Reinhold Friedl - Schönberg Pierrot Lunaire Cheap Imitation

came into being at the suggestion of Thomas Schäfer for a concert of the ensemble zeitkratzer at the Vienna Konzerthaus during the Wien Modern Festival. The idea of creating a new version of Schönbergs’ Pierrot Lunaire arose from the following anecdote: during rehearsals for the piece’s premiere in Berlin in 1912, the clarinettist, as a joke, played his part on a B-flat clarinet instead of the A clarinet prescribed in the score. Schönberg, who was also conducting the piece, was reported not to have noticed the difference.

This is where the idea originated to further reduce Pierrot Lunaire without compromising the piece’s significant characteristics. It is in exactly this sense that Schönberg Pierrot Lunaire Cheap Imitation is a parody (from the Greek parodia) – an adaptation of a given work‚” with a tendency toward simplifying the approach for practical reasons“[1], as also composed by Bach (Christmas Oratorio, B minor mass), Händel or Gluck. Thus, Schönberg’s original is treated in much the same way that Stravinsky treated Gesualdo or Berio treated Mahler. In addition, the simplification is also applied to the durations: hardly any of the three times seven pieces is longer than a minute. At the same time, the adaptation clearly also encompasses the satiric and comic element.

The compositional reduction was realized by giving the musical gesture the meaning that it merits in Schönbergs’ music. Who cares about an exact pitch, who is able to hear it and to verify that a musician plays what is written in the score? What is actually heard is often only the gesture, the characteristic upward and downward motions, ostinatos, rhythmic contours. Therefore distinctive modules were extracted from Schönbergs’ original and assigned to individual musicians as performance material – in the liberal sense of John Cage, to which part of the title Cheap Imitation refers. The montage is arranged by the conductor who, after following a predetermined sequence, freely chooses the entrances of the instruments. In this way, the “’negative qualities” of new music denounced by Schönberg are deployed: “pedal points (in place of elaborated bass voices and moving harmonies), ostinatos, sequences (in place of developing variation), dissonances (that obscure the profanity of the thematic material) and a kind of polyphony that replaces counterpoint and which formerly would have been despised for its imprecise imitation as ’bandmaster music’ or what I called ‘rhubarb counterpoint’”.[2]

[1] Honegger, Marc; Massenkeil, Günther (ed.) (1987). Das große Lexikon der Musik. 8 vols. Freiburg. (6): p.198.
[2] Schönberg, Arnold (1989). Stil und Gedanke. Leipzig. p.93.

Reinhold Friedl: Schönberg Pierrot Lunaire Cheap Imitation

Raub

Gebet An Pierrot

Nacht

Der Kranke Mond

Madonna

Valse de Chopin

Blasse Wäscherin

Der Dandy

Columbine

Mondestrunken