Schoenberg 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 melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of 21 selected poems from Albert Giraud's cycle of the same name as translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The work is written for reciter (voice-type unspecified in the score, but traditionally performed by a soprano) who delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. 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. Though the music is atonal, it does not employ Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, which he did not use until 1921.

Pierrot lunaire, premiered in Berlin in 1912, is a series of twenty-one short melodramas for voice and five instruments on German translations of poems by Albert Giraud. Here the composer first introduces Sprechgesang (speech-song), a technique that revolutionised declamation. Schoenberg wanted the piece to be ironic, at once tender and grotesque, in the manner of cabaret songs.

When he wrote the cycle that was to change the musical course of the twentieth century, Arnold Schönberg wanted the 21 melodramas based on Albert Giraud's famous collection of poems to be 'spoken and sung' in the language of the country in which they were set, in keeping with the fledgling Berlin cabaret tradition… In doing so, he may not have appreciated the problems that the exercise would pose. The fate of Albert Giraud's verses is inextricably linked to Otto Erich Hartleben's free translation of them. It was in this version that they were most frequently set to music. Stripped of their rhymes and original metre, they are in fact another poetic work. When Darius Milhaud presented Schönberg with a French version recited by Marya Freund in 1922, the composer was disappointed and went so far as to say that he did not recognise his own work!

Collecting five CDs for about the price of three, this set of Boulez recordings is without parallel among the conductor's new-music releases. Imagine getting Boulez's celebrated single CD of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia and Eindrücke and his equally impressive single CD of Arnold Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande and Variations for Orchestra, bundled with four pivotal Elliott Carter works, Sir Harrison Birtwistle's electrifying …AGM…, Gérard Grisey's Modulations, Iannis Xenakis's Jalons, Hugues Dufourt's Antiphysis, and Brian Ferneyhough's Funerailles, and you have an idea how far this set stretches.

Arnold Schönberg. Austrian composer and painter, best known as the (putative) innovator of the twelve-tone technique. Leader of the Second Viennese School…