SOURCE: "Schoenberg's Speech-Song," in Music & Letters, edited by Edward Olleson and Nigel Fortune, Vol. 62, No. 1, January, 1981, pp. 1-11.

In the following essay, Stadlen examines Schoenberg's use of "speech-song, " a compositional technique of using "spoken note with fixed durations and pitches, " in Pierrot Lunaire.

If Pierrot lunaire has never had quite the success which that work of genius surely deserves, the reason is above all the confusion that has resulted from the vocal mixture known as speech-song. It was not, as Erwin Stein claimed, Schoenberg's invention. Rudolph Stephan has reminded us that spoken notes with fixed durations and pitches were first used in Humperdinck's melodrama Die Königskinder. His belief that Schoenberg is likely to have attended one of the Vienna performances of 1897 is supported by the fact that a song composed in 1899 is marked 'less sung than declaimed, to be performed in a descriptive manner'. It will not...