Interview,
Claire Booth on Schoenberg
In between preparations for her performance of Judith Weir's mini one-woman opera King Harald's Saga at Aldeburgh last night, Claire spoke to me about how there's more to Schoenberg than serialism, why his songs are still receiving scant attention in his 150th anniversary year, how his paintings can shed new light on the music, and her long history with Pierrot Lunaire (which she has recorded for release in September)...
As someone who goes to a lot of song-recitals, I could still probably count the number of Schoenberg sets I've heard live on the fingers of one hand...is it fair to say that a lot of his vocal music is underappreciated?
Chris Glynn and I have always been interested in highlighting and exploring repertoire by composers who are not so well known for their vocal output, and Schoenberg definitely falls into that category. People perhaps know the Brettl-Lieder, and the songs from the early part of his career (Op. 2 to Op. 8) occasionally get an outing at festivals who want to include something from the Second Viennese School without frightening the horses: of course some of his early songs sound a bit like Mahler or Wolf because he was born out of that era, but there’s no need to stop there…You wouldn’t put on a Picasso exhibition and stop in 1907 with Les demoiselles d’Avignon!
I think Schoenberg is still perceived as less approachable than Berg: people swoon over the Seven Early Songs, and the two operas are quite tantalising and engaging. Yes, you’ve got to listen to Schoenberg with your full attention - but in a way it’s not all that different from listening to late Strauss, which can often be quite angular.
The songs are so varied, and it’s been good to do a deep-dive and discover just how Romantic a lot of them are: here is a composer who has enormous breadth, but I think will forever be remembered as someone who just wrote Serialist music. It’s quite incredible to think that the man who wrote Gurre-Lieder could also compose those Op. 48 songs which are super-sparse and very intense, folk-song settings which also owe something to Bach, film music, cabaret songs… And in the middle of it all there’s Pierrot Lunaire, which still sits in a league of its own today.
You mentioned Wolf there - do you see a direct line from the Classical song-tradition to Schoenberg, or does he occupy a different space entirely?
I remember taking some Webern to my Lieder class when I was studying at Guildhall, and people rolling their eyes as if to say ‘Oh, here comes Claire with some random twentieth-century repertoire again’...But these songs are part of the canon, and how amazing that that canon stretches from Schubert to Schoenberg and beyond. Schoenberg and Webern’s songs are often quite conservative in the sense that they’re still very much voice and accompaniment: even if the vocal line is very angular it still has its own trajectory, with the rest of the sound-world underneath.
In something like Ravel’s Mallarmé settings (and a lot of more recent music for voice and chamber ensemble) you have musical ideas passing through all the lines, but with Schoenberg and Webern you can sing the vocal line unaccompanied and it stands up on its own. It’s part of that classical song tradition which we know so well from Schubert.
A great example is The Ballad of Jane Grey, which is really in that tradition of the story-song which Schubert, Schumann and Wolf loved so much. For all his Modernism Schoenberg is writing a Romantic ballad here; he’s not messing about with the form. (Why and how he got interested in a bit-part British queen I have no idea!). I don’t think he’s always such a dyed-in-the-wool Modernist as people believe, and it would be great to transmute that to young singers as well as to curious listeners; hopefully at least one music-student might think ‘I don’t need to bring Die Taubenpost to Lieder class again - I’ll try Schoenberg’s Traumleben!’.
How about the influence of Schoenberg's older contemporaries, such as Mahler?
It’s interesting that you mention Mahler, as there’s a direct link there. Chris suggested we include a couple of piano pieces, and the very last one on the album was composed just after Schoenberg had come back from Mahler’s funeral. There are only about five distinct pitches in there, and in terms of the way he spaced them around the instrument reminds me a bit of Ligeti; it’s a little goodbye present to a friend, and it’s very touching.
Mahler had been a real supporter of Schoenberg’s when perhaps others weren’t; he knew Schoenberg was a trailblazer, and because he himself was so much a part of the establishment his support meant a lot. And Schoenberg would have been very aware that people like Mahler and Wolf were a part of his musical pedigree. Nowadays we’ve got a bit fixated on the idea of young composers arriving on the scene with their own unique fully-formed voice, but up until recently there was no problem with acknowledging that Oliver Knussen was influenced by Stravinsky, Ravel and Mussorgsky etc. Schoenberg was obviously part of a tradition, and I think it’s good to remind people that he (and the Expressionist movement as a whole) didn’t just pitch up out of nowhere!
How did the idea of curating the programme around Schoenberg's paintings come about?
Chris and I have tried to find some sort of arc for all our albums; both the Grieg and the Mussorgsky were loosely structured around a woman’s life-journey, but we didn’t want to force that narrative onto Schoenberg when it wasn’t there. We got talking about the fact that he was a real polymath, and it was Chris who suggested that the paintings could be the way in…
All his paintings have very Expressionist titles like ‘Flesh’, ‘Tears’ and ‘Expectation’, and we thought they were a powerful illustration of how much things had shifted since the nineteenth century. A Victorian painting entitled ‘Expectation’ would probably show a little dog waiting for its master with something in its mouth, whereas Schoenberg’s painting is characterised by blackness: there’s the suggestion of a figure, a shaft of light and a pool of colour…Who is waiting, and for what? What do I think? What did he think? It’s all a question, and it’s wonderful how these words have ended up meaning different things in different eras.
It’s been interesting seeing the Expressionism exhibition at The Tate where they reference Kandinsky’s friendship with Schoenberg, because all of that feeds into what we’re trying to explore here. I was only sorry that they feature some of Schoenberg’s music but none of his paintings…
Eventually we picked eight pictures and did a triptych of three songs around each one. There were some glorious songs that didn’t make the cut: I was sorry not to include the Op. 8 orchestral Lieder or anything from Pierrot Lunaire, although doing that with piano only would’ve been a headache! We did include Tove’s song from Gurre-Lieder, which Chris assures me was originally scored for just voice and piano: I’m not likely to do Gurre-Lieder with orchestra any time soon, but it’s a beautiful song and knowing its origin makes me feel vindicated!
How much activity is there around the 150th anniversary this year?
I’ve been in touch with Randol Schoenberg and indeed the Schoenberg Estate quite a lot; they’ve been big supporters of this project and of the Pierrot Lunaire recording that’s coming out in September. And they are nervous that he’s being forgotten: we’re by no means the only people performing his music this year, but there aren’t as many concerts as there should be. I’ve found that even the most established song festivals worry about programming an all-Schoenberg recital, but if they’re not going to promote these songs then what hope have we got for them to infiltrate the broader sphere?
We’re going to perform at the Schönberg-Center in Vienna in December, and I’ll be standing next to the real paintings for that one! The West Malling Festival down in Kent enthusiastically agreed to the entire programme and asked if we could get the rights to have the artwork projected behind us, which the Schoenberg Estate were really happy to authorise.
Where do the cabaret songs fit into the story?
A lot of those Expressionists were polymaths, which meant that there were various creative coteries springing up where artists were interacting with all sorts of different people. Kandinsky was also a cellist, Gabriele Münter was also a photographer, while on a different tack Gershwin was a painter: these guys were all hanging out together and sharing ideas. There’s an amazing painting of Gershwin painting Schoenberg, and the pair of them were tennis-partners! People are often surprised that Schoenberg pitched up in the US and started hanging out with somebody who was writing showtunes, but he’d written for the cabaret scene in Berlin in 1902: he was no stranger to any of this stuff.
I often hear people say ‘Thank god he wrote the Brettl-Lieder, otherwise we wouldn’t hear anything he wrote for the voice’, and I do see the appeal – they are brilliant, filthy and deadpan, in a way that audiences probably don’t expect from Schoenberg. You can perform them in a lot of different ways and contexts, but it’s more fun to put them in the framework of everything else. Schoenberg arrived in Berlin with no money and started working in the cabaret club writing those songs; within the year, his wife Mathilde was having an affair with the artist Richard Gerstl who Schoenberg had brought into the house to teach them to paint! By 1908 Mathilde had gone back to Schoenberg and Gerstl (who was somehow still Schoenberg’s best friend) killed himself, so there’s a lot of darkness behind all this satirical cabaret stuff, as well as behind the Op. 8 songs.
Pierrot Lunaire is two or three years later, so it’s hard not to see Pierrot as Schoenberg himself on some level: the tribulations of the love triangle are an obvious link to the Pierrot story. You can’t dismiss them as just jolly cabaret songs: in the truest spirit of cabaret (and indeed Cabaret), there’s a really dark undertone to it all. If you read Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye To Berlin, you quickly realise that it wasn’t just rip-roaring fun: he’s able to look at it as an outsider, but it all feels a bit jaded.
Tell me more about your upcoming recording of Pierrot - what's your history with the piece, and how do you approach it?
It grew out of a concert I did with Ensemble 360 a couple of years ago – I’ve done a few Pierrots in my time, but we had a real blast with that one and I really wanted us to record it together. I was aware that the 150th anniversary was coming up, and as far as I know there hasn’t been a recording by a British singer since Jane Manning's.
I love the piece and have a long history with it: I first sang it when I was twenty, with Pierre Boulez conducting, so I think I’m a valid interpreter. And the slapdash, have-a-go approach that still persists with it makes me really quite angry: without naming names, I heard a recent recording where it would be very generous to say that the singer uses the notes as a guideline, which sums up everything I dislike about people’s attitude to Schoenberg.
I remember asking Boulez how to do Sprechgesang, and he said ‘You sing a bit, you speak a bit…that’s it!’. It was quite freeing to hear that, but ‘sing a bit’ doesn’t mean you can sing wrong notes! I don’t think it’s credible to say that because Schoenberg wrote the piece for an actress he didn’t care what the notes were; if that were true then I don’t think he would’ve notated it like that. There are so many scenarios in each bar where some sense of the pitch is integral to what’s happening underneath; if you ignore that, then you’re literally singing gobbledegook and it becomes nothing more than an amusing screamathon. I think it’s a fallacy that you can have theatricality or accuracy - you have to have both, or leave it alone. Nobody would dream of treating something like Tosca with so little care, so why isn’t Schoenberg afforded the same respect?
What will you be programming alongside it?
It’s often paired with another Second Viennese School work, but I persuaded Ensemble 360 to go with ‘Portraits of Pierrot’ as a working title. We have something from Schumann’s Carnaval, something from Amy Beach’s Colombine, and something from Korngold’s Die tote Stadt. Then there’s Debussy’s Pierrot, a piece by Max Kowalski (another Jewish composer who set Giraud’s poems around the same time as Schoenberg), Poldowski’s Colombine, some Joseph Marx (who lived in Vienna at the same time as Schoenberg but went in a different direction), then Thea Musgrave’s fantastic Pierrot Trio for clarinet, violin and piano. There’s a lot of women in there as it’s worked out, which is also nice!
Claire Booth (soprano), Christopher Glynn (piano)
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