Actually, Pierrot lunaire isn't an opera, even though it comes up when you do a google search for "Schoenberg operas." But I'm sort of trying to figure out Schoenberg, so I watched it anyway. There's a good performance with English subtitles here.
What it is is a song cycle for a chamber orchestra and soprano based on a series of poems by the symbolist Belgian poet Albert Giraud, featuring the protean figure of Pierrot in a number of situations, some lyrical, some gruesome, and some just surreal. This was written before Schoenberg worked out his twelve-tone system, so while it is atonal, it's not that. But it raises the opportunity for me to try to answer the question: can I tell the difference? And the answer is: nope! If you told me this was a twelve-tone piece, I would happily nod along. There's a good post here about the differences by a person who seems to know what they're talking about, but I think if I want to understand, I'm REALLY going to just have to spend some time staring into the sun.
Regardless! Whatever it is, I liked it (and I liked Kiera Duffy's singing). It may be atonal, but it doesn't have any of the jagged, dissonant feel that one, by which I mean me, associates with the form. It's just kind of pretty. I thought. Good late-night music. I might actually be willing to just listen to the music here, which isn't something I'd ever have said about any other music of this sort.
So that's encouraging! How about Von heute auf morgen? Well, that is an opera--the first one ever written in twelve-tone. You associate this kind of music with grim tragedy or at least with Very Serious Drama, but this is a short domestic comedy--and a rather charming one at that.
There's a married couple who've just come home from a party, at which they were both taken with other people--her with a famous tenor, him with her friend. They think about their marriage. Do they still love each other? What kind of relationship do they want to have? Do they want to be free and easy, like "modern people" are? The answers turn out to be yes, the same kind they've had, and no. Their two objects of temptation turn up, but they're not interested. They don't want to be "modern" in that sense.
The music is...well, what it is. It's fine, which is sort of my all-purpose unhelpful description of all music like this. The story has a more or less conservative message, but not in an offensive way. Also, their bickering never comes across as mean-spirited, like The Lockhorns or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It doesn't hurt that Georg Nigl and Brigitte Geller in the leads really act the hell out of them--they really bring the characters alive.
So I liked this a lot. But I want to draw your attention to the plot summary on wikipedia, screen-capped in case it's changed:
It seems to me that the person who wrote this either didn't understand or was too freaked out to mention the fact that the drama here revolves around whether this couple should open up their marriage. That "they champion the latest trends in society"--yes, specifically, the trend of not being bothered if your spouse is sleeping with someone else. There's something oddly childish about this description.
Good stuff, good stuff. I would like to see more Schoenberg, but I don't think his other two operas, Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand, are on video anywhere. Shame.
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