Arnold Schönberg
Pierrot lunaire, op. 21
Journey Home“ and “Night.“ Sketches
Konzert Taschen-Buch 1911/12

At the beginning of 1912 Schönberg received a request to compose melodramas for voice and piano for the singer and reciter Albertine Zehme, who was planning a tour featuring the cycle of poems Pierrot lunaire by the Belgian symbolist poet Albert Giraud. The bizarre imagery of the poems, and their play with features of the Commedia dell’arte, sparked his enthusiasm and gave him an opportunity to combine his atonal compositional language with historical formal types such as barcarolle, waltz or a baroque trio sonata. Schönberg worked quickly and mostly directly into the score. Some preliminary notes of the melodrama no. 8, “Night,“ have survived. The core idea is hidden behind an inconspicuous sketch in a notebook, in which Schönberg contemplated the layout of the piece. Three notes at intervals of a minor and a major third are repeated steadily in the completed composition, sometimes transposed, in retrograde or inversion. Schönberg refers to the historical form model of the Passacaglia, which is also named in the piece’s subtitle. The short motif is sometimes difficult to discern from the dense emsemble playing, but it “functions as a basic idea in everything that happens.“