The Glenn Korff School of Music will present Arnold Schoenberg’s landmark of early 20th century music, “Pierrot Lunaire” on Thursday, Oct. 9 at 7:30 p.m. in Kimball Recital Hall. The concert is free and open to the public and will also be webcast.
“This is not something that gets played a lot, and it’s probably not going to get played again for a long time,” said Associate Professor of Music Theory Stanley Kleppinger, who teaches the piece to sophomores in his music theory classes and who helped organize the performers for this performance. “People should get out to see this because it’s unlike anything they’ll ever see.”
The chamber ensemble for this work, conducted by Associate Professor of Bassoon Jeffrey McCray, includes faculty members John Bailey (flute and piccolo), Clark Potter (viola and violin) and Karen Becker (cello), as well as master’s student Lucas Willsie (clarinet and bass clarinet), and DMA alumnus Kurt Knecht (piano). These performers collaborate with Professor of Voice Donna Harler-Smith, who initially approached Kleppinger with the suggestion of performing the piece.
“All of these instrumentalists are phenomenal players, otherwise we couldn’t do the piece,” Harler-Smith said.
The setting of 21 poems by Albert Giraud follows Pierrot, a clowning character from the Italian commedia dell-arte theatrical tradition, as he engages life’s largest issues (love, religion, violence, regret) through the exaggerated lens of post-romantic expressionism.
Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” (1912) is considered a masterwork. It features 21 movements set to Giraud’s poems, translated from French into German by Otto Erich Hartleben.
“It’s one of these landmark works of early 20th century that really every music student should know,” McCray said. “But because it gets performed so rarely, they just don’t ever get to experience it, other than on a recording.”
It is a difficult piece filled with many dark moments.
“This is the time period when Sigmund Freud is still alive. We’re all worrying about the darkest part of our psyches. And it’s in the same time period as Edward Munch’s “The Scream” painting,” Kleppinger said. “That’s what art was doing in Europe at this time. It was a dark, angry, disturbed place to be, and music was just in the right place at the right time.”
Tonality was breaking down, and Kleppinger said Schoenberg saw himself as the successor of the German Romantic mantle.
“It’s like German Romanticism on steroids,” Kleppinger said.
The title, “Pierrot Lunaire” means moonstruck Pierrot or crazy Pierrot. Based on the commedia dell’arte, a form of theatre characterized by masked “types,” which began in Italy in the 16th century. Troupes of actors would travel from town to town and improvise comedies for the locals.
“There’s always a damsel in distress. There’s always a snidely, whiplash, kind of dastardly villain. There’s always a hero to come to save the day. And there’s always a clown. The clown was Pierrot,” Kleppinger said.
As Pierrot got played by hundreds of actors over a couple of centuries, he evolved.
“You got to the 18th or 19th centuries, and he starts to get picked up by Expressionists,” Kleppinger said. “He was no longer the guy who tells the off-color joke and tries to win the damsel, and that’s just funny. It’s now darker than that. It’s more macabre humor.”
Thus, the clown in “Pierrot Lunaire” is a dark, angry and sometimes evil clown.
“He’s very afraid of the moon. He’s moonstruck, and the moon makes him go crazy,” Kleppinger said. “It’s emotionally impactful in a way that maybe you don’t want to get all the time, but Schoenberg is really good at what he’s trying to do.”
“Pierrot Lunaire” is known for a unique vocal technique called “Sprechstimme,” which means speak and voice.
“It’s a hotly contested concept,” Harler-Smith said. “Schoenberg himself wrote what his idea of Sprechstimme was to be in the preface to ‘Pierrot Lunaire,’ but his description is confusing and contradictory. I personally believe that since he gave specific pitches for every non-sung word, he means for the quality of the voice used to sound not like singing, but more like speaking.”
Kleppinger describes it as something in between singing and speaking.
“He doesn’t just want you to say the text. He has notes on the score,” he said. “But he doesn’t want you to sing those notes either. He wants you to do something kind of in between when you’re gliding and sliding between the notes. The effect is really spooky. It’s not just ‘Hey, I’m a happy clown.’ This is like ‘I’m a really creepy clown here to freak you out.’”
The music is also incredibly difficult for each of the performers.
“All of the players individually have so many notes to play,” McCray said. “And then the part that makes it even more difficult sometimes is that the lines don’t really line up at all for long stretches of time. There are, however, some really lovely ensemble numbers where it’s more of a homophonic texture. Those are some of the most exquisitely beautiful moments in the piece.”
McCray said the piece is “terrifying” as the conductor.
“It’s only five players and one singer, so from that perspective, you might ask yourself, ‘Does this piece need a conductor?’ McCray said. “But because of the way it’s written, it’s so active, and the parts are so disconnected at times, it needs a traffic cop. The hardest thing about conducting a piece like this is understanding when to just get out of the way and when to assert yourself and just knowing the difference between those two needs for the ensemble.”
The faculty are looking forward to performing the piece on Oct. 9.
“It’s an absolute joy to work with my colleagues on this,” McCray said. “I’m going to confess, though, that conducting a group of my colleagues is a little terrifying because they’re all such fabulous musicians, and they’ve been very gracious about allowing me to lead them through this process. There’s a lot of give and take.”
Harler-Smith agreed.
“I am so privileged to be able to work with such phenomenal musicians,” she said. “I am looking forward to really giving myself over to the eerie world of Pierrot and allowing the drama in the poetry and music to create a highly imaginative world. I absolutely LOVE that the work concludes with a happy ending. I hope that audiences will open their senses to experience the highly imaginative and dramatic world that Schoenberg and Hartleben have masterfully created.”
The second half of the program on Oct. 9 will be the performance of another landmark 20th century piece, “In C” by Terry Riley, which can be performed by any number of people, as yet to be determined by students who volunteer to perform in it.
“I don’t know who’s going to be playing yet. I’m still working on that,” McCray said. “But it will be an appropriate and really interesting contrast to the Schoenberg piece. Now, you’re talking about a piece that strips away all of the complexity of atonal musical language and simplifies it down to these teeny, tiny cells that are all based in C-major.”
Kleppinger says it will be fun to put these two contrasting pieces together.
“’In C’ is like the cleansing sorbet after this,” he said. “’Pierrot Lunaire’ is like 45 minutes of anger and dissonance, and then ‘In C’ is an hour of happy sounds. We need a chance to put wild stuff out there like this because it’s important and because it’s very impactful, even though it’s on the fringe. We need some more music on the fringe. These are experiences that you only get in a university.”
McCray is planning for this to become a regular ensemble in the Glenn Korff School of Music that regularly plays new music that will comprise of students and perhaps also faculty.
“There’s this whole body of musical literature out there that is too big to be chamber music, but it’s too small to be really a part of your symphony orchestra or wind ensemble curriculum,” McCray said. “We might call it a new music ensemble or contemporary music ensemble, but I plan on exploring literature as far back as the early 20th century.”
He also wants them to play music being written today by students in the Glenn Korff School of Music’s composition program.
“The composition area is really on board with having a resident ensemble here that’s already in place that would be available to perform student compositions,” McCray said. “We have such an active composition area here, and I just want to facilitate things more efficiently for them.”
He’s hoping the new ensemble will perform regularly, even if it’s not an official ensemble for credit.
“It will just be for the love of doing modern music,” McCray said.
McCray hopes people will come experience “Pierrot Lunaire” on Oct. 9.
“It’s one of these once-in-a-lifetime kinds of pieces to get to be part of a performance like this. It doesn’t get performed very often, and I’m thrilled and humbled that I’m getting to do this with my colleagues here,” McCray said.
For more information or to watch the live webcast of the concert, visit http://music.unl.edu.