Pythagoras and Pierrot: An Approach to Schoenberg's Use of Numerology in the Construction of 'Pierrot lunaire'
1982; Perspectives of New Music; Volume: 21; Issue: 1/2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/832890
ISSN2325-7180
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Musicological Studies
Resumois not superstition, it is belief.' Thus did Arnold Schoenberg defend the importance he attached to the power of numerology and to its influence on his life. His fear of the number thirteen is common knowledge. So, too, is the way in which that number marked his birth (September 13, 1874) and death (Friday, July 13, 1951, at age 76). Schoenberg is said to have observed the flagging of his creative energy during the compositional process at measures whose numbers were thirteen or its multiples, a circumstance that reportedly led to his numbering of measures in his manuscripts as 12, 12a, 14. We are told that even the choice of a name for his son, Lawrence Adam, was made only after Roland, the name originally intended for him (and an anagram of his father's first name), was found to be numerologically unfavorable. Schoenberg's almost pathological fear of the number thirteen produced forebodings of his death, and, one suspects, may even have contributed to bringing it about. Nor has the number symbolism of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire been completely overlooked. It has been noted that for his Opus 21 Schoenberg chose 21 of Albert Giraud's fifty poems as texts (translated from French into German by Otto Erich Hartleben), giving the work the complete title Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus ALBERT GIRAUDs Pierrot lunaire, and beginning to compose it in the third month of a year containing the symbolic digits 21 in reverse order, 1912. In spite of all this, surprisingly little attention has been focused on the part that the
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