The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Arnold Schoenberg · twenty-one melodramas for a reciting voice and five players, Op. 21, on Otto Erich Hartleben’s German versions of poems from Albert Giraud’s Pierrot lunaire · three parts of seven numbers, scored as one work · flute and piccolo, clarinet and bass clarinet, violin and viola, cello and piano
Mode
Melodrama; twenty-one recitations over chamber music, in a voice notated in pitch and rhythm and denied song
Mythos
The moonstruck clown as the artist’s mask; a passage into intoxication, down into night and sacrilege, and home to Bergamo
Phase
Three parts of seven: moon-intoxication and the sick moon; night, blasphemy and violence; homesickness, cruelty, parody and the voyage home
Presentation
Concert music; a reciting voice and five players on eight instruments, setting Hartleben’s German in twenty-one numbers, with instrumental interludes between some of them
Register
From a gallows joke of a few seconds to a passacaglia in the lowest registers and a last number near the triad; no note of the voice sung
Scale
One masked consciousness and its stage; a voice and five players; twenty-one short numbers
Governing Proposition
A moonstruck clown, the old Pierrot of the commedia, passes through twenty-one poems in three parts of seven: drunk on moonlight, down into a night of theft, sacrilege and beheading, and home by boat to Bergamo, given voice throughout by a performer who may not sing and must not merely speak. The wager of the work is that the modern artist can speak only through a mask, and that the mask is not a disguise for sincerity but the only sincerity left.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work began as a commission. Albertine Zehme, an actress and diseuse, wanted recitation with music, and asked Schoenberg for it. The texts came from Albert Giraud’s Pierrot lunaire: Rondels bergamasques of 1884, a cycle of fifty rondels, in the free German versions of Otto Erich Hartleben. Schoenberg chose twenty-one of the fifty, forty-two in a hundred, and set them in an order of his own, in three parts of seven. The full title, Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds “Pierrot lunaire”, three times seven poems, names the plan. Hartleben keeps the rondel: thirteen lines, the first returning as the seventh and the thirteenth, the second as the eighth. Three lines in every thirteen are returns, and of the 273 lines set, 210 are distinct.
The voice is written in Sprechstimme, its notes marked with crosses on the stems. Schoenberg’s preface says the melody is not to be sung, and that the performer is to neither sing it nor fall into realistic speech. What is left is a voice notated in pitch and rhythm and denied song: it cannot sing, it will not merely speak, and it never coincides with its own expression. How far the written pitches bind has been argued ever since. The argument is the work’s, not an accident of its reception. Sing these words and they become sentiment; speak them and they become parody. The truth of the work is in neither, and the voice is made to stand between.
The players are five, on eight instruments: flute doubling piccolo, clarinet in A doubling bass clarinet, violin doubling viola, cello and piano. The combination changes from number to number, so that the ensemble is a palette rather than a group. In the first number, Mondestrunken, the piano sets a glinting ostinato and the voice enters, neither sung nor spoken, with the wine that is drunk with the eyes, “mit Augen trinkt”. The poet is drunk on moonlight. The line comes back as the drink comes back, the rondel turning twice to its first words, and each time the music has changed what they mean.
Movement II
Part I is moon-intoxication, love, the art-poet and the sick moon. Colombine and Valse de Chopin restate the moonlit languor that the first number set, and the waltz is a style looked back on, Chopin’s, made into parody. These are the two numbers where the selection gives most: fine work, below the level of the rest, in a frame that could have been filled otherwise. Between them Der Dandy brings the piccolo’s glitter and the work’s first open wit, and Eine blasse Wäscherin, a pale washerwoman, stands between the dandy and the waltz.
Madonna is the first entrance of the sacred, a mother of sorrows set inside a cycle about a clown. It is not parody yet. The sacred here is still an image the poet reaches for, and in Part II it will become the structure of the night itself, inverted at the altar and on the crosses. The arc of the three parts, as most commentators read it and as the desk reads it, is already in motion: intoxication, then descent, then a voyage home. The homecoming will be stated by the poems; the descent is inferred from the order Schoenberg gave them.
Then the seventh number, for voice and flute alone. Der kranke Mond addresses a “nächtig todeskranker Mond”, a night moon sick to death, and the flute is the only other line in the room. Of all the work’s heights this is the coldest and the purest: a dying moon over a single instrument, with nothing beneath. It closes Part I by changing its state. The intoxication ends not in a crash but in a thinning, and the sick moon is the image the rest of the work will turn into wound, sword and stain.
Movement III
Part II is night, blasphemy and violence, and it opens with a passacaglia. Nacht is built on a three-note figure, with the bass clarinet, the cello and the piano in their lowest registers, and over it giant black moths shut out the sun. Here the work’s claim about strict form is first made plain: a passacaglia, one of the oldest of strict devices, carried inside a free atonal language, a decade before the twelve-tone method gave that language rules of its own. The device is not displayed. It is made audible as image, the dark closing in by repetition.
The night fills with sacrilege. Gebet an Pierrot is a prayer to the clown himself. In Raub he steals rubies from graves. In Rote Messe he stands at the altar and tears out his own heart as the host. Then Galgenlied, the shortest number, a few seconds of music on a gallows joke about a scrawny whore: nothing in it could be shorter, and its brevity is the joke. The sacred is now structure, inverted and parodied, and the work’s great feeling is uttered, as it must be here, half in jest.
In Enthauptung the moon hangs as a Turkish sword over Pierrot’s neck, and a long interlude follows the poem, music alone carrying the dread. Part II closes with Die Kreuze: the verses are “Heilge Kreuze”, holy crosses, on which poets bleed. The poet’s crucifixion is in his own poems. Each part of seven ends on a number that changes state, and this one names what the night has been about. The mask is the artist’s, and the blood is real.
Movement IV
Part III is homesickness, cruelty and parody, and the voyage home. Heimweh opens it. Then Gemeinheit, in which Pierrot drills a hole in Cassander’s skull to fill his pipe: the grotesque at its sharpest, and wit by design. The work gives a third of its numbers or more to such things, Der Dandy, Gemeinheit, Serenade, Galgenlied, and the desk does not count cruelty as comedy toward its height. It counts it toward the work’s range. Parodie is built on canons, among them canon by inversion, a learned device turned to mockery.
Der Mondfleck is the work’s most famous construction. Pierrot, out walking, finds a white spot of moonlight on the back of his black coat, and rubs at it until dawn. The winds and strings play strict canons that run backward from their midpoint, against a fugue in the piano. The music turns round at the centre as Pierrot turns to rub at his own back. The form is the gesture, and the palindrome is the obsession: the spot cannot be removed because it is not on the coat.
Serenade follows, Pierrot bowing his viola on Cassander’s bald head. It is the least necessary number of Part III, adding less than Gemeinheit had. But across the whole span of this part, from a skull drilled for tobacco to a retrograde canon, one law holds. The moon is the one image; the voice holds jest and grief at one distance; the rondel returns. The range runs from cabaret to Bach’s devices, and the work never moves outside it.
Movement V
Heimfahrt is a barcarole: a moonbeam for a rudder, and Pierrot steers home to Bergamo. It rises by gentleness. Then O alter Duft, the last number, recalls the old scent “aus Märchenzeit”, from fairy-tale time, and its harmony comes nearer to triads than anything else in the work. Whether this is a homecoming or a pastiche of one, the mask set down or a last mask, has not been settled. The desk reads it as the law’s last turn rather than a step outside it, without certainty, and the question stays open after a century.
The work was first performed in Berlin on 16 October 1912, with Zehme reciting and Schoenberg conducting. From 1933 to 1945 the Nazi state banned Schoenberg’s music in Germany, and outside Germany the performances went on. Berg took Sprechstimme into Wozzeck and Lulu. The question of what the voice should do has had answers that differ in kind, not degree: Boulez’s recordings, and singers from Helga Pilarczyk to Christine Schäfer and Barbara Hannigan. No realisation is the work, and none settles it.
In 1967 Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle founded the Pierrot Players, later the Fires of London, on the work’s ensemble. Flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, with or without percussion, became the Pierrot ensemble, and composers still write for it by the hundred. The formation outlived its occasion, as the work has outlived Hartleben’s verse. What it brought into the open holds: that the modern artist speaks through a mask, that the mask is the sincerity left, and that a voice which may not sing and will not speak can say both at once.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is put twenty-one times, and it finds more give than in a through-composed work. Schoenberg chose these poems from fifty, and a selection could have been otherwise: Colombine and Valse de Chopin restate the moonlit languor that Mondestrunken has already set, and Serenade, Pierrot bowing his viola on Cassander’s bald head, adds less than Gemeinheit had. But the frame resists. Each part of seven ends on a number that changes state: the sick moon over a flute alone, the verses as crosses, the old scent of fairy-tale time. Within numbers the compression is extreme: Galgenlied is gone in seconds, and nothing in it could be shorter. The rondel’s returns are form, not padding.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: the modern artist speaks only through a mask, and the mask is not a disguise for sincerity but the only sincerity left. Feeling at its extreme, in the sick moon, the Red Mass and the beheading, can be uttered only half in jest, and the jest does not reduce it. The Sprechstimme is the disclosure made audible: a voice that cannot sing and will not merely speak, a self that cannot coincide with its own expression. Held at the gate by the line between mood and meaning. Much of the work renders a mood, the moonstruck and the grotesque, and Hartleben’s verse, read alone, says little the 1890s had not said; the meaning is made by the setting.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Height is reached, and more often than the work’s reputation for irony allows. Der kranke Mond, a dying moon over a single flute, is the cold sublime at its purest. In Nacht giant black moths shut out the sun over a passacaglia in the lowest registers, and that is terror. In Enthauptung the moon hangs as a Turkish sword over Pierrot’s neck, and the long interlude after it reaches dread. O alter Duft is beauty in the old sense, held for a few bars before it fades, and Heimfahrt rises by gentleness. Held below by frequency, and by design: Der Dandy, Gemeinheit, Serenade and Galgenlied are wit and the grotesque, and cruelty as comedy is not height.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth built, on a borrowed figure. Pierrot is the commedia’s white clown, already the artist’s mask in Watteau, Banville and Laforgue; the work does not invent him. What it builds is load-bearing: three parts that carry the moonstruck poet into intoxication, down into night and sacrilege, and home to Bergamo. The sacred is built into the middle: Madonna as a mother of sorrows, the Red Mass in which Pierrot tears out his heart as the host, the verses as holy crosses on which poets bleed. The moon governs throughout, as wine, wound, sword and stain. Held a tenth above the gate by the inherited archetype, and because the homecoming is stated by the poems while the descent is inferred from their order.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritances are the melodrama, spoken word over music from Benda to Schumann’s ballads, the Lied cycle, and the cabaret recitation Albertine Zehme wanted. The departures: a speaking voice sustained through a whole work, notated in pitch and rhythm and denied song; free atonality carried across twenty-one forms with no through-composed text to hold it up; five players on eight instruments, the ensemble a palette rather than a group; strict canon, passacaglia and palindrome inside the atonal language, a decade before the twelve-tone method. The stake was real: a Berlin public, and a language most of it refused. Held below the top by his own road: Sprechstimme had appeared in the speaker of the Gurre-Lieder and in Die glückliche Hand, the atonal miniature in Opp. 11 and 19.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The rondel’s returns are a mind that circles: in the first number “mit Augen trinkt”, drinks with the eyes, comes back as the poet’s drink comes back, and every return is changed by what the music has done between. The Sprechstimme is the knowledge itself: sing these words and they become sentiment, speak them and they become parody, and the work’s truth is in neither. In Der Mondfleck the canons turn backward at their midpoint while Pierrot turns to rub at the spot on his own back; the form is the gesture. Held below the top because the three-by-seven frame is a numerical scheme as much as a necessity, and Colombine and Serenade contain their poems more than they enact them.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence, not promise: a century of return, and it has not closed. What the Sprechstimme asks is still unsettled. Schoenberg’s preface forbids both song and realistic speech, and Boulez’s recordings and singers from Helga Pilarczyk to Christine Schäfer and Barbara Hannigan give answers that differ in kind, not degree. The questions inside it stay open: whether the irony protects the feeling or destroys it, whether O alter Duft is a homecoming or a pastiche of one, whether the whole is a farewell to Romanticism or its last mask. Held below the elder works because a century of return is less than two, and much of the analysis serves the history of atonality more than this work.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The work reorganised what vocal chamber music could be: a new voice, an ensemble used as a palette, and the proof that atonality could carry strict forms and wit as well as outcry. In the music of its decade only The Rite of Spring moved the field as far. It is held below the summit because much of its harmonic reach passed through Schoenberg’s later twelve-tone works, and the Sprechstimme has few true heirs. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: immediate and lasting. Berg took Sprechstimme into Wozzeck and Lulu. In 1967 Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle founded the Pierrot Players, later the Fires of London, on its ensemble, and that formation became the standard of new music, written for by the hundred.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Survival is demonstrated. The score survives whole and is performed as written; no part is lost or doubtful. Its presence has been continuous since 1912, broken in Germany while the Nazi state banned Schoenberg’s music, from 1933 to 1945. It is widely recorded, in the core repertory of every new-music ensemble, taught in conservatories, and it gave its name to a whole formation of players. Its presence is the widest of any atonal work of its decade, but in a narrower field than the song cycle’s or the symphony’s: it is not heard as Winterreise is heard. The surface fixed to its moment is the text. Hartleben’s decadent verse belongs to the 1890s, and it has dated where the music has not.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The making bears weight. The passacaglia of Nacht and the backward canons of Der Mondfleck, set against a fugue in the piano, are strict devices made audible as image, the moths and the spot. The scoring finds a new combination number by number, and the colour is never decoration: the flute alone against the dying moon, the bass clarinet’s dark, the piccolo’s glitter in Der Dandy. The rhythm of the voice carries the stress and wit of German speech through a notation without song, and numbers of a minute or two are built from very little. The costs: the notation does not say unambiguously what it asks, and a century of disagreement is in part its failure; Colombine and Valse de Chopin are fine work below the rest.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the gallows joke of Galgenlied and the warmth of O alter Duft, or the strict palindrome of Der Mondfleck and the parody waltz of Valse de Chopin. One law governs them. The moon is one image through all twenty-one poems; the voice never yields to song, and so holds jest and grief at one distance; the rondel returns in every number; and the harmony admits the triad only as memory. The range is wide, from cabaret to Bach’s devices, from blasphemy to nostalgia, and the law holds across it. The tension is in the closing number, whose near-tonal harmony is either the law’s last turn, the mask set down, or a step outside it; the desk reads the first, without certainty.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The orders the work holds are held together through the moon and the mask, not listed: consciousness, in intoxication, obsession, guilt and homesickness; the sacred, inverted but present as structure, in Madonna, the Red Mass and the crosses; art and the artist, the governing subject; eros and cruelty, in Colombine, Gemeinheit and the violence of Part II; history as a style looked back on, in Chopin’s waltz, the commedia’s Bergamo and the last number’s fairy-tale time. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, labour and the state do not appear, and the natural order is no more than a lunar emblem. A chamber work holds one masked consciousness and its stage; the figure says how many orders that is.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.4, then The Swerve, The Living Form and Pressure on Tradition at 9.2. Strict canon, passacaglia and palindrome made audible as image, and a scoring that finds a new colour for every number; a speaking voice sustained through a whole work and denied song; a form in which the rondel’s returns and the voice between song and speech are what the work knows; and a reach that runs through Berg to the Pierrot ensemble, the standard formation of new music.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4: consciousness, the sacred inverted, art and the artist, eros and cruelty, and history as a style looked back on are held through the moon and the mask, but the family, labour and the state are absent and the natural order is a lunar emblem. Next above it, The Inevitable and The Unconcealment at 8.5: a selection of twenty-one poems from fifty, with numbers in Part I that restate one mood, and a disclosure made more by the setting than by Hartleben’s verse.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.4, The Living Form at 9.2, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five, one with no room: The Swerve at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.2 and The Imperishable at 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5, The Archetypal Deep clears it by a tenth at 8.6, and The Unconcealment meets it exactly at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.5, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · the score of Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds “Pierrot lunaire”, Op. 21, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition, text or recording was in hand. The twenty-one melodramas for reciting voice and five players, in three parts of seven and with the instrumental interludes between some numbers, are scored as one work; the numbers are not scored separately, and no performance or recording is the object. The words are part of the work and are read in German, in Hartleben’s versions as Schoenberg set them; Giraud’s French is evidence of what Hartleben kept and changed, not the unit, and Hartleben’s verse is credited or charged to the work as the text Schoenberg chose. German is quoted only where the desk is certain of the words, in fragments of four words or fewer; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and no published translation is quoted. The rondel’s lines and returns were counted by script. Figures and details that could not be verified, among them the dates of composition, the performances that followed the first, the number of rehearsals, the running time, the scoring of every number, the pitches of the passacaglia’s figure, the date of the composer’s own recording and the first answers of other composers, are not given. The Sprechstimme is realised differently by every performer; the sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.