The Pierrot Ensembles: Chronicle and Catalogue, 1912–2012 by Christopher Dromey (review)

Abstract

REPERTOIRE The Ensembles: Chronicle and Catalogue, 1912-2012. By Christopher Dromey. Edited by Christopher Win tie. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2012. [xii, 299 p. ISBN 9780956600721 (hardcover), $70; ISBN 9780956600738 (paperback), $29.95.] Music examples, illus- trations, works lists, bibliography, index.Among the many fertile elements of Arnold Schoenberg's lunaire for the future of music is its medium. The ensemble consists of speaking voice and five instruments-flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano-of which the first three in- struments double, respectively, on piccolo, bass clarinet, and viola. Schoenberg uses his instrumental ensemble in to pro- duce changing colors such that no two of the twenty-one melodramas have just the same sound. In a letter of 5 July 1912 to his publisher Emil Hertzka, Schoenberg stressed the importance of and in- sisted that the work be published in full score: Pierrot lunaire can only appear in score! A piano reduction is unthinkable! . . . Color is everything, the notes mean noth- ing {Arnold Schonberg: Samtliche Werke, series B, vol. 24/1 [Mainz: Schott, 1995], 233).Schoenberg's proposition in 1912 that color is everything was the outcome of a broad shift in orchestration practices among progressive composers near the turn of the twentieth century. Gustav Mahler and Claude Debussy had begun to pare down the large nineteenth-century or- chestra in favor of smaller and more trans- parent instrumental groupings with lines treated soloistically. Schoenberg joined in this movement in 1901 with his song Nachtwandler, in which the voice is ac- companied by piccolo, trumpet, piano, and drum, and he continued to explore the expressive resources of small soloistic en- sembles in his Chamber Symphony, op. 9 (1906), Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra (1910), and in arrangements made following World War I for his Verein fur Musikalische Privatauffuhrungen.The combination of such mixed ensem- bles with a voice singing modernistic poetry arose in Schoenberg's mind around 1911, at first theoretically. In his essay Das Verhaltnis zum Text-written to appear in the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (ed. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc [Munich: R. Piper, 1912])-Schoenberg speculated that advanced vocal music need not express the content of a poem by conventional mu- sical description, but could do so more fully by reaching to a deeper level to repro- duce the sound or tone contained in a poem. In a letter of 1931 to Julius Bahle, the composer asserts that when composing a song, his first encounter with its poem awakens in him unnamable sense of a sound and moving space (cited in Willi Reich, Schoenberg: A Critical Biography [New York: Praeger, 1971], 238).Schoenberg put his theory to work first in the song Herzgewachse, op. 20 (1912), where the voice (itself treated like an in- strument) is combined with harp, celesta, and harmonium. lunaire followed closely behind, and it proved to be Schoen- berg's enduring and influential appli- cation of his theory of the congruence of color, sound, and poetry.The ensemble was subsequently adopted and altered by composers from Schoenberg's own circle and others, in- cluding Stravinsky, who heard in Berlin in 1912 and found that it most in- tensively displayed the whole extraordinary stamp of [Schoenberg's] creative genius (Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1881-1934 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999], 190). Many, perhaps most, of these early ensemble pieces were created to flesh out concert programs on which was scheduled to appear. These include Anton Webern's 1922 arrangement for five instru- ments of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony and Hanns Eisler's Palmstrom (1924), a recitation of Christian Morgenstern's po- etry that closely relates to the style and at- mosphere of Schoenberg's Pierrot.A history of such extensions and reap- pearances of the ensemble in British music is the subject of Christopher Dromey's The Ensembles: Chronicle and Catalogue, 1912-2012. …