Pierrot - Pierrot Lunaire

Pierrot Lunaire

The fifty poems that were published by Albert Giraud (born Emile Albert Kayenbergh) as Pierrot lunaire: Rondels bergamasques in 1884 quickly attracted composers to set them to music, especially after they were translated, somewhat freely, into German (1892) by the poet and dramatist Otto Erich Hartleben. (Hartleben later went on to write his own Pierrot poems—"The Harp" and five rondels titled Pierrot, Married Man.) The best known of these settings is the atonal song-cycle derived from twenty-one of the poems (in Hartleben's translation) by Arnold Schoenberg in 1912: Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds Pierrot lunaire (Thrice-Seven Poems from Albert Giraud's Pierrot lunaire—Schoenberg was numerologically superstitious). But the poems have dense histories as songs and sets of songs both before and after Schoenberg's landmark Opus 21. The bullet-point that follows lists early 20th-century musical settings chronologically and notes how many poems were set by each composer (all, except Prohaska's, are in the Hartleben translations) and for which instruments.

• Pfohl, Ferdinand: 5 poems ("Moon-rondels, fantastic scenes from 'Pierrot Lunaire'") for voice and piano (1891); Marschalk, Max: 5 poems for voice and piano (1901); Vrieslander, Otto: 50 poems for voice and piano (46 in 1905, 4 more in 1911); Graener, Paul: 3 poems for voice and piano (c. 1908); Marx, Joseph: 4 poems for voice and piano (1909; 1 of 4, "Valse de Chopin", reset for voice, piano, and string quartet in 1917); Schoenberg, Arnold: 21 poems for speaking voice, piano, flute (also piccolo), clarinet (also bass clarinet), violin (also viola), and violoncello (1912); Kowalski, Max: 12 poems for voice and piano (1913); Prohaska, Carl: 6 poems for voice and piano (1920); Lothar, Mark: 1 poem for voice and piano (1921).

As an homage to Schoenberg, the English composers Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle founded The Pierrot Players in 1967; they performed under that name until 1970. The similarly inspired Pierrot Lunaire Ensemble Wien, founded in Vienna by flautist Silvia Gelos and pianist Gustavo Balanesco, is still performing internationally.

In 1987, the Arnold Schoenberg Institute in Los Angeles commissioned the settings of the remaining twenty-nine poems that Schoenberg had neglected, using his original scoring (Sprechstimme optional), by sixteen American composers: Milton Babbitt, Leslie Bassett, Susan Morton Blaustein, Paul Cooper, Miriam Gideon, John Harbison, Donald Harris, Richard Hoffmann, Karl Kohn, William Kraft, Ursula Mamlok, Steve Mosco, Marc Neikrug, Mel Powell, Roger Reynolds, and Leonard Rosenman. The settings were given their premieres between 1988 and 1990 in four concerts sponsored by the Institute. (The director of the Institute, Leonard Stein, added a setting of his own to the final concert of the project.)

Schoenberg's Pierrot has kindled inspiration not only among fellow composers but also among choreographers and singer-performers. Dancers who have staged Pierrot lunaire have included the Russian-born American Adolph Bolm (1926), the American Glen Tetley (1962), the German Marco Goecke (2010) and the French Kader Belarbi (2011). Also, the avant-garde Triadic Ballet (1923) by Oskar Schlemmer and Paul Hindemith was inspired by Schoenberg’s song-cycle. The theatrical/operatic possibilities of Schoenberg's score have been realized by at least two major ensembles: the Opera Quotannis, which staged a version of Pierrot lunaire (with singer Christine Schadeberg) at the New School for Social Research in 1995 and, more recently, the internationally acclaimed contemporary music sextet eighth blackbird, which premiered a "cabaret opera" dramatizing the Schoenberg cycle in 2009. Its percussionist, Matthew Duvall, played Pierrot, and, in addition to the remaining five musicians and a singer/speaker, Lucy Shelton, the production included a dancer, Elyssa Dole. The work, which is being toured in 2012 to mark the centennial of Schoenberg's composition of Pierrot lunaire, was conceived, directed, and choreographed by Mark DeChiazza. (View excerpts.)

Schoenberg has also attracted at least one parodist: in 1924, Hans Eisler published Palmström (Studies on 12-tone Rows), in which a Sprechstimme vocalist, singing texts by Christian Morgenstern, parodies the musical lines of Pierrot to the accompaniment of flute (or piccolo), clarinet, violin (or viola), and violincello.

How inextricable the Giraud and Hartleben poems had become by the late 20th century is suggested by two works. The first, Pierrot Lunaire of 1982, is a retranslation of the Hartleben versions back into French by the poets Michel Butor and Michel Launay, who conclude the volume with poems of their own inspired by Giraud. The second, Variations: Beyond Pierrot (1995), is a work by the American composer Larry Austin. Each of its three ten-minute sections features a Spreschstimme soprano who sings fragments of Schoenberg's 21 selections accompanied by flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. She sometimes renders those fragments in Giraud's original French, sometimes in Hartleben's German, at other times in English and Japanese. Drawing upon live computer-processed sound and computer-processed prerecorded tape, the composition attempts (in Austin's words) to go "beyond Schoenberg's musical melodrama" to create a "multi-lingual dream of the essences of the poems".

In 2001 and 2002, the British composer Roger Marsh set all fifty French poems for a (mostly) a cappella group of singers. Sometimes they sing in French accompanied by a narrator, whose English translations are woven into the music; sometimes they sing in both French and English; sometimes they speak the poems in both languages (in various combinations). The few songs entirely in French are intended to be glossed by action in performance. Instruments occasionally brought in, usually solo, are violin, cello, piano, organ, chimes, and beatbox. The English texts were derived from literal translations of Giraud's poems by Kay Bourlier.

Giraud's original texts (and apparently one of Hartleben's) also stand behind the Seven Pierrot Miniatures (2010) by the Scottish composer Helen Grime, though hers cannot be called "settings", since voice and words are absent. The seven poems she selected—"The Clouds", "Decor", "Absinthe", "Suicide", "The Church", "Sunset", and "The Harp", none used by Schoenberg—were merely "points of departure" for her suite for mixed ensemble.

The painters Paul Klee, Theodor Werner, Marc Chagall, Markus Lüpertz, and Fernando Botero have all produced a Pierrot Lunaire (in 1924, 1942, 1969, 1984, and 2007, respectively). The British writer Helen Stevenson published a Chinese-box-like, postmodern set of variations on Giraud's poems in her 1995 novel Pierrot Lunaire. And Pierrot Lunaire is a very familiar figure in popular art: Brazilian, Italian, and Russian rock groups have called themselves Pierrot Lunaire. The Soft Machine, a British group, included the song "Thank You Pierrot Lunaire" in its 1969 album Volume Two. And in issue #676 of DC Comics, Batman R.I.P.: Midnight in the House of Hurt (2008), Batman acquired a new nemesis, who shadowed him for seven more issues: his name was Pierrot Lunaire.