As host John Kennedy told us before Intermezzi III, he could not let the hundredth anniversary year of Arnold Schoenberg’s groundbreaking Pierrot Lunaire go by without bringing it to us here at Spoleto for the first time. What? Hundred-year-old “New Music?” Well, Kennedy described it to us as an ageless work, one that could’ve been written yesterday, and that could still come across to modern audiences as radically new, even avant-garde, with its pervasive atonality and use of the “Sprechstimme” (speak-voice) technique. While I have a recording of it, I was overjoyed to get to hear this classic in performance for the first time.
The work sets 21 poems (three sets of seven each) by expressionist poet Albert Giraud, which have to do with the actions, antics, and experiences of Pierrot: the classic “sad clown” of the old European commedia dell’arte tradition. The half-sung, half-spoken Sprechstimme technique — with its characteristic vocal swoops, sighs, shrieks, whispers and moans — had its origins in the stylized vocal techniques of German Cabaret. It seems ideally suited to the whimsical and totally unpredictable character of Pierrot. Since, unlike conventional singing, the technique follows no specific tonal scheme, it also lends itself well to the atonality of the work’s instrumental accompaniment (which can be either an orchestra or the five-instrument chamber ensemble heard here). You should know that the so-called “free atonality” of this piece pre-dates the “serial” or “twelve-tone” techniques that Schoenberg later developed to bring some order to the chaos of disorganized atonality.
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