Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg 

or Schönberg  (13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian

composer, music theorist, and painter. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German
poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. With the rise of the Nazi Party, Schoenberg's
works were labelled degenerate music, because they were modernist, atonal and what even Paul
Hindemith called "sonic orgies" and "decadent intellectual efforts" (Petropoulos 2014, 94–95). He
emigrated to the United States of America in 1934.
Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, has been one of the most
influential of 20th-century musical thought. Many European and American composers from at least
three generations have consciously extended his thinking, whereas others have passionately reacted
against it.
Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed
German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify innovations
in atonality (although Schoenberg himself detested that term) that would become the most polemical
feature of 20th-century art music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, an
influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic
scale. He also coined the term developing variation and was the first modern composer to embrace
ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.

Pierrot Lunaire

Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire" ("Three times Seven Poems from Albert
Giraud's 'Pierrot lunaire'"), commonly known simply as Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 ("Moonstruck Pierrot"
or "Pierrot in the Moonlight"), is a melodramaby Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of 21 selected poems
from Otto Erich Hartleben's German translation of the Belgian poet Albert
Giraud's cycle of French poems of the same name. The première of the work, which is between 35 and
40 minutes in length, was at the Berlin Choralion-Saal on October 16, 1912, with Albertine Zehme as the
vocalist.
The narrator (voice-type unspecified in the score, but traditionally performed by a soprano) delivers the
poems in the Sprechstimmestyle. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with
instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-
Lieder, which was a fashionable musical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. The
melodrama is in atonal form, yet does not use Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.
The composition is among Schoenberg's most celebrated and frequently performed works. The
instrumentation of the piece, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano (with standard doublings and in this
case with the addition of a vocalist) is referred to as a Pierrot ensemble.
The work originated in a commission by Albertine Zehme for a cycle for voice and piano, setting a series
of poems by the Belgian writer Albert Giraud. The verses had been first published in 1884 and later
translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. Schoenberg began on March 12 and completed the
work on July 9, 1912, having expanded the forces to an ensemble consisting of flute (doubling on
a piccolo), clarinet (doubling on bass clarinet), violin (doubling on viola), cello, and piano.
After forty rehearsals, Schoenberg and Zehme (in Columbine dress) gave the premiere at
the Berlin Choralion-Saal on October 16, 1912. Reaction was mixed. According to Anton Webern, some
in the audience were whistling and laughing, but in the end "it was an unqualified success". There was
some criticism of blasphemy in the texts, to which Schoenberg responded, "If they were musical, not a
single one would give a damn about the words. Instead, they would go away whistling the tunes".
The show took to the road throughout Germany and Austria later in 1912. It was performed for the first
time in America at the Klaw Theatre in New York City on February 4, 1923, with George
Gershwin and Carl Ruggles in attendance
Pierrot Lunaire consists of three groups of seven poems. In the first group, Pierrot sings
of love, sex and religion; in the second, of violence, crime, and blasphemy; and in the third of his return
home to Bergamo, with his past haunting him.

Pierrot Lunaire uses a variety of classical forms and techniques,

including canon, fugue, rondo, passacaglia and free counterpoint. The poetry is a German version of
a rondeau of the old French type with a double refrain. Each poem consists of three stanzas of 4 + 4 + 5
lines, with line 1 a Refrain (A) repeated as line 7 and line 13, and line 2 a second Refrain (B) repeated for
line 8.
The instrumental combinations (including doublings) vary between most movements. The entire
ensemble plays together only in the 11th, 14th and final four settings.
The atonal, expressionistic settings of the text, with their echoes of German cabaret, bring the poems
vividly to life. Sprechgesang, literally "speech-singing" in German, is a style in which the vocalist uses the
specified rhythms and pitches, but does not sustain the pitches, allowing them to drop or rise, in the
manner of speech.

Everything in "Nacht" is generated from a ten-note motif, introduced in canon starting in the fourth bar.
[5] This piece predominantly uses the pitch collection (014). This collection gets introduced in the very
first measure with the piano. If you take into account every note the piano plays in the first three
measures you get an octatonic scale (0134679T). This is just four groups of (014) transposed by T3. In
measure 4, we see one set of (014) in the bass clarinet line. Whenever we see this pitch collection it is
usually in one of two rhythms. The first, as illustrated by the bass clarinet in measure 4, is three half
notes. Later it shows up as three quarter notes, simply a compressed version of the original. The other
rhythm is three eighth notes, usually this comes in groups of three. For example, in measure 8 the bass
clarinet has the collection three times, each time as an eighth note rest followed by three eighth notes.
If you look at that measure as a whole, and any other time this pattern shows up, we see that the
second group is transposed from the first by T4. The third group of notes is transposed from the first
group by T1. Thus, the entire measure is actually using (014), not just in each group, but within each
group. In other words, if you take the first note of each three you get (014), if you take the second note
of each you get (014), and if you take the third note you also get (014). For the first two stanzas of text,
we only ever see (014) transposed by various Tx. Starting in the third stanza, we begin to see inversions
of (014). In measure 19, the right hand in the piano starts off with an inversion of (014) and then goes to
a transposition of (014). This continues on for the entirety of the run in both hands of the piano.

Following a brief introduction, the movement falls into three strophes of seven, six, and seven bars, with
section breaks occurring at measures 11 and 17, articulated by a change of tempo to etwas rascher for
the second strophe, and back again to the initial tempo for the third. These follow the stanzas of the
poem, and are followed by a coda. The first strophe is canonic in four voices; the second is also canonic,
but in just three voices; the third strophe consists of a rapid succession of ambiguous canonic fragments.
[6]
Although the pitch-class sets are virtually the same throughout the whole movement, each section has
distinct musical elements that differentiate them from each other. When looking at the transition from
the first section to the second section, a couple important changes take place. First, the tempo marking
"Etwas rascher" marks an increase in speed and rhythmic energy. This is further exaggerated by the
increased rhythmic density in the piano, clarinet, and cello parts. In addition to the rhythmic changes,
the registers of the cello, piano, and vocal lines are notably higher in the second section. The third
section returns to the original tempo, and the register and rhythmic density change again to closely
resemble the first section. This analysis provides evidence for organizing the piece into an ABA' form, as
the first and last sections have many similar elements while the middle section differs substantially.
However, because of the pitch-class set similarities, the argument could be made for a quasi theme-and-
variation organization, with A, A', and A sections.

Expressionism is a modernist movement that began in Germany and Austria in the early twentieth
century. Schoenberg, Austrian in descent, was associated with the expressionist movement in German
poetry and art. Being from Austria at this time, his music was often labeled as degenerate music since
Schoenberg is Jewish. Expressionistic music is dominated by dissonance rather than consonance, and
can create an “unsettling” feeling among its listeners [7][unreliable source] For many, expressionistic
music meant a rejection of the past and an acceptance of the innovative, unfamiliar future. The text of
“Nacht” can be described as ominous, and depicts the wings of black moths covering the sun. These
views are characteristic of expressionistic poetry.
“Nacht” also employs the occasional use of word painting through his music where he uses the music to
illustrate the literal meaning of a particular word [4]. These text expressions make general associations
between the text and musical setting. This can be seen with the word “duft” translating to “scent” in
measure 12. The full poetic phrase “Steigt ein Duft” means “arises a scent,” and this is depicted by a leap
upwards in voice from A to G♭. Likewise, the word “verschwiegen” loosely translates to “mutely” or
“hushed”, and is performed by conventional singing rather than Sprechstimme, along with prolonged
silence with a fermata,[7][unreliable source] though the word more precisely means "discreetly" or
"closed-mouthed".