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Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Atonal Expressionism
Who wouldn’t want to drink wine with their eyes, poured by the moon at night? It certainly would be intoxicatingly painful. And this is exactly how I would describe the experience of listening to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. If you’re curious have a listen yourself — this can be your next Halloween jam:
Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire is an example of 20th century atonal expressionist music. Moving away from post-romantic, Wagnerian music, Schoenberg aimed to create music that is expressive and has a new type of emotional and dramatic naturalism. This type of musical expressionism, much like its counterpart in visual arts with the Blaue Reiter movement, was concerned with expressing disturbing emotions in violent and parodic extremities.
Schoenberg tried to achieve this by challenging traditional elements of music like keys and tonality. He advocated for the emancipation of dissonance in music. In traditional music, dissonant chords are seen as secondary to consonance, and are bound to be resolved by consonant chords. Schoenberg acknowledged dissonances’ musical value and argued that they should be seen as chords in their own rights. So he developed atonal music: music that does not have any system of tonality or key. What holds the music together in the absence of tonality are text and recurring motives. All of these elements can be found in “Mondestrunken” (Moondrunk) song no.1 in Pierrot Lunaire, a piece from Schoenberg’s ‘free atonal’ phase.
Pierrot Lunaire is a melodrama that is set to 21 selected poems. These poems are German translations of Albert Giraud’s cycle of French symbolist poems of the same name. Schoenberg’s surreal and psychological melodrama features a narrator who delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style. Sprechstimme is a type of vocal enunciation between speaking and singing. The speech of the narrator, a soprano, has a musical form but it never turns into actual singing. The narrator follows a certain rhythm; her voice rises and falls, never staying on a clear pitch. She is singing (or speaking) in the grey areas between keys, away from any kind of conventional harmony — it’s almost like hearing a guitar getting tuned.
Schoenberg reinforces this atonality with his notation: the notes are approximated and written out but are never sung in exact pitches. The undulating pitches of the narrator’s voice create a surreal, supernatural effect, which makes the listener feel extremely uneasy. It is also highly intriguing to hear these approximate pitches because they introduce a new sound world to the listener. The narrator is accompanied by a piano, flute, clarinet, violin and cello — like a chamber ensemble. The motive introduced by the piano at the beginning of the piece, climbing up and down, is played by the other instruments throughout the piece. This recurring motive creates a sense of coherence in the piece and makes up for the lack of a home key. The violin is used expressively by being picked or played smoothly in longer phrases. Each instrument has its own rhythm. This syncopation creates a sense of controlled chaos.
Is poured down in waves by the moon at night,
And a spring tide overflows
The silent horizon.
This modernist piece composed by Schoenberg introduces the listener to a surreal world. It heightens the psychological effect of music with its atonality and the Sprechstimme style. Schoenberg recreates the psychotic aura of Giraud’s poem with his inventive approach to music. This expressive, dramatic, and certainly memorable piece evokes anxious urges and disturbing feelings.
Recommended Reading: “Art and the Arts” (1966) by Theodor Adorno
