The New York Reception of Pierrot lunaire: The 1923 Premiere and Its Aftermath

Abstract

During the 1920s, New York City witnessed a significant increase in the performance of modernist music. One of the most controversial works of this period was Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire, which received its American premiere on 4 February 1923. According to the critic Lawrence Gilman, the performance disrupted families, severed life-long friendships, incited critics to unbrotherly remarks about one another, and filled whole pages in the Sunday music sections of the newspapers.1 To critics and concertgoers, Pierrot epitomized modemist composition, and it therefore served as a lightning rod for the growing and vehement dispute surrounding new music. As a receptor in that debate, Pierrot was galvanized by a variety of musical and social currents. This study of the 1923 and 1925 New York performances examines not only how critical reactions to the work exposed contemporary understandings of music but also how Pierrot absorbed the anxiety over the far-reaching changes underway in American society. Unlike Edgard Varase's Hyperprism and George Antheil's Ballet mecanique, two works that also scandalized New York audiences during the 1920s, Pierrot has received numerous subsequent performances in the city, including one two years after its American premiere. Surprisingly for a work that has achieved such vitality in twentiethcentury musical life, several aspects of it have been neglected, particularly its reception history.2 Whereas the reception of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, one of the few modernist compositions that rivals Pierrot in canonic centrality and regular performances, has been sketched, that of Schoenberg's melodrama has barely been traced, especially the response to the work in the United States.3 The American reaction offers a unique case, as Pierrot, in landing on foreign soil, dramatically entered a musical world shaken by the sudden