Take a Dip in the Fin-de-Siècle Imagination
“You can’t really understand Pierrot and you don’t have to. It is tone-painting, musical rhetoric. The piece feels close to life and to the world of dreams,” says Patricia Kopatchinskaja, resident artist of 2025 Prague Spring Festival, violinist, performer and composer about the composition Pierrot lunaire by Arnold Schönberg. At the concert on May 17 in Rudolfinum, she will put down her violin for thirty-five minutes to also show her acting talent in this extremely demanding “Sprechestimme” role.
The character of the enigmatic and mysterious Pierrot breathed life into the comedy dell’arte, the plays by the famous Molière, the pantomime performances of the Czech-born Jean-Gaspard Deburau and even into the dreamy and slightly eccentric works by decadent poets and fin-de-siècle symbolists. Arnold Schönberg was inspired by Pierrot in 1912 when he used the texts by the French symbolist Albert Giraud as translated by the eccentric German poet Otto Erich Hartleben. Schönberg’s Pierrot lunaire is one of Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s most demanded projects. She won acclaim with it in collaboration with members of the Berlin Philharmonic, Gothenburg or Montreal Symphony Orchestras, the Asko/Schönberg Ensemble in Rotterdam or, more recently, in the Louvre Museum in Paris. She will come to Prague with fantastic instrumentalists, with whom she recorded this groundbreaking 20th century work for the Alpha Classics label.
In addition to Pierrot, three other remarkable compositions of the stylistically multifaceted first half of the last century will be played in which “PatKop” will take up her violin again: The Tale of the Soldier by Igor Stravinsky bringing a parable of a man who trades his violin to the Devil in return for a book of spells promising infinite wealth, Bartók‘s Contrasts in which Kopatchinskaja uses an unusually tuned instrument, and Jeu (A Play) from the Suite for Violin, Clarinet and Piano by Darius Milhaud.
Schönberg’s “solar plexus of music of the early 20th century”, as Igor Stravinsky called Pierrot lunaire, is a test of human imagination. If you want to test yours, come to Rudolfinum on May 17!
