided in favor of generalities: "densely chromatic harmony," "fragmentary interludes," "semiquaver figuration," "motivic repetitions," --after dozens of pages of this one longs for some actual concrete detail. Professor Dunsby's volume is a slim eighty pages, I guess if he had grasped Pierrot it would have been longer.
Mondestrunken (Drunk with Moonlight) and Der Mondfleck (The Moon Spot) are favorites with theorists, so let's look at another piece, number 8, Nacht (Night). The Grundgestalt is easy to pick out as this is a passacaglia. In melodic form, the ten-note motif is:
This is preceded by a brief introduction where the motif is compressed and buried deep in the bottom register of the piano. It continually reappears, in eighth notes in the piano:
Also in the bass clarinet (in Bb):
The best explanation of how atonality works in Schoenberg is found in Charles Rosen's book Arnold Schoenberg published by the University of Chicago Press.
What Schoenberg, consciously or unconsciously, realized before anyone else is that the concept of themes and the system of motivic construction were bound up with a symmetrical system of harmony clearly oriented around a central triad... Schoenberg was not the first composer to abandon "triadic" harmony; but he was the first to realize fully the implications of such a revolution for all the other aspects of musical form. [op. cit. p. 42]
Th[e] emancipation of tone color was as significant and as characteristic of the first decades of the twentieth century as the emancipation of dissonance. [p. 48]
[A] new ideal of harmonic consistency is supported by Schoenberg's idiosyncratic form of motivic construction in parts of Pierrot Lunaire... A short motif of from three to fourteen notes provides the nucleus not only for the entire melodic development but for almost every note of the accompaniment as well. [p. 51] The harmony implied by these motifs pervades the music completely: they are meant to give any work composed by this method an individual and characteristic sonority. [p. 52]
Let's listen to Nacht with the score:
I think that the main reason Schoenberg remains controversial to this day, a hundred years after these pieces were written, while others like Stravinsky and Bartók are fully absorbed into the canon, is that he has been consistently misunderstood the whole time--including by Theodor Adorno!
References
No comments:
Post a Comment