1 Introduction

JENNIFER SHAW AND JOSEPH AUNER

This Cambridge Companion provides an introduction to the central

works, writings, and ideas of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). Few
would challenge the contention that Schoenberg is one of the most
important figures in twentieth-century music, though whether his ulti-
mate achievement or influence is for good or ill is still hotly debated. There
are those champions who regard as essential his works, theories, and
signature ideas such as “the emancipation of the dissonance,” and “com-
position with twelve tones related only to one another,” just as there are
numerous critics who would cite precisely the same evidence to argue that
Schoenberg is responsible for having led music astray.
No doubt many readers will take up this volume with some measure of
trepidation; for concertgoers, students, and musicians, the name Schoenberg
can still carry a certain negative charge. And while the music of other early
modernist twentieth-century composers who have preceded Schoenberg
into the ranks of the Cambridge Companions – including Debussy, Bartók,
Stravinsky, and even Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg – could be regarded as
having achieved something of a state of artistic normalcy, Schoenberg’s
music for many remains beyond the pale. It is not our purpose here to bring
Schoenberg in from the cold or to make him more accessible by showing
that the alleged difficulty, obscurity, fractiousness, and even unlovability of
his music are mistaken. On the contrary, much of his music – indeed almost
all of his creative output, be it theoretical, literary, or in the visual arts –
could be characterized to some degree as oppositional, critical, and unafraid
of provoking discomfort. He began his Theory of Harmony specifically by
challenging what he characterized as “comfort as a philosophy of life,” with
its pursuit of the “least possible commotion,” arguing instead that “only
activity, movement is productive.”1
But this passage also points in turn to what has been much less under-
stood, namely the degree to which Schoenberg’s contrarian impulse was
driven by what was ultimately a productive intent, aimed at reforming,
rebuilding, extending, and ameliorating all aspects of musical life. Reductive
and monolithic views of Schoenberg have obscured the range of issues,
problems, and developments with which he sought to intervene over the
[1] course of a long life that spanned late nineteenth-century Vienna, Berlin of
2 Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner

the Weimar Republic, and Los Angeles émigré culture from the 1930s to the
early 1950s. Yet it is our contention, as demonstrated by many of the essays
in this collection, that what has kept Schoenberg and his music interesting,
provocative, and problematic for well over a century is precisely his pro-
found engagement with the musical traditions he inherited and trans-
formed, with the broad range of musical and artistic developments during
his lifetime he critiqued and incorporated, and with the fundamental
cultural, social, and political disruptions through which he lived. The
evidence of this engagement can be found in the pages of his scores, his
published writings, and through the vast archive of his correspondence,
library, sketches, writings, and paintings that he collected and cataloged
throughout his life, much of which is now available through the Arnold
Schönberg Center in Vienna to anyone with an internet connection.
That such a case still needs to be made a hundred years after
Schoenberg first confronted audiences with his musical “air from another
planet,” as evoked by the text for the last movement of his String Quartet
No. 2 from 1908, can be attributed to many factors, but perhaps most
directly to the composer’s own self-presentation. In 1911 Schoenberg
published a rather rude aphorism that would seem to sum up his proble-
matic position in the musical life not only of that period, but for much of
the century that would follow:

The artist never has a relationship with the world, but rather always
against it; he turns his back on it, just as it deserves. But his most fervent wish
is to be so independent, that he can proudly call out to it: Elemia, Elem-ia!2

Here we have a distillation of many of the characteristics that have shaped

the reception of Schoenberg’s music and thought: a self-imposed isolation,
a disdain for an uncomprehending public, and a seemingly intentional
difficulty and obscurity that even if unraveled turns out to be something
unpleasant. Indeed, the mysterious final word “Elemia” appears in no
dictionary, but is a reference to the German acronym “L. m. i. A.,”
which could be translated, somewhat delicately, as “Kiss my ass.”
And of course, many audiences, critics, and other composers have been
more than ready to return the insult. Richard Strauss’s remark in a letter to
Alma Mahler from the time of the aphorism, “I believe that it would be
better for him to be shoveling snow than scrawling on music paper,” sets
the tone for a hundred years of critics who have repeatedly proclaimed
Schoenberg’s incompetence, irrelevance, and misguidedness.3 Indeed, if
on no other account, Schoenberg’s continuing relevance is demonstrated
by the rivers of ink spilt by those who have sought, once and for all,
to prove his irrelevance. But Schoenberg’s advocates, too, have often
accepted his claims of isolation. For Theodor Adorno, the degree to
3 Introduction

which he heard Schoenberg’s works as severing “the last communication

with the listener” and becoming a music into which “no social function
falls,” is a measure of its ultimate authenticity.4 Adorno’s very influential
interpretation of Schoenberg’s music as “the surviving message of des-
pair from the shipwrecked” resonates more broadly with accounts of
modernism in general that emphasize its quest for autonomy, its break
from everyday life, and its “adversary stance” to bourgeois culture.5
But it is ironic that Schoenberg’s antisocial aphorism appeared in a
very visible place in the Gutmann Concert Calendar, published by the
noted impresario Emil Gutmann, who was responsible for the 1910
premiere of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and who played an important
role in the commission of Pierrot lunaire by the actress-singer Albertine
Zehme and the subsequent extensive tour of the work. Schoenberg men-
tions Gutmann in a 1912 diary entry describing a concert of Ferruccio
Busoni’s music that gives a vivid sense of his active engagement in the rich
musical life of Berlin:

made the acquaintance of [Serge] Koussevitzky. Gutmann dragged me to

him. He wants to perform Pelleas in Petersburg and Moscow next year.
Would be very nice. Hopefully. At least this year foreign countries are
starting to take some rather keen interest in me. In two weeks, says K. they
will do my IInd Quartet in Petersburg . . . Went to Heidelberger Restaurant
with Gutmann, [Emil] Hertzka, [Anton] Webern, and [Edward] Clark after
the concert. Gutmann in very high spirits. But is supposed to have sworn (!!)
to perform the Gurrelieder in the fall. We shall see. Hertzka beamed!6

Reading this rather dizzying display of name-dropping (including a

famous conductor, Schoenberg’s publisher, and two of his students), it
will come as less of a surprise that Schoenberg planned an autobiography
to be entitled “Life-Story in Encounters” that would “present all persons
with whom I have been in contact, in so far as their relationship to me is
of some interest.”7 The list of names he assembled counts more than 250,
in such categories as “Performers,” “Musicians, Painters, Poets, Writers,”
“Publishers,” and “My Friendships”; surprisingly, in light of Schoenberg’s
reputation for irascibility, there are only two censorious categories:
“Thieves” and “Rascals,” with only eight names between them. For a
composer who is often interpreted from the perspective of the character
of the isolated, misunderstood prophet Moses seeking purity in the waste-
land, as depicted in his opera Moses und Aron, Schoenberg’s encounters
could populate a small town. Among the musicians, painters, poets, and
writers he includes on this list are Gustav Mahler, Alexander Zemlinsky,
Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Hans Pfitzner, Ferruccio Busoni, Max
Schillings, Paul Hindemith, Franz Schreker, Ernst Krenek, Ernst Toch,
4 Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner

Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Maurice Ravel, Arthur Honegger,

Charles Koechlin, Heinrich Schenker, Leopold Godowski, Franz Lehár,
Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Ernest Bloch, Eusebius
Mandyczewski, Artur Schnabel, Anton Bruckner, Pablo Casals, Erich
Korngold, Fritz Kreisler, Oskar Kokoschka, Jascha Heifetz, Carl Moll,
Gustav Klimt, Adolf Loos, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Liebermann,
Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Peter Altenberg, Karl
Kraus, Richard Dehmel, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo Hofmannsthal, and
many others.
Many of the chapters in this book deal with Schoenberg’s intensive
encounters with these and other figures, including the chapters by Jennifer
Shaw, who provides an overview of finished and unfinished collaborative
works from throughout his life, Craig De Wilde on Schoenberg’s interac-
tions with Strauss, Elizabeth Keathley on Schoenberg’s productive part-
nership with Marie Pappenheim for the opera Erwartung, Op. 17, Richard
Kurth, who considers Albertine Zehme’s influence on the vocal writing in
Pierrot lunaire, and Joy Calico who discusses Schoenberg’s complex rela-
tionship with his student Hanns Eisler.
Schoenberg’s most profound and long-lasting encounters, as Calico
argues, were through his many students in Europe and the United States.
In addition to his direct involvement with a large number of students,
Schoenberg also published many articles and books concerning the theory
and practice of teaching, and still more of his teaching materials have been
published posthumously. Through his direct impact, and even more
through the teaching activities of his students, including influential per-
formers, conductors, administrators, and teachers, the impact of his ideas
and music has been vast, including on many universities in North America
and the United Kingdom, such as the University of Southern California,
University of California, Los Angeles, Black Mountain College, North
Carolina, the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts, New York’s
New School, and Morley College, London, and stretching from the
Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, Berlin’s
University of Arts, North German Broadcasting in Hamburg, the BBC,
Covent Garden, Australia’s Elizabethan Trust Orchestra, Hammer Films
in London, and the film industry in Hollywood.
As the list cited above makes clear, Schoenberg’s encounters were by no
means limited to musicians, but included many leading artists and intel-
lectuals in Germany and Austria. His closest contacts among painters were
Oskar Kokoschka, Wassily Kandinsky, and Richard Gerstl, whose portrait
of Schoenberg appears on the cover of this book, but he had dealings with
many others including Carl Moll (1861–1945), the stepfather of Alma Mahler
and a Secessionist painter in the circle around Gustav Klimt. A keen inventor
5 Introduction

and designer of card games, board games, and small machines (such as his
own bookbinding machine), Schoenberg also painted and drew throughout
his life. His most intensive activity as a painter coincided with the years of his
pursuit of an ideal of direct and intuitive emotional expression, 1908–12,
when his comparative lack of technical training as a painter seems to have
permitted a kind of spontaneity that he struggled to achieve in his composi-
tion. The first one-man exhibition of his works took place in 1910 at the
Heller Bookshop in Vienna, and the following year his paintings were
included in the first of Kandinsky’s Blue Rider exhibitions. Contemporary
accounts of Schoenberg frequently mentioned his paintings along with his
musical works. Hundreds of his paintings and drawings survive, including
many self-portraits, “visions,” and “gazes” (ranging from the more explicitly
expressionistic self-portraits to nearly abstract works), portraits (mostly of
family and acquaintances), caricatures, landscapes, stage settings, and still-life
compositions.8
The intensity of Schoenberg’s encounter with Kandinsky is evident in
its impact on both artists. Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and others in
Kandinsky’s Berlin circle attended an all-Schoenberg concert in Munich
on January 2, 1911 at which Schoenberg’s Op. 11 piano pieces were
performed, as well as a number of his tonal songs and his two string
quartets. Schoenberg did not attend, but Gutmann, who had organized
the concert, told him that it had been “A great and loud success . . . there
was some opposition following the piano pieces, but these really need to
be heard more than once to be understood.”9 In fact, it seems there was
loud applause after the songs and a mixture of applause and hissing after
the Op. 11 pieces. This was a concert of contrasts. One of the songs
performed was Schoenberg’s “Erwartung” (Expectation), Op. 2, No. 1
(1899), a setting for vocal soloist and pianist of a text by one of
Schoenberg’s favorite poets, Richard Dehmel. Schoenberg’s Op. 2 is highly
effective and, to his Viennese audiences, reasonably familiar territory.
Schoenberg’s profound engagement with the German lied tradition is
explored in the chapter on the songs by Walter Frisch, as well as in
Richard Kurth’s discussion of Pierrot lunaire and its allusions to
Schumann’s Dichterliebe and other songs. In contrast, the Op. 11 piano
pieces, which Schoenberg composed in February 1909, were heard as
radically new works. As Ethan Haimo charts in his chapter, this was
only one of a series of works from these years in which Schoenberg tested
the limits of comprehensibility. For Kandinsky and Marc, it was the
Op. 11 piano pieces that made the strongest impression. After the concert,
Marc wrote to a colleague, “Can you imagine a music in which tonality is
completely suspended? I was constantly reminded of Kandinsky’s large
Composition, which also permits no trace of tonality . . . and also of
6 Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner

Kandinsky’s ‘jumping spots’ on hearing this music, which allows each

tone to stand on its own (a kind of white canvas between the spots of
color!).”10
Kandinsky’s response was even more direct. He first made two sketches
of the concert, both of which depict the grand piano dominating the space
with the audience members crowded around it. He then turned this into
his painting entitled Impression III: Concert where the details have become
more abstract; the dramatic effect of the music translated by Kandinsky
into blocks, columns, and streaks of color. Kandinsky, who had not yet
met Schoenberg, wrote to him after the concert that their radical ideas
about music and color shared much in common: “The independent pro-
gress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual
voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my
paintings.”11
This began an important artistic friendship and collaboration that
lasted into the early 1920s. The relationship with Kandinsky is also
taken up in Julian Johnson’s chapter on Herzgewächse, Op. 20 (Heart’s
Foliage), a brief work for voice and chamber ensemble from 1912, first
published in Kandinsky’s Blue Rider Almanac. Johnson discusses the song
in terms of a “seismic change in the geology of modernism” evident in
the emergence of a metaphysical dimension that is so fundamental to
Schoenberg’s development in the years 1908–23, between the break with
tonality and the twelve-tone works. Richard Kurth’s chapter on
Schoenberg’s unfinished opera Moses und Aron similarly emphasizes
Schoenberg’s willingness to test the limits of comprehensibility as a way
to point toward an otherwise unrepresentable metaphysical dimension.
These contrasting styles of Romantic and radical composition, some-
times within the same work, combined with sharply divided responses
from audiences and critics to those works, form the background not only
to the composer’s activities and development but also to strong reactions
to performances of his music that continue today. A particularly impor-
tant work in Schoenberg’s development was his First Chamber Symphony,
Op. 9, composed in 1906 and premiered in Vienna the following year. Its
rich and complex harmonic language, although tonal, is at the very edge of
tonality; Robert Morgan’s chapter delves into theoretical issues around
what Schoenberg described as “fluctuating tonality” in the context of
analyses of two songs from the Eight Songs, Op. 6 completed just before
he began work on the Chamber Symphony. Schoenberg never stopped
composing tonal music, and, as Severine Neff shows in her study of his
Second Chamber Symphony, Op. 38, started right after the first, but not
completed until 1939, he was stimulated by the challenge of reconciling
tonality with his later compositional approaches.
7 Introduction

Characteristic of Schoenberg’s compulsion to engage with and trans-

form whatever genre he encountered, the Chamber Symphony is not really
a symphony as his audiences would have understood the Beethovian
model of a large-scale, multi-movement work (in fact Schoenberg never
completed a full symphony, although he began plans for two during his
life). Yet neither was it conceived on the typically more modest scale of a
chamber work, but as a work for a small symphony – as in the sense of
instruments (in this case fifteen of them) sounding together – with a focus
on the kinds of solo textures usually found in chamber music. In other
words, there are inherent tensions both in the hybrid genre Schoenberg
chose to write and in his harmonic language – and these tensions are
played out in all aspects of the piece, through its complex rhythmic
writing, its network of solo instrumental lines, doublings and dense tutti
parts, and its very broad range of dynamics, registers, and expression.
Although written as a one-movement work, Schoenberg himself marked
five sections in the score as Sonata-Allegro, Scherzo, Elaboration, Adagio,
and Recapitulation and Finale, and while there are some extreme demands
made of the players, this is a reasonably accessible piece for audiences to
listen to: themes and motives do return (although rarely is anything
repeated in exactly the same way) and, especially in the Adagio, there
are some exquisitely beautiful solos.
Throughout his life the chamber music tradition offered a particularly
fertile resource, as Michael Cherlin discusses in his chapter on the very
popular Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) for string sextet of 1899 and
other chamber music for strings. He was also active in writing choral
music, including his 1907 a cappella chorus Friede auf Erden (Peace on
Earth) which premiered (in a version with a small string ensemble) in
Vienna in 1911, conducted by Franz Schreker. One of his most popular
works is Gurrelieder (Songs of Gurre), a dramatic cantata that he began in
1900, completed in 1911 and which premiered (also under Schreker’s
direction) to great popular and critical acclaim in 1913 – and which, like
the First Chamber Symphony, continues to receive mainstream perfor-
mances today.
In writing for the huge choruses that fill the stage with Gurrelieder,
Schoenberg could draw on his own experience conducting and composing
for several suburban workers’ choirs, which began shortly after leaving his job
as a bank clerk in 1895 and continued through his first move to Berlin in
1901.12 In Berlin Schoenberg became involved in another activity difficult to
reconcile with the image of the isolated, elitist Schoenberg. From December
1901 until July 1902 he worked as music director of the famous Überbrettl
Cabaret in Berlin, one of the many artistic cabarets aimed at the fashionable
urban intelligentsia. In addition to writing his own cabaret lieder, a large part
8 Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner

of his job there had been to make arrangements of existing songs (mainly
about alcohol and sex!). In fact, Schoenberg made arrangements of his own
and others’ compositions throughout his career and, in particular, he spent a
good part of his military service during the 1914–18 war arranging patriotic
songs and marches for Austrian military bands. Schoenberg’s experience of
the war was directly linked to his compositional output. In a short note that
appeared in a Berlin newspaper in 1916 about a proposed performance of
an expanded orchestral version of the First Chamber Symphony it was
announced that:
Arnold Schoenberg, the most modern of the modern composers has been
conscripted into the army reserves in Austria. At this time Schoenberg’s
most recent, still unfinished symphony, was supposed to have had its
premiere in Prague under Alexander Zemlinsky. The premiere did not take
place at the behest of the composer. In a letter to Zemlinsky, Schoenberg
indicated that he would like to postpone the premiere until after the War. He
would not want during the War to be the reason for new attacks and
hostilities, as could well result from this symphony. When peace again
comes, he will no longer steer clear of such attacks – peacetime for him shall
again be wartime.13
This newspaper report points to Schoenberg’s increasing interest in the public
dimension of his music during the war years. That he would have postponed
the work with an eye toward what the audience’s response might have been –
or even proposed that as an excuse – marks a significant change from his pre-
war aesthetic when he accepted and embraced the fact that his music would
only be appreciated by limited circles of like-minded listeners.
The war itself undoubtedly had a significant impact on how
Schoenberg saw his social role. His experience of military service (for
even men in their forties like Schoenberg were called up for compulsory
military service for the Austro-Hungarian forces during World War I) is
most directly evident in the jovial chamber work Die eiserne Brigade (The
Iron Brigade), a march and trio for piano quintet which he wrote in
August 1916 for an evening party for recruits at the Bruck an der Leithe
military school. By using trumpet signals and other music based on the
military drills familiar to all Austro-Hungarian army recruits, Schoenberg
took pains to make music that would be readily comprehensible to its
intended audience. Attention to Schoenberg’s new concern for the audi-
ence can clarify the function of such projects as the Verein für Musikalische
Privataufführungen (Society for Private Musical Performances), which pre-
sented over one hundred concerts over the three years it operated in Vienna
(1919–21), with Schoenberg as president and many of his current and
former students as members. While the “private” aspect is often emphasized,
its purposes were to build the audience for modern music and reform
9 Introduction

concert life by challenging the power of critics, eliminating what was

identified in the prospectus as the “corrupting influence of publicity,” and
to avoid the disruptions that had accompanied many performances.14
Schoenberg’s relationship to the public is also bound up with the
origins of the twelve-tone method, as is made clear in the history of the
massive Choral Symphony that he began in 1914 just before the outbreak
of the war. It is in the fragmentary sketches for this work that Schoenberg
first used a twelve-tone row and explored ways to generate material by
using inversions, retrogrades, and other twelve-tone techniques. In a letter
to Alma Mahler he described his vision of a work which was to include
seven movements, an orchestra of 300, and a chorus of at least 2,000:
It is now my intention after a long time to once again write a large work. A
kind of symphony. I have already felt it; I can see it already, now perhaps this
summer it will come to something. For a long time I have been yearning for a
style for large forms. My most recent development has denied this to me.
Now I feel it again and I believe it will be something completely new, more
than that, something that will say a great deal. There will be choirs and solo
voices; that is certainly nothing new. Today that is already allowed to us. But
what I can feel of the content (this is not yet completely clear to me) is
perhaps new in our time: here I will manage to give personal things an
objective, general form, behind which the author as person may withdraw.15
In light of the subsequent history of twelve-tone composition – in parti-
cular its adoption and transformation by composers like Pierre Boulez,
Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Milton Babbitt after World War II – it is
common to characterize twelve-tone composition as the quintessential
elitist, insider art. Thus it is striking that it was in a large-scale public work
like the Choral Symphony that Schoenberg first systematically pursued
the new ways of thinking that led to the development of the twelve-tone
method. Moreover, in contrast to an image of twelve-tone music as
cerebral and abstract, the sketches for the Symphony indicate that
Schoenberg’s new compositional tools were closely linked to the eclectic
selection of texts he had chosen, and to his ideas about spirituality, death,
transcendence, and immortality.16 The linkage between such metaphysical
concerns, the twelve-tone method, and Schoenberg’s central concept of the
“Idea” (Gedanke) is the subject of Joseph Auner’s chapter on Schoenberg’s
row tables. During 1917–18, while his Choral Symphony evolved into
his oratorio Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob’s Ladder), Schoenberg wrestled with
defining the idea of comprehensibility in an unfinished theoretical work
entitled Coherence, Counterpoint, Instrumentation, Instruction in Form,
a major focus of which is on techniques the composer must use “if the
author addresses himself to many listeners or to those of limited capa-
city.”17 By April 1923 Schoenberg had completed three works that chart
10 Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner

the transition from what he called “working with tones of the motive,” to
the first twelve-tone pieces, the five Piano Pieces Op. 23, the Serenade
Op. 24 for chamber ensemble and baritone, and the Suite for Piano Op. 25.
In the postwar years, Schoenberg’s often critical engagement with the
many new trends was shaped by what he perceived as his obligation to
reinforce and extend the influence of German music. Between 1918 and
1922 Schoenberg arranged popular tonal pieces, some in the style of his
cabaret songs, for teaching purposes and for the benefit of the Society for
Private Musical Performances as well as for his own family’s entertain-
ment. He also agreed to a request from Josef Stransky, conductor of the
New York Philharmonic Orchestra, to orchestrate two of Bach’s chorale
preludes. The first of these Schoenberg completed in April 1922, the
second in June 1922, and the New York Philharmonic performed them
on November 7 that year. In both arrangements Schoenberg extensively
modified Bach’s scores, not just by means of contrasts of register, articu-
lation, timbre, and tone doublings, but also by the addition of harmonic
tones and new contrapuntal lines. In both pieces the changes primarily
emphasize motivic coherence, even to the extent, as scholars have dis-
cussed, of creating motivic connections that, in Bach’s original settings,
were “not at all present.”18 Schoenberg’s decision to arrange organ chorale
preludes by Bach rather than any of his own works – tonal or free-atonal –
must have been guided both by his desire to reclaim Germany’s superior
place in music, as he had claimed in his 1919 Guidelines for the new
Ministry of the Arts, but also to emphasize his own connections to the
German musical tradition.19
The image of Schoenberg as the isolated prophet with his back turned
to the world was further established by the post-World-War-II avant-
garde who sought a music free from tradition, as Richard Toop discusses
in Chapter 18. There has been a related emphasis in discussions of
Schoenberg’s works from the 1920s and 1930s of twelve-tone works
such as the Third String Quartet, Op. 30 (1927), the Variations for
Orchestra, Op. 31 (1928), and his opera Moses und Aron. But as Peter
Tregear discusses in his chapter on Schoenberg’s “opera of the times” Von
heute auf morgen (From Today to Tomorrow) and other works, there is
plentiful evidence of Schoenberg’s engagement with the latest develop-
ments in the works of the younger generation, including Kurt Weill, Paul
Hindemith, and Ernst Krenek, with their connections to popular music,
contemporary life, and the impact of film and radio.
Once the National Socialists’ policies came into effect in 1933,
Schoenberg, who had been a target of anti-Semitism from the early
1920s, fled Berlin with his family to Paris, where his reconversion from
Lutheranism to Judaism was formally witnessed by the painter Marc
11 Introduction

Chagall. As Steven Cahn discusses, Schoenberg’s formal reentry into the

Jewish community must be understood as part of a long personal journey
for the composer as well as in the context of the complexities of German–
Jewish history. From France he sailed to New York, finally settling with
his family a year later in Los Angeles. Unlike many émigrés in their sixties
who struggled to create new lives in their adopted countries, for
Schoenberg the experience of moving to the United States – while often
challenging and mystifying – also proved liberating. As he told an audi-
ence in Hollywood in 1934, “I . . . came from one country into another
where neither dust nor better food is rationed and where I am allowed to
go on my feet, where my head can be held erect, where kindness and
cheerfulness is dominating, and where to live is a joy, and to be an
expatriate of another country is the grace of God. I was driven into
Paradise!”20 He desperately needed to settle in and lead a “normal life” –
and, personally, he achieved this, with an extensive photographic record
from the time documenting his relative material success, his passion for
games and time for recreation, especially involving tennis, and his deep
affection for his three young children. Professionally, he yearned for the
success other émigrés to Los Angeles had achieved in making the transi-
tion to Hollywood’s film music culture, but, apart from one well-known
and disastrous encounter with MGM, this was not to be.
Yet his new country – of which he became a citizen on April 11, 1941 –
proved surprisingly receptive to his music, as Sabine Feisst documents.
The United States also gave him the freedom to comment, both in written
documents and through his music – on injustices and atrocities that
he suspected the Nazis were committing under cover of war. The most
famous of these wartime documents, his Survivor from Warsaw,
Schoenberg composed after the war in 1947 in response to accounts he
had heard of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943. Less well known is his
setting of Lord Byron’s 1814 poem “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte”, which
Schoenberg wrote in 1942 for Reciter, Piano, and String Quartet. In a
version for string orchestra, the work was premiered on November 23,
1944 by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Artur Rodzinski with
Mack Harrell in the speaking role and Schoenberg’s former student and
member of the Viennese Society for Private Musical Performances,
Eduard Steuermann, at the piano. As Schoenberg later explained, the
Ode’s origins were pragmatic, emotional, and didactic:
The League of Composers had ([in]1942) asked me to write a piece of
chamber music for their concert season. It should employ only a limited
number of instruments. I had at once the idea that this piece must not ignore
the agitation aroused in mankind against the crimes that provoke this war.
I remembered Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, supporting repeal of the jus
12 Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner

primae noctis, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, Goethe’s Egmont, Beethoven’s Eroica,

and [his] Wellington’s Victory, and I knew it was the moral duty of the
intelligentsia to take a stand against tyranny.
But this was only my secondary motive. I had long speculated about the more
profound meaning of the Nazi philosophy. There was one element that puzzled
me extremely: the relationship of the valueless individual being’s life in respect to
the totality of the community, or its representative: the queen or the Führer.21

Byron’s bitter ode was written two years after Napoleon’s failed attempt to
invade Russia; Schoenberg’s just a couple of months after Hitler’s likewise
unsuccessful push on the eastern front. This is an overtly dramatic work in
which Schoenberg was adamant in his performing directions for the piece
that the words must be comprehensible: the singer must declaim but very
musically and rhythmically. Schoenberg was in fact adamant that all his
works should be performed in the language of their audiences, so that they
could be understood: in this instance he made a German translation of
Byron’s text, no doubt for his own benefit, but also, one suspects, for
performances that he hoped would happen in Germany and Austria in the
future – a remote hope in 1942. The musical language, too, although
twelve-tone, is also comprehensible, with much direct word-painting. In
this piece the music is a backdrop to the message, but that backdrop
includes several coded messages of its own – at Byron’s line “The earth-
quake voice of Victory,” Schoenberg refers to the rhythm of the opening
motive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which, from January 1941, had
been strongly associated with the Allies’ ubiquitous “V for Victory”
campaign; and, at the very end of the piece, the final, unexpected E flat
major chord must be a reference to Beethoven’s E flat “Eroica” symphony –
itself originally dedicated by Beethoven to Napoleon. Even though this is a
twelve-tone piece, this is hardly the work of an intellectual “construction-
ist,” a label Schoenberg disputed throughout his life. It is clearly dependant
on tonal music’s grammar, vocabulary, and phrasing; the music is very
much a response or reaction to the text rather than a straightforward
setting of it. Walter Bailey’s chapter on the Piano Concerto similarly
presents that piece as a work intended to communicate to his new
American audience; a work that shows Schoenberg’s lifelong engagement
with the challenges of reconciling the “Heart and Brain in Music.”
It is our hope that this Cambridge Companion will be useful to those
who wish to begin their own encounter with Schoenberg, a complex man,
profoundly interested in music and the arts, as well as in politics and
religion, and committed to maintaining a strong connection to tradition at
the same time as he explored and celebrated the new.
40 Michael Cherlin

PART ONE (Exposition)

First Theme Group

1a. mm. 1–29: Sentence in D minor
1b. mm. 29–49: Sentence in D minor (without tonic closure)
Second Theme
mm. 50–99: B♭ minor (vi in D minor)
Closing Theme
mm. 100–32: begins in E major (V/V in D minor)

Development
Part One
mm. 132–69 (harmonically unstable, introduces new characteristic material and develops
motives from the Second Theme and 1b)
Part Two
mm. 169–87 (develops Closing Theme and 1b)
Retransition
mm. 198–228: ends in E♭ minor (develops 1a)

PART TWO (Verklärung)

Second Exposition (in lieu of a Recapitulation of Part I)

Post-Verklärung First Theme

mm. 229–48: D major (without tonic closure); counterpoint remembers 1b
Post-Verklärung Second Theme Group
2a. mm. 249–65: F♯ major
2b. mm. 266–76: begins in E♭ minor (without closure); remembers 1a
Post-Verklärung Closing Theme
mm. 277–94: begins in D♭ major (without closure)

Post-Verklärung Development
Part one
mm. 294–320: begins in F, ends with implied D; develops 1b, Closing Theme of Part One and
Closing Theme of Part Two
Part two
mm. 320–41: functions as close for Second Development and Retransition; begins in Db,
ending dovetails with return of D major; introduces new theme, develops 1b and post-
Verklärung Closing Theme.

Recapitulation
Post-Verklärung First Theme
mm. 341–69: D major; remembers Closing Theme of Part One
Post-Verklärung Second Theme Group
mm. 370–90: D major (without closure); counterpoint remembers 1a
Coda
mm. 391–418: D major (with strong tonic closure); remembers 1a and brings post-Verklärung 2a
to D major tonic closure
Figure 3. 1. Verklärte Nacht: Outline of the Form

heard at the end of the retransition concluding Part One) and D flat major at
m. 277 and again at m. 320, respectively a minor second above and below the
tonic. The sole exception to this scheme is the closing theme of Part One. It is
set in E major (which I interpret as V/V in D minor or D major) and its
reciprocal key would be C major or C minor (IV/IV or iv/iv in D minor or D
major).
Richard Dehmel’s thirty-six line poem can easily be paraphrased: a man
and a woman walk alone in the moonlight; the woman tells the man that she
is carrying a child, not his, but conceived by a stranger (“einem fremden
 9 Pierrot lunaire: persona, voice, and
the fabric of allusion
RICHARD KURTH

Since its 1912 composition and premiere, Schoenberg’s Dreimal sieben

Gedichte aus Albert Girauds Pierrot lunaire (Three Times Seven Poems
from Albert Giraud’s Pierrot lunaire), Op. 21 has aroused strong responses
and extensive commentary, especially regarding its enigmatic approach to
Sprechstimme (speaking voice or recitation) and its “atonal” idiom. This
chapter, in three parts, synthesizes and extends some themes in the recent
critical reception of the work.1 The first part sketches a history of the
Pierrot character in comedy and pantomime, including a description of the
genesis and overall shape of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. The second
section explores how traditional vocal representations of subjectivity and
lyric expression are renatured by Schoenberg’s striking approach to
Sprechstimme in the work. The final part demonstrates, through selected
examples, how the music invokes a rich network of musical allusions, in
tandem with tonal latencies that permeate its kaleidoscopic surface.

Pierrots old and new – en blanc et noir

Over the centuries, the Pierrot character has been portrayed by countless
actors, pantomimes, and puppets.2 Originating among Italian commedia
dell’arte troupes active in seventeenth-century France, Pierrot first appears
in 1660s comedies as a rustic and dumbfounded bumpkin, but in the
eighteenth century he became the paragon of pastoral innocence, a pure
(and often silent) fool. The nineteenth century gradually transformed him,
radically, into a decadent fin-de-siècle dandy, obsessed with the moon.
A resemblance with the moon was already suggested by his eighteenth-
century commedia costume: a powdered white face, soft white hat
and large ruffled collar, and loose jacket and trousers of flowing white
silk. By the nineteenth century he had become a darker figure, often
completely mute, and the distant and intoxicating moon had become his
emblem, muse, and mirror. This was his triumphant period on the stages
of Paris, where he was reinvented in the 1830s by the pantomime Jean-
Gaspard (“Baptiste”) Deburau and his apostles. Pierrot’s new lunatic
[120] persona aroused delirious enthusiasm among a diverse company of
121 Pierrot lunaire

poets – Baudelaire, Banville, Gautier, Verlaine, Laforgue – because the

mute Pierrot’s miming gestures allegorized the sufferings and growing
isolation of the modern poet.
Among other things, Deburau restyled Pierrot’s make-up. The panto-
mime powdered his face to a perfect blankness to heighten its mute
expressivity. He rouged his silent but elastic lips, added dark shading
around his searing eyes, and topped his moon-like face with a black
skullcap – to evoke the dark side of the moon, and an open cranium
exposed to pernicious celestial influences. The contrast of this black void
atop his white face signifies a deep split in Pierrot’s psyche, manifested
thereafter by the two main fin-de-siècle types of Pierrots: the moon-like
white Pierrots of Aubrey Beardsley’s etchings, who are pale, diaphanous,
narcissistic, and androgynous; and the lunatic black Pierrots in tailcoats,
seen in the cartoons of Jules Chéret and Adolphe Willette, who are evil
geniuses inspired by seductive, grotesque, and sinister comic gaiety, or
hallucinogenic and sacrilegious maniacs tormented by every fear and guilt.
Pierrots of both polarities waft and swerve through Pierrot lunaire:
Rondels bergamasques, the 1884 collection of fifty French poems by the
Belgian poet Albert Giraud (1860–1929). As Robert Vilain notes, Giraud
uses Pierrot’s inner and outer landscape to explore the artistic challenge of
bringing Parnassian poetic restraint into contact with Symbolist poetic
sensuousness, without falling into Decadent excesses.3 Pierrot’s white-or-
black polarity here symbolizes a debate in Belgian poetic circles, with
the Parnassian and Decadent creeds at the respective poles. In his 1893
German translation of Giraud’s poems, Otto Erich Hartleben (1864–1905)
preserved their basic Parnassian formal element – the rigid thirteen-line
rondel form – but he refocused the poems as expressions of subjective
crisis rather than aesthetic debate.4 Hartleben intensified the imagery and
sound of the poems, making them sizzle and blaze in a stunning display of
sonic pirouettes and explosions, so that the poems render the mute
pantomime’s antic gestures and poses back into a spectacular verbal
substance, perfectly suited to the novel mode of recitation Schoenberg
would create in his 1912 Pierrot lunaire.
During the 1910–11 Berlin season, the actress Albertine Zehme gave
three recitals featuring the Hartleben translations in melodramatic set-
tings (with piano accompaniments) by Otto Vrieslander. Schoenberg
moved to Berlin in October 1911, and Zehme approached him in
January 1912 to commission more elaborate and adventurous settings of
the poems. Schoenberg was fascinated by her proposal and ideas. On
March 10, 1912 he signed a contract to compose at least twenty melodra-
mas, with piano and two additional instruments, and he started compos-
ing immediately, writing “Gebet an Pierrot” (with piano and clarinet in A)
122 Richard Kurth

Table 9.1 Titles, poetic character-shading (black/white), instrumentation,

and instrumental character-shading in the three parts of Pierrot lunaire.
(Instruments in parentheses enter midway through the respective
melodrama.)

1. Mondestrunken/Moondrunk Piano Flute Violin Cello

2. Colombine Piano (Clarinet in A) (Flute) Violin
3. Der Dandy/The Dandy Piano Clarinet in A Piccolo
4. Eine blasse Wäscherin/A pale washerwoman Clarinet in A Flute Violin
5. Valse de Chopin/Chopin Waltz Piano Clarinet in A Flute
6. Madonna (Piano) Bass Clarinet Flute (Violin) Cello
7. Der kranke Mond/The Sick Moon Flute
8. Nacht/Night Piano Bass Clarinet Cello
9. Gebet an Pierrot/Prayer to Pierrot Piano Clarinet in A
10. Raub/Robbery Clarinet in A Flute Violin Cello
11. Rote Messe/Red Mass Piano Bass Clarinet Piccolo Viola Cello
12. Galgenlied/Gallows Song Piccolo Viola Cello
13. Enthauptung/Beheading Piano Bass Clarinet Viola Cello
(wordless reprise of No. 7) Bass Clarinet Flute Viola Cello
14. Die Kreuze/The Crosses Piano Clarinet in A (Flute) (Violin) (Cello)
15. Heimweh/Nostalgia Piano Clarinet in A Violin
16. Gemeinheit!/Dirty Trick! Piano Clarinet in A Piccolo Violin Cello
17. Parodie/Parody Piano Clarinet in A Piccolo Viola
18. Der Mondfleck/The Moon Fleck Piano Clarinet in B♭ Piccolo Violin Cello
19. Serenade Piano (Clarinet in A) (Flute) (Violin) Cello
20. Heimfahrt/Homeward Journey Piano Clarinet in A Flute Violin Cello
21. O alter Duft/O ethereal fragrance Piano in A/(Bass) Fl./(Picc.) Vln/(Vla) Cello

on March 12. The instrumentation expanded rapidly as Schoenberg

worked, eventually requiring five players and eight instruments; each
melodrama uses a distinct combination of instruments, sometimes chan-
ging midway through. Schoenberg eventually chose twenty-one of the fifty
poems, including twelve from Zehme’s March 1911 recital, which had
featured twenty-two poems arranged in three groups of six, seven, and
nine poems, respectively. Schoenberg finished the individual settings in
early July, and then completely revised his preliminary ordering so as to
fashion an overall narrative in three groups of seven poems each – thus the
“dreimal sieben” (three times seven) in the work’s title.5 Each group
represents a contrasting facet of Pierrot’s psychology in a multipart nar-
rative of his exploits. After an open rehearsal on October 9 for invited
guests and the press, the work was premiered on October 16, 1912. A five-
week tour of thirteen cities followed immediately.6
Table 9.1 outlines the titles, grouping, and instrumentation of the melo-
dramas. To show continuity and contrast, and observe affiliations with
specific instruments, I associate the overall character of each movement
with either a white or black Pierrot. (Bold type identifies the “black” Pierrot
movements; some movements appear in mixed type, if they combine “white”
imagery with “dark” character.) Bass clarinet, piccolo, and viola function like
alter egos (to the clarinet, flute, and violin, respectively); they tend to appear
123 Pierrot lunaire

in “black” numbers, and grotesquely distort the music’s registral and timbral
proportions. Overall, dark movements outnumber light ones, approximately
two to one. Parts I and III are both fairly balanced, though differently paced,
while Part II is almost entirely dark and diabolical. The lunar phases also
structure Schoenberg’s grouping. Part I begins with Pierrot enraptured by the
full moon, but he slips progressively into illness as the moon wanes, and Part I
ends with the dying moon as a mere sliver. Pierrot’s depraved exploits in Part
II mostly take place during the ensuing moonless phase, but a new crescent
moon appears near the end (in No. 13). Pierrot becomes more comic as the
moon waxes throughout Part III, until it is full again at “Heimfahrt” (No. 20).
Morning sunlight dissolves the whole nocturnal world in “O alter Duft”
(No. 21). Only this closing melodrama uses all eight instruments: the
“white” instruments appear first; the “black” siblings enter near the end,
but their dark connotations fade in the morning light.
Susan Youens interprets Schoenberg’s selection and tripartite framing
of twenty-one poems as an allegory on the condition of the modern artist.7
Reinhold Brinkmann reinforces this interpretation when he notes that in
comparison with other contemporaneous settings of the Giraud/
Hartleben poems, only Schoenberg’s Pierrot cycle “elevates the puppet
Pierrot to the level of an allegorical figure, to a model of identification for
the late artist of modernity, for the problematic state of subjectivity, for the
crisis of identity and cohesion of the I.”8 The eccentric sounds of the
Sprechstimme certainly contribute to the expression of identity crisis and
alienation, in rich and fascinating ways. But the sense of disorientation
arises first from the discontinuous contrasts between the many black and
white Pierrots that swerve through the poems, representing the obsessions
of the modern psyche generally, not just the delusions of a single indivi-
dual artist.
The electrifying diversity of the instrumental music also challenges the
listener. Yet there are many factors, though often concealed, that do help
to integrate it. Stephan Weytjens has shown the extensive use of varied
motivic repetition in each melodrama, and Jonathan Dunsby believes that
a “motivic essence” (and an unidentified Grundgestalt) unify Schoenberg’s
inventive music.9 Many recent critics hear Pierrot lunaire as thoroughly
parodic – like the eponymous pantomimes and puppets – and replete with
satiric musical references and ironic allusions. As Brinkmann puts it,
“There is not a single piece in Pierrot lunaire that is not based upon pre-
existing material. The entire cycle indeed is music about music.”10 The
musical references are concealed and distorted by Schoenberg’s enigmatic
harmony, which effaces their original tonal moorings, but the music is
nonetheless replete with lambent fragments of tonal sensation. The hid-
den references also invoke a massive supplementary intertext of musical
124 Richard Kurth

works with their own dramatis personae, much like the larger cast of
commedia characters from which Pierrot emerged.

The mimetic voice: Sprechmelodie and alterity

The instrumental music in Pierrot is so remarkably inventive that some
listeners, including Stravinsky, have wished the voice would fall mute –
like a pantomime – to let the instruments sound alone.11 But the unfami-
liar mode of vocal production is surely the most important component in
Pierrot, because it transmits and transfigures the word-sounds. The enig-
matic quality of the Sprechstimme is the paramount aspect of Pierrot: it
revolutionizes the musical use of the voice, and displaces the artifice of bel
canto style that hitherto counted as the “natural” and authentic expression
of subjectivity.12 In fact, for her March 1911 recital, Albertine Zehme
wrote a passionate program note on the aesthetics of recitation, question-
ing the naturalness of singing and calling for a wider expressive palette:
“The singing voice, that supernatural, chastely controlled instrument,
ideally beautiful precisely in its ascetic lack of freedom, is not suited to
strong eruptions of feeling . . . For our poets and composers to commu-
nicate, we need both the tones of song as well as those of speech.”13
Undoubtedly, she showed this program note to Schoenberg, and her
ideas probably influenced his approach to Sprechstimme in Pierrot.
Before Pierrot lunaire, Schoenberg experimented with different notations
and approaches to modulating Sprechstimme, in Gurrelieder and Die
glückliche Hand; and he would do so again in several later pieces.14
Numerous factors have been proposed as influences on Schoenberg’s unique
approach to Sprechstimme in Pierrot lunaire: contemporaneous melodramatic
works by other composers (especially Humperdinck’s 1897 Königskinder);
the Berlin cabaret world in which Schoenberg briefly participated in 1901;
Karl Kraus’s famous Viennese recitations; and perhaps even Jewish cantila-
tion.15 None of these possible influences is mentioned, confirmed, or denied in
any of Schoenberg’s recorded statements about Pierrot lunaire.
Schoenberg believed at this time that poetic language conveys meaning
directly through its sensuous sounds (rather than through syntax, seman-
tics, concepts), and he had proclaimed in a recent essay that he “had
completely understood . . .the poems of Stefan George from their sound
alone.”16 This statement resonates with Symbolist tenets valorizing poetic
sound as the purified manifestation of meaning. Schoenberg must have
been pleased to discover a similar conviction in Albertine Zehme’s March
1911 program note: “The words that we speak should not solely lead to
mental concepts, but instead their sound should allow us to partake of
125 Pierrot lunaire

their inner experience.”17 The oracular Sprechstimme and brilliant instru-

mental gestures in Pierrot lunaire are vividly and inventively responsive to
what Zehme calls the “inner experience” of the words. Schoenberg com-
posed the Pierrot melodramas very rapidly, describing the experience as
the “unmediated expression of sensual and mental gestures. Almost as
though everything was directly transcribed.”18 The music is a transcrip-
tion of vocal and instrumental gestures that Schoenberg imagined spon-
taneously in response to each poem’s sonic material. In this period he had
complete faith that word-sounds alone could transmit the full poetic
content and shading, and he rendered afresh this “inner experience” of
the words in new instrumental and vocal gestures, vividly perceived and
notated in precise detail. The resulting music is definitely associative and
representational, but Schoenberg’s prefatory comments in the 1914 score
have often been misunderstood to mean the opposite:
Never do the performers have the duty here to shape the tone and character
of the individual pieces out of the meaning of the words, but always only out
of the music. So far as tone-painterly representation of events and emotions
given in the text was important to the composer, it can in any event be found
in the music.19

Schoenberg is in fact underlining his music’s representational agency.20

But he warns that because the music so precisely captures meanings and
associations awakened during the creative moment, any attempt by per-
formers to add expression could distort and destroy its intense specificity.
He also wants the reciter (and instrumentalists) to avoid adding pathos
that would make the performance, and the work, seem either affected
or maudlin: “I have always stressed that this piece must be performed in
a light manner, without pathos,” he wrote of “Die Kreuze” in 1928, and
in 1940 he referred to “the light, ironic-satiric tone . . . in which the work
was originally conceived.”21 Like all the great nineteenth-century mani-
festations of the Pierrot persona, Schoenberg’s Pierrot is a work of levity
and wit, in which macabre images dissolve ironically into cathartic
laughter.
Schoenberg actually used the word “Sprechmelodie” to describe his
approach to Sprechstimme in Pierrot. Fidelity to the notated rhythms is
crucial, but proper characterization of pitch and tone are the crucial
properties. In the Foreword to the score, he outlined the concept carefully,
first stating:

The melody indicated by notes for the speaking voice [Sprechstimme] is not
meant to be sung (apart from a few specifically marked exceptions). The
performer has the task of transforming it, with due consideration for the
prescribed pitches, into a speech-melody [Sprechmelodie].22
126 Richard Kurth

Sprechmelodie transforms the sonic material of language into a new

musical resource. Schoenberg formulated specific directives for the
desired concept of vocal modulation:

[The performer must remain] fully aware of the contrast between singing
tone and speaking tone: singing tone strictly maintains the pitch, while
speaking tone gives it at first, but abandons it immediately either by falling
or rising. But the performer must take great care not to fall into a sing-song
form of speaking. That is absolutely not intended. And by no means should
one strive for realistic-naturalistic speech. On the contrary, the difference
between an ordinary speech and one that contributes to a musical form must
be made clear. But it must also never be reminiscent of singing [Gesang].23

The last sentence makes it clear that “Sprechgesang” (speech-song) is

definitely not what Schoenberg wants; Schoenberg avoided this term,
but it has been widely used by others, creating unnecessary confusion
even in otherwise perceptive and useful studies.24 Schoenberg uses
“Sprechmelodie,” by which he means an expressive and artistically coordi-
nated succession of spoken pitches, timbres, and rhythms, without the
sustained vowels of song. Sprechmelodie is already inherent in the con-
tinuous frequency and timbre fluctuations of normal speech, and has long
been shaped artistically in poetry and drama, by authors, readers, and
actors. It is a natural vocal attribute, ready to become a new musical
resource when shaped artistically by the composer in specific ways and
contexts.25
Spoken pitch is inherently musical. It is in constant motion, across large
intervals and microtonal ones; vowel timbres change continuously, and
consonants are much more varied and incisive than in song. Schoenberg’s
Sprechmelodie replaces the bel canto emphasis on sustained pure vowels with
a fantastic new mobility. It forces continuous change in both pitch and
vowel timbre, and by magnifying the profile of the consonants, it also
forces discontinuous change in vowel sounds. It produces a mercurial
kaleidoscope of vocal tones and timbres, giving the voice new articulations
and percussive effects, comparable to the extended bowing techniques used
by the string instruments in the work. Ferruccio Busoni, after a private
performance conducted by Schoenberg in 1913, described the declamation
as “affected” but also “almost like a new instrument, charming and expres-
sive.”26 Schoenberg’s student Erwin Stein also compared the Sprechmelodie to
an instrument in a seminal 1927 essay on the topic.27
This newly enriched vocal instrument can register the sonic material of
language with utmost vividness, fulfilling Schoenberg’s and Zehme’s belief
that the meaning and inner experience of words is conveyed purely
through their sounds. But the heightened expressive capacities of this
127 Pierrot lunaire

“instrumentalized” voice also alienate it from everyday vocalization, in

which words function as semantic units, and only secondarily as inflected
sound. Sprechmelodie still “speaks,” but it also supersedes meaning
through its extraordinary sonic palette. As Guy Michaud said of
Verlaine’s poetry, “the language is vaporized and is reabsorbed into the
melody.”28 The Sprechmelodie in Pierrot transforms Hartleben’s already
heightened language into an acrobatic display of vocal gestures and
timbres. It is also grotesque, in that the timbral capacities of the voice
are distorted by immense increases in every dimension, to register more
vividly the music of the poetic language.
The alterity of Sprechmelodie arises from this vertiginous liberty. It
releases vocal sound and expression from the shackles of an outdated
notion of beauty, but its free and rapid inflections also relinquish the
ability of bel canto song to delineate subjective states through a more
limited scale of positions relative to a tonic. The newly “instrumentalized”
voice of Sprechmelodie denatures bel canto’s most beautiful artifice – its
constructed tonal representations of subjectivity and identity.
However, a growing number of analysts now acknowledge the fleeting
tonal residues that arise everywhere in Schoenberg’s music.29 The beginnings
of a methodological approach to this complex phenomenon have emerged
recently in the theoretical literature.30 Schoenberg’s idiom in this period
demonstrates his fine-tuned ability to create multiple simultaneous tonal
implications that, in constant flux, are neutralized through superimposition
or juxtaposition. (The basic elements are diminished-seventh, whole-tone,
and fourth chords; they are fragmented and recombined to simultaneously
intensify and neutralize their traditional implications.) Schoenberg was not
out to destroy tonality, and in 1921 he derided the term “atonal,” offering
“polytonal” and “pantonal” as preferable alternatives.31 It was the structural
obligations of tonality that he wished to elide, and it is only from his concept
of “suspended tonality” (aufgehobene Tonalität), all-too-briefy defined in his
1911 Harmonielehre, that we can find any historically relevant theoretical
bearings for the music of Pierrot.32 Schoenberg’s published discussions of
suspended tonality give very few examples, and his music in the period of
Pierrot realizes the concept far more subtly and intensively, maintaining
intricate webs of tonal latencies that collectively suspend tonality without
completely negating it. Busoni may have been referring to these sorts of
fleeting sensations in Pierrot when he remarked in a 1913 letter that it was
“as if a large musical mechanism had been assembled from crumbled
ingredients . . . put to uses other than those for which they were originally
designed.”33
In Pierrot, each instrument projects its own diaphanous shroud of
fragmentary, shifting tonal latencies; contrapuntal superimposition of
128 Richard Kurth

the different instrumental strata suspends these tonal residues in a neutral

balance, something like a Calder mobile. Sprechmelodie plays an impor-
tant role in keeping the suspension in motion, because – unlike sung
pitches – it will generally not interfere with the sensitive pitch-specific
balancing of tonal residues. Although Schoenberg’s preface asks the reciter
to give “due consideration” to the notated pitches, the main priority is the
agility and timbral variety that characterize Sprechmelodie. In fact,
recorded performances conducted by Schoenberg attest to his increasing
lenience about pitch accuracy in the Sprechmelodie.34 Nevertheless, the
notated Sprechstimme pitches always participate in the musical structure,
and not only in the obvious places where they double an instrument or
collaborate in strict canonic imitation.35 The optimal Sprechmelodie per-
formance will convey the notated pitches as boundaries for the continuous
pitch fluctuations in order to help project the specific manner in which
tonalities are neutralized and suspended in each passage. After all, the
notated Sprechstimme pitches are fundamental components of the spon-
taneous sonic/expressive content that Schoenberg imagined and heard in
response to the poems, and of the harmonic/contrapuntal idiom that
captured his experience.

The fabric of allusion: echoes of Schumann

in the shadows of tonality
Pierrot lunaire, writes Reinhold Brinkmann, “offers a historical diagnosis”
and “critical commentary on itself, on its own representational intent. In
an extreme state of self-reflection, Pierrot lunaire is music about its own
presence . . . music about music, music about a specific musical tradi-
tion.”36 For Brinkmann, fragments of specific musical works constitute
what Busoni (quoted above) called “crumbled ingredients”; thus Pierrot
weaves into its fabric parodic allusions to a panoply of works, genres,
and composers – including Wagner’s Parsifal, Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben,
and Schumann’s Carnaval – in addition to numerous contrapuntal
devices (passacaglia, retrograde and inversion canons, fugue) and tradi-
tional forms (trio sonata, barcarolle, waltz).37 The Parsifal and Ein
Heldenleben parodies appear in the first and second melodramas
Schoenberg composed, so the idea of musical caricature – the analog of
pantomime – must have been part of his “ironic-satiric” concept from the
outset. There are also instances of self-parody: for instance, Jonathan
Dunsby hears an echo of Op. 19, No. 4 in “Valse de Chopin,” while
Stephan Weytjens observes in “Colombine” a clear quotation from
Herzgewächse, Op. 20.38
129 Pierrot lunaire

Example 9.1 (a) Schoenberg, “Mondestrunken” (No. 1), m. 1 (piano only). (b) Schoenberg,
“Entrückung,” String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10, IV, m. 1 (second violin only). (c) Schumann,
“Mondnacht,” Eichendorff Liederkreis, Op. 39, V, mm. 1–3. (d) Schumann, “Hör” ich das
Liedchen klingen,” Dichterliebe, Op. 48, X, mm. 1–2. (e) Schumann, “Am leuchtenden
Sommermorgen,” Dichterliebe, Op. 48, XII, m. 11

Brinkmann’s idea that Pierrot is replete with ironic referentiality raises

many fascinating questions. Are the allusions structural components of
the work, or just witty moments of brilliance that emerge and then
dissolve? How dense is the network of allusions, and what are its techni-
ques of concealment? What criteria validate a “real” allusion? (Some
putative references invoke striking musical or poetic intertextualities,
while others may simply reflect a listener’s personal associations.) To
begin exploring such questions, the following discussion offers some
new examples for consideration and debate, supported by several types
of evidence. Passages that allude to tonal compositions will also help
expose some of the tonal latencies in Schoenberg’s music.
The “‘Mondestrunken” motive (see Example 9.1a) is our starting point
since it opens the cycle. It nicely exemplifies how Schoenberg concatenates
familiar symmetrical harmonic configurations in order to superimpose mul-
tiple tonal implications: it contains an augmented triad, diminished-seventh
chord, five-note whole-tone subset, and three tritones (the maximum possi-
ble in a seven-note set); these subsets are all tonally multivalent, in diverse
ways. The motive’s signature rhythm and contour are easily recognized, and
it reappears in many guises throughout the cycle. It also evokes numerous
musical allusions.
The “Mondestrunken” motive depicts the flooding moonlight that intox-
icates the poet (“Den Wein, den man mit Augen trinkt”). It is surely a self-
parody of the ascending eight-note motive from Schoenberg’s “Entrückung”
(third movement of the Second String Quartet, Op. 10), which depicts pre-
sentiments of celestial fragrance (“Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten”).
130 Richard Kurth

The second violin entry (see Example 9.1b) best illustrates the close similarity,
since it shares six pitch classes with the “Mondestrunken” motive (including
the same augmented triad and diminished-seventh chord). Both poetic con-
texts involve celestial rapture, but the parody-allusion makes an “ironic-
satiric” and grotesque comparison between the moon-drunk Pierrot and the
soul’s transcendental ecstasy in “Entrückung.” The inverted contours of the
two motives delineate that contrast.39
The “Mondestrunken” figure also echoes the beautiful descending
figure from Schumann’s “Mondnacht” (from the Eichendorff Liederkreis,
Op. 39), probably the most beloved moonlit meditation in the entire Lied
tradition (see Example 9.1c). This parody also invokes ironic contrasts,
setting Eichendorff’s affirmative celestial contemplation against Pierrot’s
decadent intoxication, and the Romantic isolation expressed elsewhere in
the Eichendorff Liederkreis against the modern alienation allegorized in
the Giraud/Hartleben poems.
As noted above, Brinkmann and Youens both interpret Pierrot as an
allegory on the artist or poet of modernity. This identification emerges in
“Mondestrunken” (No. 1), “Madonna” (No. 6), and “Die Kreuze”
(No. 14), which are the only movements that specifically mention the
poet or his verses. Indeed, the cello (Schoenberg’s own instrument) enters
in “Mondestrunken” precisely at the words “der Dichter.” Schumann’s
Dichterliebe, Op. 48 is the obvious model for a song cycle about poetic
subjectivity and psychological crisis. This discussion will henceforth focus
entirely on numerous allusions to Dichterliebe that emerge in Pierrot.
The “Mondestrunken” figure, for instance, evokes a wistful memory of
Dichterliebe X (see Example 9.1d), a song that in fact is about nostalgic
recollection of song (“When I hear the song / that once my sweetheart
sang”). The motive also parodies the enharmonically multivalent arpeg-
giations of Dichterliebe XII, in which Schumann’s devastated poet, mourn-
ful and pale, falls mute and hears illusory voices – much like a sick and
melancholy Pierrot. (Example 9.1e shows m. 11, precisely where the poet
falls mute (“stumm”), and where a descending augmented triad D-B flat-G
flat and diminished-seventh chord skeleton B flat-E-C sharp strikingly
resemble similar components in the “Mondestrunken” motive.)
The preceding allusions all involve detailed intervallic similarities and
poetic associations or contrasts. Brinkmann noted a different sort of
allusion to Dichterliebe: the reprise of the flute monolog “Der kranke
Mond” (No. 7) as an interlude – without Sprechstimme but with new
instrumental parts – between “Enthauptung” and “Die Kreuze” (Nos. 13
and 14).40 Brinkmann noted that Dichterliebe is the obvious model for this
kind of structural recollection, because the postlude from Dichterliebe XII
(a song just mentioned above) returns at the end of the entire cycle,
131 Pierrot lunaire

Example 9.2 (a) Schoenberg, “Madonna” (No. 6), mm. 1–3. (b) “Madonna”, m. 24.
(c) Schumann, “Im Rhein,” Dichterliebe, Op. 48, VI, mm. 57–8

transposed to D flat major. In both Dichterliebe and Pierrot, the reprise

comments wordlessly upon a traumatic experience endured by the poet. In
fact, the structural reprise in Pierrot also links the waning crescent moon
of No. 7 to the waxing crescent moon of No. 13, and thereby also connects
the adjacent movements “Madonna” (No. 6) and “Die Kreuze” (No. 14),
which are both points of intense musical and narrative climax, share
religious imagery, brood on the poet’s suffering, and are the only melo-
dramas that end with fortissimo outbursts.
In fact, “Madonna” (No. 6) makes striking structural allusions to
Dichterliebe VI, and these can also help illustrate the tonal latencies of
Schoenberg’s remarkable idiom. In Dichterliebe VI, itself a parody of a
chorale-prelude in E minor, the rejected and deluded poet ironically
compares his faithless beloved to the beatific Madonna in the Cologne
Cathedral altarpiece. Schoenberg’s “Madonna” conceals ironic allusions
to this song, perhaps initially stimulated by the shared religious icono-
graphy. In “Madonna” the poet hails the blood-red moon as the Mother of
all sorrows; she rises over the “altar” of his verses, bleeding from unheal-
able wounds while holding her son’s “corpse” – symbolizing a leaf of
poetry – in her emaciated hands. Schoenberg’s music doesn’t parody
Schumann’s directly, although “Madonna” is also a mock baroque texture,
which many critics interpret as an allusion to Bach’s music.41 “Madonna”
does, however, project specters of Schumann’s E minor that are suspended
in its penumbral harmonic fabric.
In the opening passage (Example 9.2a), the cello ascends and descends
in distorted scales that nonetheless create a liminal pitch-class focus on
E/F flat. Above this, the flute melody projects a very strong sense of
132 Richard Kurth

dominant harmony in E minor, highly embellished, but with durations

and contours lending constant emphasis to dominant-function scale
degrees. (The piano also repeats a B major triad five times near the end
of the preceding melodrama.) Meanwhile, the opening Sprechmelodie
pitches – sharing five pitch classes with the “Mondestrunken” figure! –
project a strong sense of submediant harmony from parallel E major
(C sharp minor), which morphs chromatically into subdominant har-
mony (A minor) at the word “Schmerzen.” Multiple harmonic functions
in E are thus diversely represented and superimposed contrapuntally, to
suggest but suspend the tonality. (The bass clarinet drifts like a specter
through fragmentary references to other centers.)
“Madonna” then orbits through numerous other fragmentary tonal refer-
ences, but E minor reemerges at the final cadence (Example 9.2b), where the
dominant chord B-D sharp-F-A-C (with diminished fifth F), is superimposed
over E, with the root B prominently sustained in the cello. The tonal function
of this sonority is obscured by the low register, loud dynamic, unusual
spacing, and the manner of inverting the ninth chord. But it is nevertheless
a compressed echo of the ending from Dichterliebe VI (Example 9.2c), where
the same harmony (except with the perfect fifth F sharp) unfolds linearly, but
in the same general register. The final crashing chord of “Madonna” hides
this quotation, and all the other facets of allusion and parody between the two
pieces, by smashing the whole edifice.
The ending of Pierrot on a nostalgic note and in full morning sun (“O
alter Duft,” No. 21) also evokes further parallels with Dichterliebe. The
opening words “O alter Duft aus Märchenzeit” (O ethereal fragrance from
fabled times) are matched by languid parallel thirds in mm. 1–2, and an E
major triad at the phrase cadence in m. 3 (Example 9.3a). Other similar
tonal cues arise throughout the song. Many critics hear the E major triad
as a tonic here, and also at the end of song.42 This tonal orientation is easy
to hear, and it also forges an unmistakable – but so far unnoticed – allusion
to the title, key, and final sonority of Dichterliebe XV (“Aus alten Märchen
winkt es” [Out of the old fairy tales beckons]), which closes with the
identical pitches in the piano right hand. The closing words of the
Schumann song also describe how morning sun dissolves the idle dreams
of the previous night. But like that fleeting dream-image, the sense of tonic
function about the E major triad in Example 9.3a can also dissolve, and
take on another identity: as a dominant substitute in C sharp/D flat major.
The reader can test this idea at the piano, noting in particular the right
hand D flat-F third and bass A flat that immediately precede the E triad,
the clarinet’s D-D sharp-C sharp sigh above it, the C-C sharp gesture that
sets the left hand in motion at the outset, and other factors that emerge
with clear tonal potency if a C sharp major triad is appended to the
133 Pierrot lunaire

Example 9.3 (a) Schoenberg, “O alter Duft” (No. 21), mm. 1–3. (b) “O alter Duft,” mm. 26–30

excerpt. The fact that there is no literal resolution to C sharp here (except
for the subtle clarinet figure) is absolutely typical of Schoenbergian sus-
pended tonality, which necessarily entails suppression of the tonic
sonority.43
The ability of the opening passage simultaneously to evoke both E
major and C sharp major further strengthens the Dichterliebe allusion,
because the E major of Dichterliebe XV gives way suddenly to C sharp
minor in Dichterliebe XVI (“Die alten bösen lieder” [The old evil songs], a
song with words and images ripe for ironic reference at this point in
Pierrot). D flat major is attained later, precisely when the postlude from
Dichterliebe XII (already mentioned earlier) is reprised. The multiple tonal
latencies in the opening of “O alter Duft” thus simultaneously allude to
both of the last two songs of Dichterliebe. Schoenberg’s manner of sus-
pending tonality gives his music this unprecedented allusiveness.
Like Dichterliebe, Pierrot lunaire also ends with nostalgic retrospec-
tion, very faint and subtly nuanced (see Example 9.3b). The strings wist-
fully remember the piano’s opening thirds, and E major sensations are
kept mysteriously aglow – by the piano triads (subdominant and two
dominant substitutes) and by the closing low E octave – and then evaporate.
134 Richard Kurth

Meanwhile the Sprechmelodie is reprising a piano figure from m. 11, and uses
C sharp three times, each one longer. As the voice also dissolves into inaud-
ibility, it descends to a low F – intentionally beyond the singer’s range –
joining the C sharps to create a delicate echo of Schumann’s closing D flat
major. (This can be tested at the piano, again with great care for the fragility of
the sensations in question.) In this intricate manner, quixotic tonal fragrances
of E major and D flat major are superimposed once more, with the latter
especially frail, but dissolving last – along with the entire atmosphere of
allusion.
Some may also perceive another lingering diaphanous tonal sensation
here: a delicate gravitation towards an F root. The suspension of tonality
always produces multiple valences, arising from the counterbalanced
instabilities that are needed to suspend tonality. These liminal sensations
also heighten the sense of nostalgic yearning that ends Schoenberg’s cycle.
Like Dichterliebe, there is also a harmonic reference back to the tonal
coordinates of the first song, and the analytically inclined reader will find
residues of these same three tonalities in “Mondestrunken,” especially at
its lambent close. Such delicate and ephemeral harmonic traces, like the
dreamy visions in “O alter Duft,” are indices of the diaphanous world of
suspended tonal sensibility that Schoenberg uniquely created. Like the
imaginary gestures of the pantomime, these evanescent allusions to ton-
ality emerge almost inaudibly and then evaporate into the fragrant air of
memory and imagination.