Late night lunaire: Schoenberg's Pierrot with Claire Booth and the Nash Ensemble

No clown make-up or costume for soprano Claire Booth this evening's Pierrot lunaire at the Aldeburgh Festival, but a large moon was projected onto the backdrop of the intimate Britten Studio, and the titles and text of each of these “three times seven” poems were ideally clear in projection. This is essential as the work is an accompanied recitation of poems, commissioned by an actress, not a singer.

The poetic unity, single protagonist, and the dominant supporting role of a piano, make clear that the template is also that of a song cycle, if one that does not need a singer but reciter. Famously this is because the text is to be delivered in Sprechstimme, the formidably precise requirements of which Schoenberg describes in the preface to his score. He explains that: “The melody... is not intended to be sung. The performer transforms it into a speech melody taking the prescribed pitches carefully into account... adhering to the rhythm as precisely as if singing, [yet] precisely aware of the difference between sung tone and spoken tone... spoken tone indicates the pitch, but immediately abandons it by falling or rising. But the performer must take care not to lapse into a singsong speech pattern.”

Perhaps the last performer to accomplish this perfectly was the last one conducted by Schoenberg himself. Here there was no conductor at all, potentially spoiling the composer’s numerological obsession to have seven performers – except that was restored by the Nash Ensemble having a separate viola player, rather than the specified one player for both violin and viola.

Claire Booth’s response to Schoenberg’s vocal requirements certainly met the challenge of communicating the intensely surreal craziness of the piece. Booth’s vocal commitment produced, only in the first poem, a couple of overloud hoots, and some syllables that were too whispered to register – but she soon found the dynamic range required in this small hall. 

Being a leading soprano, it was remarkable how rarely she sounded more chanteuse than diseuse and when she did, it was too brief for the Schoenberg police to be confident of obtaining a conviction. Schoenberg also railed against those who produced vocal effects suggested by the text but outside the notation. Booth did this once maybe, for there is a succession of trilled notes in the penultimate bar of number seven, Der kranke Mond (The sick moon), and how do you trill on a note while observing the injunction against sustaining it? Her solution produced a remarkably musical version of gargling, or perhaps of a death rattle, hardly inappropriate for the line “Du nächtig todesranker Mond” (you sombre death-stricken moon).

That seventh poem is instrumentally parsimonious, with no piano and only the flute throughout. Philippa Davies’ tone and control were remarkable, even when the composer asks for pppp, and then requires softer playing still! But each member of the Nash Ensemble took their solo moment in the sun (or rather moon), and the ensemble illuminated the counterpoint whatever the very varied combinations of instruments being used. Alasdair Beatson was tireless, precise and sensitive at the keyboard.

Pierrot lunaire has had a few successors in its modernist use of the commedia del’arte tradition, none more controversial than Harrison Birtwistle’s opera Punch and Judy. That had its premiere at the 1967 Aldeburgh Festival, when it drove Benjamin Britten from the Jubilee Hall. Would it be mischievous to suggest that the incoming Director might put the two works together on a double bill, perhaps in a commedia dell’arte-themed Festival?

Roy’s accommodation was funded by Britten Pears Arts.