Pierrot Lunaire Essay

The answer to French Impressionism was German Expressionism. “Where the French genius delighted in luminous impressions received from the outer world; the Germanic dug deep down into the hidden resources of the soul. In Vienna, where Sigmund Freud developed his theories of psychoanalysis, artists tried to capture for art the shadowy terrain of the unconscious. Expressionism set up inner experience as the only reality” (L48, 11:07). “At the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna was Paris's only musical rival, the heart of the great Austrian German musical tradition”. Concurrent to Paris, the Modernist musical movement in Vienna, underwent a different sort of musical revolution. “While Debussy and Stravinsky both grew out of Romanticism, their musical debts to the
In terms of its impact on the music of the 20th century, it is second only to Stravinsky's, The Rite of Spring. Pierrot Lunaire was commissioned by an actress named Albertine Zehme. As she wasn't a singer, she had requested a piece that she could recite with a musical background and for her, Schonberg created a vocal part using a technique drawn directly from German cabaret music, something he called Sprechstimme, or speech voice, a sing-song-like technique, halfway between singing and speaking (L48,
Greenberg (2009) states: “Debussy's incredibly original approach to timbre, rhythm, melody, harmony, and musical form, created a music the likes of which no one had ever heard before. In this, Claude Debussy is one of the great originals in the history of Western music and, along with Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, the most influential composer of the 20th century” (L46,