“Pierrot lunaire,” op. 21

The actress Albertine Zehme is to be thanked, that in 1912 in Berlin one of the masterworks of the 20th century came into being: the compo-sition of “Three times seven Melodramas of Pierrot lunaire” by Arnold Schönberg. “I read the forward, looked at the poems, am enthralled. Brilliant idea, quite to my liking. I would have wanted to do this even without payment. That is why I made another suggestion: instead of a payment, a percentage of the performances. I can accept that, because I can’t work on command,” the composer noted in his diary, three days after he had heard of Albertine Zehme’s plans through his agent Emil Gutmann. The native Viennese woman, 55 years of age at the time, who was known for reciting texts to music, was looking for a musical composition to accompany the recitation of texts by Albert Giraud. On 12 March 1912, Schönberg began with the first melodrama, “Gebet an Pierrot” (“Prayer to Pierrot”): “And I feel that I am definitely approaching a new form of expression. The sounds directly become an animalistic, immediate expression of sensual and spiritual movements.” With “Pierrot lunaire,” Arnold Schönberg wrote a composition that became the embodiment of expressionist aesthetics: to a multi-colored, fixed instrumental quintet is added a speaking voice that takes over the recitation of the 21 texts by Giraud. The work was completed on 9 July 1912, and the rehearsals, at which the Schönberg pupil and pianist, Eduard Steuermann, played a major role, began: “For my part, I will never forget these weeks and months, when the eight o’clock mail-delivery arrived with a new piece of the work. Feverishly, I practiced it on the piano and rushed over to the studio of Frau Zehme with the really difficult task of studying it with her. She was an intelligent and artistic woman, but an actress by profession, and only as musical as the well-brought up German ladies of our time. I remember, in despair about whether or not I could ever teach her the specific difference between three-quarter and four-quarter time, asking her a few times to dance a few measures of a Waltz and then a Polka, varying with increasingly short intervals between the two, and ultimately attempting the first measures of ‘The Dandy’.” (Eduard Steuermann) 25 rehearsals preceded the world première, for which the Berlin Choralion hall was rented. Steuermann reported about the première of “Pierrot”: “Frau Zehme insisted on appearing in a Pierrot costume and standing alone on the podium. The instrumentalists and the conductor, Schönberg, were behind a fairly complicated folding screen, complicated because on a small stage it wasn’t easy to build the screen so that the conductor could be seen by the singer, but not by the audience.” (Eduard Steuermann) Despite the unavoidable rustling and rattling of keys, the performance was a complete success, as Anton Webern wrote his friend, Alban Berg: “At the end there was no opposition at all. Schönberg and the performers had to come out again and again, Schönberg above all, of course. They screamed for him over and over again. It was an out and out success.”