Schönberg’s
Pierrot Lunaire, his “3x7 poems” for speaker and
small ensemble, was composed in 1912, so the 2011 Salzburg Festival saw
pianist Mitsuko Uchida, actress Barbara Sukowa, and a hand-picked
international ensemble, perform the work for its centennial. It was
acclaimed by audience and critics, and this DVD preserves that occasion.
Along with the live concert recording, a documentary film was made during
the Pierrot rehearsals at Schloss Elmau in Salzburg on the work’s
historical, contextual and musical exegesis.
Not every performance, even at Salzburg, is necessarily worth recording
and issuing, but this one certainly was. First, the vocal contribution is
from an actress, not a singer. The composer’s initial commission came from
an actress and elocutionist - Albertine Zehme of Berlin - for a melodrama,
or settings for reciter and piano, which was joined in the final score by
other instruments. The vocal line is in
Sprechstimme,
(“speech-song”), in which the pitches are suggested by the reciter but the
rhythm, phrasing and dynamics are performed precisely. Singers have often
usurped the role, with a tendency for more song than speech at times. We
know that is not what Schoenberg wanted generally since the score
occasionally marks some notes as
gesungen, “to be sung”, implying
that singing was not the norm. Here we have something close, one imagines,
to that original conception, as Barbara Sukowa is an excellent
diseuse (“speaking voice” is the description on the DVD) enacting
the whole range of the piece from the intimate and eerie to the wild and
unhinged.
There is great value in actually seeing a performance of
Pierrot
Lunaire, since there is an element of theatre in the work with the
poems essentially a monologue for Pierrot, the
commedia dell’arte
clown character. The commissioner and first reciter played the work in
Pierrot costume, with the players and Schoenberg, who conducted, behind a
curtain. This performance does not imitate that, but has the requisite sense
of a sort of expressionist cabaret. The instrumentalists are all excellent,
accurate and expressive, the camera-work making the concentration required
clearly visible. The sound is very good too.
On the accompanying documentary
Solar Plexus of Modernism Mitsuko
Uchida and the other musicians speak of the brilliant scoring for their
instruments and the great emotions they constantly encountered during the
performance. The composer’s descendants Nuria Schoenberg Nono (b.1932) and
Lawrence Schoenberg (b.1941) present a variety of original materials from
the time when
Pierrot was written. Uchida is her usual compelling
self when talking about music, and recalls how, when she told Boulez that
they planned to do it without conductor, he responded “it’s better that
way”. She speaks here in German but there are subtitles – or at least there
are for the documentary, since the main flaw of the issue is the lack of
English (or even German) subtitles for the performance. This really was a
missed opportunity. To have to consult a text — which is not provided anyway
— instead of just looking at the screen for text and the filmed performance,
is an irritation at the very least.
The main rival is an issue on an Arthaus Musik DVD (10330/10331) which
does have subtitles, but is quite different in conception. It is a film
called “One Night, One Life”, directed by Oliver Herrmann. It's not a
concert performance but shows Pierrot (Christine Schäfer, seen throughout,
but not always seen to sing) wandering through a series of urban
nightscapes: abattoir, rail station, peep-show, supermarket. There are
twenty-one such scenes, one for each poem, and the result is an effective
way into the work’s surreal and sometimes disturbing world. That DVD has
Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain in the performance familiar from
its DG incarnation on CD. The DVD also has a performance by Schäfer of
Schumann’s
Dichterliebe, given a similarly provocative
treatment.
For most collectors of DVDs interested mainly in the Schoenberg, the
Belvedere issue will still be the more desirable item, even though
non-German speakers will need to obtain a text and translation to get full
value from this excellent performance.
Roy Westbrook
