Page 261 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

originally scored for just voice and piano: I’m not likely to do Gurre-Lieder with orchestra any time
soon, but it’s a beautiful song and knowing its origin makes me feel vindicated!

How much activity is there around the 150th anniversary this year?

I’ve been in touch with Randol Schoenberg and indeed the Schoenberg Estate quite a lot; they’ve
been big supporters of this project and of the Pierrot Lunaire recording that’s coming out in
September. And they are nervous that he’s being forgotten: we’re by no means the only people
performing his music this year, but there aren’t as many concerts as there should be. I’ve found
that even the most established song festivals worry about programming an all-Schoenberg
recital, but if they’re not going to promote these songs then what hope have we got for them to
infiltrate the broader sphere?

We’re going to perform at the Schönberg-Center in Vienna in December, and I’ll be standing next
to the real paintings for that one! The West Malling Festival down in Kent enthusiastically agreed
to the entire programme and asked if we could get the rights to have the artwork projected
behind us, which the Schoenberg Estate were really happy to authorise.

Where do the cabaret songs fit into the story?

A lot of those Expressionists were polymaths, which meant that there were various creative
coteries springing up where artists were interacting with all sorts of different people. Kandinsky
was also a cellist, Gabriele Münter was also a photographer, while on a different tack Gershwin
was a painter: these guys were all hanging out together and sharing ideas. There’s an amazing
painting of Gershwin painting Schoenberg, and the pair of them were tennis-partners! People
are often surprised that Schoenberg pitched up in the US and started hanging out with
somebody who was writing showtunes, but he’d written for the cabaret scene in Berlin in 1902:
he was no stranger to any of this stuff.

I often hear people say ‘Thank god he wrote the Brettl-Lieder, otherwise we wouldn’t hear
anything he wrote for the voice’, and I do see the appeal – they are brilliant, filthy and deadpan,
in a way that audiences probably don’t expect from Schoenberg. You can perform them in a lot
of different ways and contexts, but it’s more fun to put them in the framework of everything else.
Schoenberg arrived in Berlin with no money and started working in the cabaret club writing
those songs; within the year, his wife Mathilde was having an affair with the artist Richard Gerstl
who Schoenberg had brought into the house to teach them to paint! By 1908 Mathilde had gone
back to Schoenberg and Gerstl (who was somehow still Schoenberg’s best friend) killed himself,
so there’s a lot of darkness behind all this satirical cabaret stuff, as well as behind the Op. 8
songs.

Pierrot Lunaire is two or three years later, so it’s hard not to see Pierrot as Schoenberg himself on
some level: the tribulations of the love triangle are an obvious link to the Pierrot story. You can’t
dismiss them as just jolly cabaret songs: in the truest spirit of cabaret (and indeed Cabaret),
there’s a really dark undertone to it all. If you read Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye To Berlin,
you quickly realise that it wasn’t just rip-roaring fun: he’s able to look at it as an outsider, but it all
feels a bit jaded.

Tell me more about your upcoming recording of Pierrot - what's your history with the
piece, and how do you approach it?