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My title is a pun on Stravinsky's characterisation of Pierrot Lunaire as the solar plexus of twentieth‐century music. Given its place in the history of musical depictions of moonlight, I characterise Pierrot as the twentieth century's lunar nexus – a place of intersections among literary and musical depictions of moonlight in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first part of this essay is a survey and discussion of the musical topos of moonlight in German and Austrian nineteenth‐century literature and music. I then discuss Schoenberg's depictions of moonlight in key works prior to Pierrot, including Verklärte Nacht, Gurre‐Lieder, Pelleas und Melisande and Erwartung. The third section explores the depictions of moonlight developed across the 21 songs of Pierrot, with special focus on three: ‘Mondestrunken’, ‘Eine blasse Wäscherin’ and ‘Der Mondfleck’.
Irony, one of the most basic, pervasive, and variegated of rhetorical tropes, is as fundamental to musical thought as it is to poetry, prose, and spoken language. In this wide-ranging study of musical irony, Michael Cherlin draws upon the rich history of irony as developed by rhetoricians, philosophers, literary scholars, poets, and novelists. With occasional reflections on film music and other contemporary works, the principal focus of the book is classical music, both instrumental and vocal, ranging from Mozart to Mahler. The result is a surprising array of approaches toward the making and interpretation of irony in music. Including nearly ninety musical examples, the book is clearly structured and engagingly written. This interdisciplinary volume will appeal to those interested in the relationship between music and literature as well as to scholars of musical composition, technique, and style.
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