What I would give to crawl around in Arnold Schoenberg's head. A seemingly normal father and husband, I found on our trip to the Schoenberg center that old Arnold lived in essentially, my house. Like his, mine is filled with old books, strange artwork in various states of completion that I and my fiance have made, millions of notebooks full of ideas, sheet music of all kinds and ages, musical instruments and their cases, and many othe collected oddities. He favored the same color palette, a soft yellow with dark furniture in an eclectic mix of hues and time periods of origin.
While eccentric, the mock up of his house could have been any musician's home. This was somewhat surprising having attended Pierrot Lunaire a couple of weeks before. I had heard recordings of this piece, but there's nothing quite like it live. The only word for it really is haunting. The song cycle is set to German translations of Albert Giraud's cycle of French poems and is typically sung by a soprano in a speak-singing (or Sprechstimme) style. It's full of trembling violins, clarinte glissandos, and like I said, a moaning soprano. It's really just downright creepy. Pierrot Lunaire puts its listeners in a trancelike fantasy mindset. At times it can sound almost hopeful, but this is almost always doused by a haunting, verging on violent text setting. It's not in his twelve-tone, twentieth century style, but there are several themes that circulate throughout that add to the repetitive feeling of musical dread. While that sounds like a completely negative reaction, I completely enjoyed the performance. It was so entirely different from all the other Viennese music that we studied that it was a welcome foray into the altogther different world of Arnold Schoenberg.
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