LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2020E3
I
sn’t it rich? When the
going gets inexplicable,
we send in the clowns.
On Oct. 16, 1912, a
clown-costumed actress,
Albertine Zehme, took
part in a “metamusical
evening” in Berlin. Par-
taking of words as “inner
experiences” in a new kind of
sung-speech, she intoned 21
fantastical poems about the
moon-drunk, lascivious Pierrot,
that lunatic stock character
from 17th century Italian thea-
ter. It was the premiere of
Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,”
the composer’s music-changing
announcement that the world
had gone mad and that the time
had come to send in the damn
clowns.
This was not altogether
unexpected, but its inevitability
made the radicalization of 20th
century music only all the more
shocking. Schoenberg, 38, had
been, piece by rapidly produced
piece, pushing the bounds of
music further than ever before
dared. With “Pierrot Lunaire,” as
far as scandalized contemporary
critics were concerned, a hal-
lowed art form, the soul of Euro-
pean civilization, was on the sure
track to self-destructive anar-
chy.
Then again, clowns can be
storm clouds, early warning
signals that something’s dis-
turbingly funny — funny ha ha
and funny uh oh.
Eight days before the meta-
musical evening, the first shots
of the First Balkan War were
fired, a destabilized Europe
prepping for the First World War.
With the Continent on the brink
between the Old World and all
that the 20th century would
portend, only a crazy clown
would do. Schoenberg’s
“Pierrot” distills this angst into a
heightened state of dread and
exhilaration.
The character of Pierrot,
indeed, has long been a faithful
companion for trying times,
capable of providing escape as
well as a dose of reality. The
dim-witted buffoon of commedia
dell’arte,pining for his Col-
umbine but outwitted by Har-
lequin, became the formula for
the classic love triangle in opera
and theater. As for the modern
clown, that was Joseph
Grimaldi’s doing. He designed
Pierrot’s clown costume, then
added the greasepaint and red
nose, becoming in the process an
immensely popular 19th century
entertainer.
The rest is continuing history.
Clown metaphors have be-
come commonplace in political
commentary. Just the other day,
as the outgoing president’s legal
counsel attempted to overthrow
an election without evidence of
fraud, what appeared to be hair
coloring ran unceremoniously
down his face. The farcical image
that went viral was of a former
New York mayor, and lover of
Italian opera, appearing as a
pagliaccio.
Indeed, Leoncavallo’s popu-
lar verismo opera, “I Pagliacci”
(The Clowns), was part of the
era’s cult of morbidity that in-
spired French symbolist Albert
Giraud’s “Pierrot” poems that
Schoenberg adopted, in Ger-
man translation, for his texts.
Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lu-
naire” was instantly recognized
as a key work that captured its
era’s zeitgeist, and it has never
lost its unnerving relevance.
These “three times seven”
songs, as the numerologically
superstitious Schoenberg la-
beled them (“Pierrot” was his
Opus 21), follow Pierrot through
a nightmarish atmosphere of
implacable desire, grotesque
sacrilege, outrageous violence
and revolting nostalgia. Sound
familiar?
This is not an easy piece.
Schoenberg notates pitches and
rhythms in the vocal part, writ-
ten for the range of mezzo-
soprano, but draws a line
through the stem of each note.
The composer was inconsistent
over the years about the degree
to which a soloist puts her em-
phasis on speech or singing, but
his very choice of Zehme meant
he clearly favored theater. “I
demand not freedom of
thought,” the actress liked to
say, “but rather freedom of
sound.”
On the other hand, Schoen-
berg insisted that the instru-
mental quintet — piano, flute
(or piccolo), clarinet (or bass-clarinet), violin (or viola) and
cello — is of, at a minimum,
equal importance to the vocal-
ist, and he had no problem with
the instruments drowning her
out. The songs sometimes
harken back to classical forms
(such as polka, waltz and barca-
role) and employ classical tech-
niques (including passacaglia,
fugue and canon). Studies have
been made on the influence of
Bach.
But the impression is that
whatever is recognizable from
the past has disintegrated into
figments of a foggy memory.
Just as Schoenberg sweeps
away the tradition of bel canto
singing in the vocal part, he
vacuums up tonality. Phrases
are fragments. Rhythms, highly
irregular. The counterpoint can
be alarmingly complex. Musical
forms provide little to hang onto.
Every song uses different combi-
nations of instruments, leaving
the sound world ever in flex.
Comprehending the musical
logic requires expertise. An
ability to think in four or five
dimensions helps.
Even the text is obscure. Who
is the singer? She’s not Pierrot,
although Zehme dressed like
him, and many a soloist has
followed in that tradition. She’s
not Columbine, although attimes she sounds like she might
be. She’s not the narrator, al-
though she narrates. Giraud’s
imagery is fanciful in the ex-
treme, and it goes by far too fast
to put much of anything to-
gether.
And yet, all of that gives
“Pierrot” an arresting dramatic
immediacy. A tipsy repeated
piano figure at the beginning,
along with ticking violin and a
flute flying off the mark, is
Pierrot losing his sense in the
moonlight. Flute, clarinet and
violin playing with no vibrato are
as pale white in timbre as the
washerwoman’s arms they
describe. Creepy, crawly gigan-
tic butterflies blot out the shin-
ing sun with the help of a creepy,
crawly bass clarinet.
It might not seem possible to
heighten the terror of Pierrot
boring a hole in Columbine’s
skull, filling it with an excellent
Turkish tobacco and smoking
that contently through a straw.
Schoenberg demonstrates that
it is. The barcarole that senti-
mentally takes Pierrot home
back to Bergamo, with a moon-
beam for a rudder and a water
lily for a boat, gets its sinister,
otherworldly wind for its sails
from the full quintet up to its
eerie tricks.
Seven months after the
“Pierrot” premiere came the
riotous one in Paris of “The Rite
of Spring,” robbing “Pierrot” as
the signifier of a musical revolu-
tion. “The Rite” followed
Stravinsky’s 1911 ballet,
“Petrushka,” the Russian
Pierrot, here a lovelorn puppet
with a heart. The score of
“Petrushka” is brilliant. The
dance, sentimental. “The Rite,”
as ballet, has less sentiment, less
heart and even less relevance to
its time and place. Its score, for
all its rhythmic genius that has
made it well-deserved standard
repertoire, offers a kind of exotic
escapism, the shock value long
since defused. “The Rite” is
what it is.
“Pierrot” is not necessarily
what it is. Each performance is
an opportunity to invent its
dramatic intent anew and re-
store shock. The peculiar quin-
tet of instruments has been
adopted by ensembles and
composers everywhere. Pierrots
pop up where you might least
expect them. In his study of
Jean-Luc Godard, Richard
Brody describes the 1965 film
“Pierrot le Fou” in terms that
could just as easily apply to
Schoenberg. He notes that this
“Pierrot” brought the great
French director’s “devotion to
classical cinematic forms to a
spectacular end, and began a set
of works marked by a hysterical,
self-flagellating despair.”
Thanks in no small part to
Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,”
the joker, on the concert or lyric
or political stage, as well as the
silver screen, remains wild.With live concerts largely on
hold, critic Mark Swed is
suggesting a different recorded
music by a different composer
every week. You can find the
series archive at
latimes.com/howtolisten.HOW TO LISTEN
Micah FluellenLos Angeles TimesTime to send in
the clowns?
Arnold Schoenberg’s sacrilegious ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ foretold
a distortion of reality that has never left us
MARK SWED
MUSIC CRITICStarting points
Schoenberg madethe first
recording of “Pierrot Lunaire” —
the only one during his lifetime
— in Los Angeles in 1940. The
singer is Erika Stiedry-Wagner,
who fought with the composer
over miking. He wanted more
instrumental prominence; she
told him he was crazy. The
balance is perfect. Look for it
on YouTube.
After Schoenberg’s deathin
1951, recordings of “Pierrot
Lunaire” started coming out
regularly. Pierre Boulez record-
ed it three times — in 1962, 1978
and 1998 — each superb.
Striking German actressBar-
bara Sukowa has made a spe-
cialty of “Pierrot,” and her
Salzburg Festival performance
is the subject of an excellent
documentary.
ViolinistPatricia Kopatchin-
skaja dresses as Pierrot as she
sings and conducts members of
the Berlin Philharmonic. The
performance is found in the
orchestra’s digital concert hall.the themes of nihilism,” he
says. “Now I play with
dystopia. I try to get past
the William Gibson cyber-
punk version of dystopia
[and into] more of a spir-
itual dystopia. Aren’t we liv-
ing it now? I believe we’re in
a form of spiritual war.
There are times when hu-
manity has to really wrestle
for itself from a soul point of
view.”
Although reticent to dis-
cuss the 2020 election, Cor-
gan bemoans the loss of a
middle ground. “I’ve taken
almost no positions, and
that makes me a heretic,” he
says with laugh. “There’s or-
thodoxy, and there’s heresy.
Why can’t there be a third
and a fourth and the fifth
choice?”
The band celebrated the
25th anniversary of their
1995 epic, “Mellon Collie and
the Infinite Sadness.” With
the exception of snarling al-
ternative classics like
“Zero” and “Bullet With
Butterfly Wings,” the dou-
ble album marked a signifi-
cant departure from the
straight-shooting fuzz-rock
of their 1993 breakthrough
LP “Siamese Dream,” and
to a lesser extent, 1994’s “Pi-
sces Iscariot.” Corgan at-
tributes this to a
“prankster” energy es-
poused by the band.
“A lot of the choices
Smashing Pumpkins made
were to piss people off,” he
says.
“We had a lot of success
with ‘Siamese Dream,’ but
we were getting lumped in
with all the other bands,” he
recalls. “It was lazy 1993
journalism .... Grunge! I
thought we were more in the
ilk of classic rock bands, like
the Beatles or Zep. It used to
make people really uncom-
fortable when we played so-
los. It brought out the
pranksters in us.”
The process of musical
liberation so central to the
making of “Mellon Collie” —
or self-indulgence, depend-
ing on whom you ask —
worked in tandem with Cor-
gan’s process of deprogram-
ming from years of abuse
while living with his father
and stepmother.
Twenty-eight songs were
culled from an initial batch
of 50, and so came to be the
Pumpkins’ lasting alt-rock
“Odyssey.”
“I wasn’t governed by
fear,” says Corgan. “I didn’t
have anybody standing
there saying ‘You can’t do
that.’ [I thought], ‘I’m not
defined by my environment.
I’m going to define my envi-ronment.’ ”
Corgan says he’s already
working on a 33-song rock
opera, which will become
the final installment of a tril-
ogy that started with “Mel-
lon Collie,” followed by the
Pumpkins’ 2000 album,
“Machina/The Machines of
God.” A conceptual “proto-
cyber-metal” album in-
spired by musical theater,
“Machina” was the last al-
bum to feature all four foun-
ding members, including
bassist D’arcy Wretzky; she
departed the band in the
midst of the recording proc-
ess. The album slumped in
sales, and Corgan later de-
scribed the project as “alien-
ating.”
“Our generation wasn’t
allowed to sell perfume,”
sniffs Corgan, alluding to
other commercial options
afforded to today’s artists.
He says today’s music in-
dustry “has made a deal
with the devil” with regard
to streaming services.
“We have allowed third
parties to come in and co-
opt our [intellectual proper-
ty],” he says. “What they did
is they sold out the artists on
the rates. And now you see
the streaming companies
[like Spotify] are going to re-
duce the rates for artists
now. Just like Facebooksqueezed everybody on ad-
vertising, they’re going to
squeeze artists.”
Considering the unique
challenges on artists posed
by the COVID-19 pandemic,
Corgan hopes to remain
adaptable. “We’ve toyed
with the idea of some kind of
online concert series,” he
says. “I don’t know if I want
to be standing there, trying
to sing a song while a guy inthe corner’s coughing into
his mask. I don’t know if I’m
psychologically there yet.”
Smashing Pumpkins
last toured in 2018, in sup-
port of their Rick Rubin-
produced record of the
same year, “Shiny and Oh
So Bright, Vol. 1.” It was the
first time Corgan had
toured with Iha and Cham-
berlin in many years; the re-
turn of ex-bassist Wretzky,however, fell through under
ambiguous circumstances.
Yet of all reunions on this
tour, most surprising was a
Holmdel, N.J., cameo by
Corgan’s former partner in
love and song, Courtney
Love. The two had famously
feuded for years over Cor-
gan’s contributions to songs
recorded with Love’s band,
Hole, some of which he
claimed went uncredited.
“I think at some point
you look at your life and
think there’s only a few peo-
ple that really matter;
Courtney, and by extension
Frances [Bean Cobain],
matter to me,” says Corgan.
“Courtney’s been living in
England, and she’s very
happy. I’ve said stupid stuff,
she’s said stupid stuff. But
we talk every once in a while,
and it’s totally lucid. It’s a
joy to just celebrate that. We
made it through, and
there’s certainly plenty of
wreckage along the way ...
but it’s more of a family
bond for us.
“Courtney once said, ‘He
stopped writing hits when
he stopped writing about
me,’ which of course is not
true,” Corgan says with a
smirk. “But I like to tell peo-
ple ... ‘She stopped having
hits when I stopped writing
them!’ ”Billy Corgan works to upend expectations
SMASHING PUMPKINS’forthcoming new album,
“Cyr,” out Friday, is a roving 20-song double album.Tnsn Dvsn[Corgan,from E1]