We met the song cycle in the hands of the Romantic composers Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann (see page 237). Pierrot lunaire is the most famous and influential twentieth-century song cycle, but it is a far cry from Schumann’s Dichterliebe. It sets poems by a minor symbolist poet, Albert Giraud. Like many artists of the time — poets as well as composers — Giraud is not easy to figure out at once. Pierrot is the eternal sad clown, and perhaps represents also the alienated artist; but why is he called “moonstruck” or “lunar”? In poems that are dotted with Freudian imagery, we hear about his obsession with the moon, his amorous frustrations, his nightmarish hallucinations, his pranks, and his adventures.

To match all this, Schoenberg wrote music that utterly lacks the tunes one might expect to find in a set of songs. The soprano does not exactly sing or exactly speak, but performs in an in-between style of Schoenberg’s invention called Sprechstimme (speech-song). Sprechstimme is an extreme example of the avant-garde composers’ search for new expressive means — here, sound that is not even fully organized into pitches. Through Sprechstimme, Giraud’s strange moonstruck poems are somehow magnified, distorted, parodied, and haunted all at the same time.

In addition to the soprano, Pierrot lunaire calls for five instrumentalists. Altogether they play eight instruments, since three of the players switch between two: flute and piccolo, clarinet and bass clarinet, violin and viola, cello, and piano. Not all the songs involve all the players, so nearly every song has its own unique accompaniment, ranging from flute alone in No. 7 to all eight instruments in No. 21 (the players switch instruments in the middle of this song). Schoenberg’s dazzling variety of instrumental effects enhances the inherent strangeness of Sprechstimme, and it is clear in the two songs we will examine, which are vastly different in sound and expressive tone.

No. 8: “Night” (voice, piano, bass clarinet, cello) The poem presents the nightmarish aspect of expressionism; we could easily imagine the screaming figure of Edvard Munch’s famous painting (see page 321) responding to a vision of this sort. Schoenberg used the lowest instruments of his ensemble to depict ominous insects, weighty and so utterly unlike real butterflies. Through the last section of the poem we can hear the swarm settling heavily downward, blotting out the light of day.

Schoenberg called this song a passacaglia, recalling a type of ostinato piece from the Baroque period. In fact, his music is dominated by the three-note ostinato shown in the margin.

The ostinato is announced at the very beginning by the piano, then taken up by the cello and bass clarinet; it also ends the song. Throughout, the instrumental accompaniment is largely constructed from overlapping versions of it, moved freely to various pitch levels. The soprano is even asked to sing it, at the eerie bottom of her range, on the word verschwiegen (secretly) — the only moment in the entire song cycle when Schoenberg has her abandon Sprechstimme for conventional singing.

Note, however, that the ostinato is chromatic in essence, its last pitch set a half step below its first. From such simple materials, Schoenberg can both unsettle conventional tonality and match the scary tone of Giraud’s words.

No. 18: “The Moonfleck” (voice, piano, piccolo, clarinet, violin, cello) The piano plays a short introduction, or transition from the previous number. Listen to this piano passage several times. Dense, dissonant, atonal, and alarmingly intense in its motivic insistence, this passage sums up Schoenberg’s uncompromising version of musical modernism. It also seems devised to recall the loudest, scariest moments of “Night,” one of many such musical connections across Schoenberg’s cycle.

In the song itself, the tone shifts abruptly from this intensity; now it is not horror but the nagging bother of an obsession. Pierrot can neither forget nor bear the moonfleck that has soiled his tuxedo. In his setting Schoenberg explores timbres completely different from those of “Night.” He uses high-pitched, quicksilver motives, scattered through the whole ensemble, to depict flickering moonlight. Simultaneous fugues and canons are at work, but what the listener perceives is a fantastic lacework of sounds, with hardly a hint of tonality, as Pierrot frantically but in vain brushes at himself. “The Moonfleck” uses extremely complicated technical means to achieve a unique sonorous effect.