Premiering Pierrot lunaire, from Berlin to New York: Reception, Criticism, and Modernism

The relationship between a composer, his critics, and the public, presents a series of interactions through which to study the historical and artistic culture of a given society and its citizens. This study examines the Berlin (1912) and the New York (1923) premieres of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire in order to demonstrate the importance of cultural context in forming critical reaction. I find that the cultural modernism and the relevance of the commedia dell’arte in Berlin led to an overall positive audience reaction despite Schoenberg’s unfamiliar compositional idiom. In contrast, the different cultural emphases in New York and the influence of the romantic tradition on New York audiences’ and critics’ perceptions of musical beauty made it much harder for them to accept Pierrot.