Drei Melodramen nach Pierrot op. 27

Three Melodramas after Pierrot op. 27 (unknown poet)

for speaking voice and piano

The first posthumous edition was published by Bote & Bock/Berlin 1914.

Preface

In musical terms, the melodrama is a genre that combines spoken word and music. It is therefore a hybrid between the play, where a monologue is a text spoken by only one person, and the song, where a singer sings a text instead of the spoken word. The genre has its origins in the 18th century, and melodramas often found their way into operas. A famous example is the dungeon scene in Beethoven's Fidelio. Melodramas with piano accompaniment, which are generally also referred to as concert melodramas, were also written by famous song composers such as Schubert, Schumann, Liszt and Brahms. However, the real very brief heyday was at the beginning of the 20th century, with composers such as Max von Schillings (Hexenlied) and Richard Strauss (Enoch Arden), among others. Arnold Schoenberg's 1912 cycle Pierrot Lunaire op. 21 was perhaps the last great highlight of the genre, expanding the concert melodrama on the one hand by including an instrumental quintet and on the other by the type of notation and the resulting demands of the musical interpretation. The concert melodrama has remained an absolute marginal phenomenon in cultural life to this day.

Erich J. Wolff was first and foremost a song composer. It is not known for what occasion he wrote his Three Melodramas after Pierrot op. 27*. They are dedicated to the baritone and actor Matthias von Erdberg, born in 1857, with whom the composer probably also performed them. It is a continuous three-part cycle which greatly enriches the fashion of the time for Pierrot, a formative figure of commedia dell’arte in the rare genre of concert melodrama. In No. 2 "Intermezzo", Wolff quotes the "I love you" motif from his song cycle op. 17 note for note at the end. The authorship of the text is not known. Perhaps Wolff was trying his hand here?

Note on this edition: The first posthumous edition from 1914 was very sparingly edited in terms of articulation and dynamics. This has not been changed in this new edition.

I dedicate this new edition to the tenor Daniel Johannsen, to whom I am very grateful for having recorded these melodramas with me as pianist.

Denzlingen in April 2024

Klaus Simon (editor)

*Erich J. Wolff's opus counting of his works ends with op. 26. The editor has reassigned all opus numbers from op. 27 onwards to Wolff’s posthumous works in order to meaningfully categorize the 62 posthumous songs and the Three Melodramas, among others.

These three melodramas were recorded with the Austrian tenor Daniel Johannsen together with the editor at the piano on the CD Erich J. Wolff Complete Lieder Vol. 1 Naxos 8.574451 (https://www.naxos.com/CatalogueDetail/?id=8.574451), which was released in April 2024. All spoken texts are also here available as a pdf under „Lyrics.“