Pierrot lunaire, op. 21 - Night

Arnold Schönberg composed Pierrot lunaire, op. 21, one of the benchmarks of modern music, in Berlin in 1912. The work was commissioned by Albertine Zehme, whose recitations were marked by a highly individual aesthetic, aiming to “recapture the ear’s prerogative in life.” In terms of its genre, Pierrot lunaire was historically unique at the time Schönberg composed it and marks the high point of his expressionistic period. Pierrot, “with waxen countenance,” is a bizarre and nervous figure, enticed into a counterworld of nighttime phantasms and hopeless passions. A cosmos of tonal shading in the colorful realm between singing and speaking. In the eighth melodrama, Night, Schönberg assimilates the old variation model of the passacaglia in a range of expression that he considered right for the future. In a blend of scoring technique, form and style, the passacaglia unites elements of static ostinato, an insisting repeated (bass) figure, with the principle of dynamic alterations in variations with a motivic and thematic foundation.