Interview, Claire Booth on Pierrot Portraits

Following her terrific survey of Schoenberg’s songs with Christopher Glynn in May, British soprano Claire Booth offered another 150th birthday-present to the composer last month in the form of Pierrot Portraits: setting Pierrot lunaire alongside other depictions of the complex, melancholy clown, the album includes works by Thea Musgrave, Max Kowalski, Joseph Marx and Robert Schumann.

Ahead of her Wigmore Hall recital this Friday (which will feature cabaret songs by Schoenberg, Weill and others), Claire spoke to me about why the figure of Pierrot exerted such a strong fascination on composers from the first half of the twentieth century in particular, how Schoenberg’s contemporaries explored sides of the character which he chose not to depict, and why absolute fidelity to what’s on the page should be as non-negotiable in Schoenberg as it is in Schubert…

Photo credit: Sven Arnstein

What prompted you to focus on the character of Pierrot for this album?

I wanted to set Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire in a different context, and I thought that looking at the concept of Pierrot as a character was as good a perspective as any. It’s interesting to see how composers have been (and continue to be) influenced and obsessed by this character. He turns up as one of the central figures in commedia dell’arte, where he’s the servant rather than the master - a bit of a loner who never gets the girl. The ‘sad clown’ trope which crops up in pantomime and cabaret is such a strong idea and he’s totally emblematic of that, much more so than Columbine and Harlequin.

The Schoenberg setting is probably the most opaque, enigmatic version of Pierrot - musos celebrate it, but everyone has a way into this figure through everything from One Man, Two Guvnors to David Bowie to Placebo’s 2006 hit 'Pierrot the Clown'. In a way the project was about diluting Schoenberg and showing that he’s one of many. Any discussion of the Schoenberg setting inevitably gets swamped in the musical language, but like so many other composers I think he was drawn to that figure because of his humanity.

It’s human nature to hide parts of your character, but we see Pierrot exposed in all his flawed glory - in commedia dell’arte he’s the only figure who doesn’t wear a mask, because he has his white paint instead. There’s an honesty about that which goes well beyond talking about twelve-tone music and Expressionistic colour-palettes, and that’s why it still feels real to us today. 

How do perspectives on Pierrot shift over time, and why do you think he was so attractive to composers of the early twentieth century in particular?

In a sense Pierrot is rooted in the tradition of courtly love, and I think Schumann’s iteration in Carnaval harks back to that: it depicts a sort of refined buffoonery that was quite edgy enough for most people in the early part of the nineteenth century. But from the second half of the 1800s onwards Pierrot starts to take on more nefarious characteristics, including murdering Columbine’s husband…

By the time we get to full-on Expressionism, Dadaism, surrealism and the fin de siècle, Pierrot has become a cypher for artists to explore things like gender-fluidity, feeling like an outsider, being cheated or cuckolded by the state…It was safer to discuss these issues through the guise of Pierrot rather nailing your colours to the mast and writing a manifesto, and his malleability was partly why Pierrot became a cult figure: he could be so many things to so many people. 

It’s extraordinary how many Jewish artists and composers were drawn to Pierrot at that time.  Look at the beautiful nostalgia which he inspires in Korngold – could he have written that if he wasn’t somehow on the outside looking in? Pierrot as a nostalgic figure is very resonant and tempting: he’s somehow forward-looking but also rooted in a much older tradition, and that is a very perennial and meaningful aspect.

Two of the works by female composers focus on Columbine, so we see Pierrot as a follower rather than a leader. Amy Beach’s piece for solo piano gives us quite a traditionally feminine Columbine, then the Poldowski song paints her as more of a minxy mean-girl. Schoenberg’s Pierrot is very much the protagonist in the strong sense of the word, but he’s all sorts of other things as well – the sacrilegious guy, the lover, the cuckold. And Schoenberg certainly empathised with that last one: in 1908 his wife had an affair with the painter Richard Gerstl, who later shot himself…talk about a gruesome threesome! It’s all there in real life.

What do you make of Albert Giraud’s poems, which inspired Schoenberg and two other composers on the album?

Why was Giraud himself drawn to Pierrot? Boulez famously dismissed the original French poems as rubbish, and other people are better-placed to comment on that than me - but I get the sense that this guy who was writing his charming, sincere poetry alongside opaque Surrealists like Stéphane Mallarmé must have felt like an outsider who’s been left behind, and that’s very Pierrot-coded in itself…

I must read the complete original set one day: Schoenberg only set 21 of the poems, so there are lots of different sides of the character that aren’t so well-known. It’s a little like Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis: there’s so much more to this girl, but musos have created this narrative based on the three poems which Debussy chose to set...

You’ve performed the Schoenberg cycle many times - do you tend to stage it, or present it as a straightforward concert-work?

It’s varied, but most of the time it hasn’t been costumed. When we staged it for Transition Projects back in 2007 the director was Netia Jones, who’s the last person to want someone in a Pierrot outfit! And I don’t think the clown costume thing works anyway, because you’re moving between the characters of Pierrot, Columbine, Harlequin and even Schoenberg himself…Approaching them as vignettes is much more effective than imposing a single character or narrative on the entire work; having the camera blur or the lights dim between each one gives you the space to shut off and start again as something else. We all dressed up for the album-cover, but there was method in our madness there because we were presenting different portraits of the character.

At the end of the day, Pierrot lunaire is a piece of vocal chamber music, and it’s seriously theatrical on its own terms if you’re brave enough to do everything that’s written. Schoenberg gives you so much information that he’s basically directed it for you himself. The sound of the musicians is so hedonistic and fulsome that you don’t need to do more than what’s on the page - but you do need to do exactly what’s on the page, and it’s extraordinary that even that basic premise is lost by so many well-known interpreters. You wouldn’t get hired to sing Winterreise at the Wigmore if you were only getting 50% of the notes right, yet somehow the standards are relaxed for a piece like this, and I think that’s shameful. This music is still hampered by the old mindset of ‘I've never performed any, but I once stepped in some’ (thank you, Thomas Beecham!) – we need to present it to audiences with the same care and dedication that we’d lavish on Mozart, and absolute accuracy should be non-negotiable.

The Max Kowalski setting is an interesting one - what was his relationship with Schoenberg?

I was researching people who’d set anything to do with Pierrot, and Kowalski just came up - he didn’t write masses of music, but he did compose these twelve settings of Giraud (only one of which overlaps with Schoenberg). Diving into Kowalski’s life a bit more, I was struck by the fact that he was a Jewish lawyer who was still able to practise well into the 1930s; he lost his wife to suicide in October 1938 and was imprisoned in a concentration-camp the day after Kristallnacht, eventually fleeing to London. Kowalski had represented Schoenberg in an altercation with Frankfurt Opera and Schoenberg introduced him to Universal Editions as a thank-you, which is why these settings were published.

Given his settings are for voice and piano it’s easy to say ‘Oh, it doesn’t compare with the extraordinary sound-world created by Schoenberg’. But Kowalski didn’t set out to be groundbreaking, and the poems that he chooses and the things he does with them do stand up on their own terms if you can bring them out of the shadow of Schoenberg. And I was keen to show a side of the character that Schoenberg hadn’t: namely Pierrot the Adventurer, which Kowalski depicts in ‘Nordpolfahrt’ [‘North Pole Journey’].

You’re not involved in the wonderful Thea Musgrave piece on the album, but what do you make of it?

I’ve sung and listened to a fair amount of Musgrave, and I think this is one of her best pieces – it’s so inventive, but the structure is quite tight. Ideas come round again and again, and the pitch-base feels very clear: you can jump to No. 6 and it’s the same world as the beginning.  There’s an argument that anybody who’s written anything to do with Pierrot since Schoenberg must have been influenced by him, but Musgrave was just inspired by the original characters. For one thing, it’s scored for clarinet trio and not Pierrot Ensemble: she was asked to write a trio and thought ‘Pierrot - Columbine - Harlequin...there’s a threesome I can get behind!’. It loses nothing in terms of theatricality through not referencing The Masterwork.

Is it getting tougher to pitch this kind of curated recital-programme to record-labels in these streaming-centric days?

Perhaps, but I don’t want Spotify to be my algorithm – I want to be the algorithm! I hate the term ‘concept-album’, but I am passionate about putting together interesting, coherent programmes for my recordings. It’s always my hope that the odd student or singing-teacher might listen to the less familiar songs and think ‘Maybe not Schubert this time…’. I so wish that conservatoires taught students more about how to research repertoire and curate interesting recitals.  We’re living in a world where distinctiveness and curiosity is frankly going to get you noticed, but it goes deeper than that: curiosity should be part of being a musician.  

Speaking of interesting recitals, you have a Wigmore Hall concert coming up next week - what’s on the menu besides Schoenberg?

We’ll be weaving together a few different cabaret strands, of which Schoenberg is one – we have some Poulenc, Woolrich, Adès, Weill and Gershwin, so it’s quite a mix. We also have a new commission by Zoe Martlew which is very naughty, and there’ll be a bit of striptease on stage… If the Wigmore had offered us a 10PM slot that would have been ideal, but we’ll be going hammer and tongues despite it being a Friday lunchtime!

I’m aware that it’s quite a tough sell. I’ll be curating Sheffield’s Music In The Round series in 2026, and we’ve been looking at the question of why song recitals are so hard to market compared to chamber or instrumental concerts – there’s an irony there in that texts are there to illuminate music (and vice versa), but can end up being seen as a barrier. I think there’s something about the delivery in cabaret which manages to weather that storm: it’s somehow more immediate, and makes people feel like they’re engaging with the songs in real time rather than thinking ‘Hang on, I must check this translation…’.

Look at the speech-rhythm delivery of text that Poulenc manages so effortlessly in something like La dame de Monte-Carlo (which is on the programme for Friday): it isn’t an art-song, but it cuts in the same way. Apparently Weill compared his own songs to Schubert Lieder; they’re never sung like that, but it says a lot about the themes Weill was addressing and the care and attention which he wanted artists to bring to them. 

I’m hoping people might turn out for this concert because they’re attracted to the immediacy of cabaret rather than the fun, sanitised image. And I feel the same way about Pierrot Portraits: I’m not saying everyone who’s seen One Man, Two Guvnors is going to rush off and buy a copy, but maybe the odd Placebo fan will!