A WORD FROM DIRECTOR

Pierrot Lunaire/ Lenz
Four Pierrots:
Schoenberg, Giraud, Buchner and Lenz

Listening to Schoenberg’s and Giraud’s poems, I could not help asking myself who Pierrot is and why he is a lunaire. What do I know about that unadjusted young being who identifies himself with Christ and who feels as being crucified by mankind? Who is the woman he is in love with, a dark muse resembling Lilith and what makes her so special? Why is Pierrot so panicky afraid of the gallows and the silver hangman’s sword? Where is the one he loves and he is jealous of so much that he dreams about slashing the alive rival’s skull, taking vengeance with unseen cruelty on great sufferings his heart has been bearing. And where is his homeland he comes back to, completely broken in the last poem, is it in this world at all?

The young man, shaped by the poet and the composer as well, has been intriguing, scaring and upsetting me more and more. He is a victim and a hangman. He is the one who suffers and who is persecuted, but also the one who is insane, unadjusted and upsetting, the one out of society. I have tried to reconstruct the man who inspired Schoenberg and Giraud as well and in whom they both recognized themselves. Of course, the poet Giraud put a mask of on the main character’s face, the mask of one of the typed characters of Del arte comedy, a dreamer Pierrot, an unhappy lover Pierrot, an abandoned Pierrot, a poet Pierrot… Who is beneath that mask which has been obsessively put by the artists since the beginning of 19th century? Who hides I Schoenberg’s piece of art? Is it a jealous and abandoned Arnold Schoenberg, whose wife left him and ran away with their close friend? Is it understood Schoenberg, a mocked and persecuted artist, whose concerts are dropped in by the police as to calm the audience in their mockery and comments which interrupt the program. Or it is a Jew Schoenberg, confined to a corner, who leaves Austria in 1934 and goes to the USA, demonstratively changing his surname? 

Searching for the parallel for a stage answer to these questions, Georg Buchner and his novella Lenz were constantly in my minds. Just like Arnold Schoenberg (like each Pierrot), Buchner is also an obsessive fighter for the new live art and the new better world, he is an unadjusted and upsetting creator, he is a persecuted prophet with the complex and turbulent emotional life. In his novella, which is here organically attached to Pierrot Lunaire, Georg Buchner follows the climax of insanity of the young poet Jacob Lenz (the fourth Pierrot). The writer uses some documentary material from the diary of the Pastor Oberlin, who received the deranged poet into his house, collages it with his own reconstructions of Lenz’s progressive insanity and pangs of conscience, creating the series of chamber music scenes full of restlessness, silence and anticipation, intimate and voyeuristic moments, screams and whispers, but first of all with the poet’s obsessive creating.

Lenz goes through the same losses and breakdowns that Buchner, Giraud and Schoenberg are going to experience. Those are sufferings, “black crosses” all Pierrots are crucified on, all artists who are, by nature of their Christ like and prophetic craft/ passion/ destiny, doomed to suffering. Instead of one abstract Pierrot, connecting the Schoenberg and Buchner’s pieces of art, connecting expression and narration, we create the complete picture of a cursed artist, taking the rare opportunity to observe in parallel his life and experiences, as well as his art that arises from his life and experience. Four Pierrots- Schoenberg, Giraud, Buchner and Lenz- like crystals reflect and refract the light on each other, allowing the viewer/ listener to see all innumerable shades that one crystal wouldn’t manage to refract. 

                                                              Aleksandar Nikolic

return to drama Pierrot lunaire/ Lenz