Schoenberg-Hartleben’s Pierrot Lunaire: Speech – Poem – Melody – Vocal Performance

Abstract

This work presents detailed examination of the various aspects of the vocal part of Pierrot Lunaire: literary, linguistic, melodic, acoustic, and vocal performance, and their inter-relations. An examination of Hartleben’s German translation reveals the decisive role of characteristic linguistic features in the German language in shaping rhythms in Schoenberg’s “Sprechmelodies”. Vocal analysis of speech intonation contours in the spoken texts, as read aloud by two persons of German native language, brings experimental evidence and elucidates the origin of Schoenberg’s “Sprechmelodies” in intonation in German speech. Intonation patterns in excerpts of Schoenberg’s own speech, recorded in 1931 and 1936, also subjected to such analysis, reveal typical intonation patterns in German speech, of relevance to his “Sprechmelodies” in Pierrot Lunaire. Singing-reciting of four poems by five artists: Erika Stiedry Wagner (recorded 1941), Jan de Gaetani (rec. ~1969), Yvonne Minton (1976), Marianne Pousseur (1992), and Christine Schaefer (1997), in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire is analyzed and compared, by analysis of their Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) spectrograms. These performances, spanning almost sixty years, reflect a variety of styles and approaches to this extraordinary work. A large variety of types and (temporal) structures of vocal tones were encountered – reflecting the vocal means the artists designed (mentally) in order to capture and express the unique atmosphere of the texts, and the music, in Schoenberg’s unique style of Sprechgesang. These vocal tones are decomposed into elementary units and a special notation was devised for their description and classification. This forms the basis of a detailed analysis on the microlevel of a single tone and a single syllable. Analysis of the melodic phrases of Schoenberg’s “Sprechmelodien” (speech melodies) in terms of melodic segment contours by means of this notation is also described. Thus, this special notation enables a symbolic representation, or transcription, of speech intonation, singing, and “Sprechgesang” melodic contours.