Page 603 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

The Hallé, cond. Sir Mark Elder; Aldeburgh Festival
Reviewed by Tony Cooper (25 June 2024)

This year’s Aldeburgh Festival has reached new limits with
a roster of excellent concerts and recitals not least by the
tasteful musical feast served up for the last weekend.

A cycle of 50 poems, Pierrot lunaire was published in 1884 by Belgian
author, Albert Giraud (born Emile Albert Kayenbergh in Leuven in 1860)
closely associated with the Symbolist Movement who wrote poems in
French. The protagonist of the cycle, Pierrot - the moonstruck and
fantastical clown who wears a mask to hide one’s true feelings - is the
well-loved comic servant and ‘outsider’ of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte
theatrical tradition. Early 19th century Romantics, such as Théophile
Gautier, were drawn to him by his Chaplinesque pluckiness and pathos.

Therefore, remarkable in many respects, Giraud’s collection is among the
most densely and imaginatively sustained works in the ‘Pierrot’ canon
which attracted the attention of an unusually high number of composers
but it’s Schoenberg’s setting that’s the most renowned and widely
considered one of the landmark masterpieces of 20th-century music.
Although the composition is atonal, it’s not written in the twelve-tone
technique that Schoenberg developed (and favoured) in his later years.

The commission came from Albertine Zehme, a chanteuse married to a
Leipzig lawyer, asking Schoenberg to set a lecture text to music.
Completely free in the selection of poems, his choice was, of course, the
French cycle of poems of Pierrot lunaire by Giraud translated by Otto Erich
Hartleben. Selecting 21 poems from the cycle, Schoenberg duly divided
them into three distinctive groups: in the first (Drunk on the Moon,
Colombine, The Dandy, A Pale Washerwoman, Valse de Chopin, Madonna,
The Sick Moon Pierrot) Pierrot sings of love, sex and religion; in the
second (Night, Prayer to Pierrot, Robbery, Red Mass, Gallows Song,
Beheading, The Crosses) he sings of violence, crime and blasphemy; in
the third (Homesickness, Foul Play, Parody, The Spot on the Moon,
Serenade, Journey Home, O Ancient Fragrance) Pierrot dreams of
returning home to Bergamo with his past haunting him.

At the work’s première in 1912, the ensemble comprised Albertine Zehme
(voice) with Hans W. de Vries (flute), Karl Essberger (clarinet), Jakob
Malinjak (violin), Hans Kindler (cello) and Eduard Steuermann (piano).
According to Anton Webern, the première was a great success for
performers and Schoenberg but received a bad press although most of
the audience, fascinated by the new sounds, responded reasonably well to
the performance overall.