Czech Chamber Music Society • Marianne Beate Kielland

A leading avant-garde contemporary classical music composer, George Crumb came to prominence in the 1960s. He was primarily known and lauded for his acute sense of symbolism. Amply applying elements of theatre, performances of his works entail movement on stage and use of masks. Significantly influenced by Claude Debussy and Béla Bartók, he had a great penchant for literature. Crumb wrote Eleven Echoes of Autumn for alto flute, clarinet, violin and piano in 1966 for the Aeolian Chamber Players, a US ensemble for whom numerous noted composers have created music, including Luciano Berio and Milton Babitt. Constituting a continuous whole, each of the “echoes” brings to bear the respective instruments’ colour specificities, aliquot tones, flageolets and other unusual stringed instrument techniques, combined playing of the keyboard and strings on the piano, and diverse ways of playing wind instruments. The essential facet is the initial, chime-resembling, piano motif, recurring throughout the piece in a variety of rhythmic forms. Each section has its own particular nature, with the intensity gradually growing, before culminating in the eighth “echo”. George Crumb used as the motto a line from his beloved Federico García Lorca’s poem Gacela de la terrible presencia (Ghazal of the Terrible Presence): “y los arcos rotos donde sufre el tiempo” (“and the broken arches where time suffers”).

Incidental and dance music was a customary component of William Shakespeare’s plays, the texts of whose songs have been set by numerous composers. Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a child prodigy admired by Gustav Mahler, gained global acclaim with Die tote Stadt, his first feature-length opera, premiered in 1920. A versatile artist, besides writing his own music Korngold was a deft arranger, possessing a keen grasp of different genres. In 1934, the film director Max Reinhardt invited him to work on his cinematic version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, entrusting Korngold with adapting the score Felix Mendelssohn had created for Reinhardt’s stage adaptation. This engagement resulted in Korngold’s establishing crucial contacts in Hollywood, owing to which in 1938 he had the opportunity to flee the Nazis and move from Europe to the USA. Korngold and his family settled in California, and he duly launched an illustrious career as a pioneering composer of singular symphonic film music. Between 1937 and 1941, he conceived two Shakespeare-inspired song cycles: Songs of the Clown, Op. 29, based on the comedy Twelfth Night; and Four Shakespeare Songs, Op. 31. 

Thematically linked with Korngold’s Songs of the Clown is Arnold Schoenberg’s cycle Pierrot lunaire. In 1912, the Berlin-based impresario Emil Gutmann submitted to the composer a commission by the actress, reciter and singer Albertine Zehme (1857–1946) for setting the Belgian Symbolist Albert Giraud’s series of poems Pierrot lunaire: Rondels bergamasques, published in Brussels in 1884. The verse was translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben and issued in Berlin a year later. Schoenberg would create a setting of the German version, which became a globally celebrated work. Hartleben transformed Giraud’s rhymes into free verse, which made it possible for Schoenberg not to adhere to strict form, and also assume a new approach to the solo voice, thus respecting Zehme’s requirement that the text be rather narrated, as “singing would hamper bold expression of feelings”. Although the composer defined the piece as “melodrama”, the words are not merely recited, with the vocalist having determined pitches and rhythms. The music is delivered by a small instrumental ensemble, with each of the instruments being assigned a symbolic role: the flute, for instance, is connected with the Moon, while the piccolo underlines the text’s humorous aspects. Fascinated by numerology, Schoenberg divided his Pierrot lunaire into three groups of seven poems, each focusing on specific themes. The first part pertains to an artist, symbolised by the Moon; the second foregrounds the dark aspect of death, pivoting around Rote Messe (No. 11); the third evokes commedia dell’arte with an ironic hyperbole, which also manifests in quotations. The cycle contains references to Richard Strauss’s tone poem Ein Heldenleben (Der Dandy); Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal (Gebet an Pierrote), even featuring the “Tristan chord”; and Gioachino Rossini’s opera Il barbiere di Seviglia (Heimweh). 

Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire premiered on 16 October 1912 in Berlin to a mixed response, with a section of the audience protesting, while others expressed enthusiasm. On 2 November that year, it was performed in Vienna. The piece was first presented in Prague on 24 February 1913 by the German Chamber Music Society, with Schoenberg conducting. As in the cases of the previous two performances, Albertine Zehme appeared as the vocalist and the ensemble consisted of Eduard Steuermann (piano), Jakob Malinjak (violin, viola), Hans Kindler (cello), Hans W. de Vries (flute, piccolo) and Karl Essberger (clarinet, bass clarinet). Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire gave rise to a scandal “unprecedented in the history of Prague concert life”, as Felix Adler wrote in the Bohemia daily, pointing out: “The overly outraged must above all be ceaselessly told that Arnold Schoenberg is an eminent artist. [...] They are journeys into the new land of music, seeking paths that no one can be coerced to pursue, yet we cannot refuse to pay respect to the one who gives up easy-to-attain laurels.” Adler admitted that the new music is not “beautiful” and raised the question of whether “beautiful” music can be written to Albert Giraud’s bizarre fantasy poems at all, adding: “Schoenberg sought a beseeming expression.” The Czech composer Karel Stecker, for his part, emphasised the necessity of defending artistic freedom: “Artists should be respected, even when we do not agree with them”, and went on to quote Giraud himself: “Holy crosses are the verses / On which poets bleed to death in silence, / Sightless, with their eyes pecked out / By ghostly vultures.“ Stecker added: “We can see why Schoenberg set these very words of the poet.” The first Czech artists to perform Pierrot lunaire, on 15 February 1934 in Prague, were the Mánes Music Ensemble and the reciter/singer Božena Kozlíková.