Sprechstimme Reconsidered Once Again: ‘... though Mrs. Stiedry is never in pitch’

Abstract

The MTO article “The Test Pressings of Schoenberg Conducting Pierrot lunaire: Sprechstimme Reconsidered” by Avior Byron claimed that “Schoenberg accepted very different performances . . . of the Sprechstimme notation by Erika Stiedry-Wagner in a period of not more than three days.” The present article discusses a surprising letter that Schoenberg wrote at the end of 1941, which seems (at first) to contradict Byron’s claim. We present this letter and suggest that Schoenberg’s conception of Sprechstimme in Pierrot lunaire presumably changed as a result of listening to recordings, an assumption which finally strengthens the argument presented in the aforementioned article.