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performances and Schoenberg at first viewed the commission mainly as a business opportunity, but he soon found himself engaged in his most original composition to date.
    Usually discussed in term of its sprechstimme performance style midway between speech and song, its contrapuntal structures (including passacaglia and fugue), and its brilliant instrumental writing, Pierrot owes much of its sound and structure to Kandinsky. Schoenberg constructed it systematically from colors and numbers, the “inner values” behind external appearance, as Kandinsky had written in his introduction to Der gelbe Klang: “The means belonging to the different arts are externally quite different. Sound, color, words!…In the last essentials, these means are wholly alike: the final goal extinguishes the external dissimilarities and reveals the inner identity.” 51
    On Sesame Street they might say that Pierrot Lunaire is brought to you by the (Blavatskian) numbers three and seven and the colors white, black, and red. Schoenberg, who chose and arranged the text from Giraud's volume, subtitled the cycle “Three Times Seven Poems”; there are three parts, with seven poems in each. It opens with a seven-note motive, a rhythmic idea that returns in various guises throughout, most dramatically at the close of “Die Kreuzen” (The Crosses), which ends part II.
    There are four explicit “color” movements: “4. Eine blasse Wäscherin” (white), “8. Nacht” (black), “11. Rote Messe” (red), and “18. Der Mondfleck” (white again). The movements share numerology as well. Number 4 begins with seven three-note chords, scored for flute, clarinet, and violin. Number 8 is a passacaglia built on a repeated three-note theme. In number 11 each line of the poem has seven syllables. To evoke the colors, Schoenberg mixed instrumental timbres justas Ellington would do in “Mood Indigo,” but with his own tricks. He revoiced the trio of instruments in number 4 from chord to chord, so, for instance, in the first chord the clarinet plays the top note, the flute the bottom, and the violin the middle, while in the next chord the flute is on top, clarinet is on the bottom, and in the next, violin is on top, and so on. In the score he asked that the three instruments “play at completely equal volume and without expression” to produce a composite, disembodied sonority, a “white” sound.
    In “Nacht” Schoenberg combined the sounds of the bass clarinet, cello, and the piano in its low register to represent “giant black moth wings killing off the sun's radiance” as night descends. The middle section of this movement, as vapors begin to rise, counterpoints flutter-tongued clarinet, the cello playing tremolos on the bridge, more squeaks than pitches, and staccato notes on the piano, a swirl of shadows. For “Rote Messe” Schoenberg contrasted high squeaks (piccolo and the upper register of the piano) and low mutters (bass clarinet, viola, and cello), a comic effect, almost like cartoon music, to paint a gruesome scene: Pierrot reveals the dripping red Host to the congregation by dipping his fingers in his heart's blood.
    â€œRote Messe,” like much of Pierrot Lunaire , feels at once lurid and funny, qualities not much evident in Schoenberg's earlier work. By employing Kandinsky's mystical symbolism in place of the attempts at direct expression found in Erwartung , Schoenberg took his music to new and unexpected (and not particularly Kandinskian) places: objectivity and satire, with expression itself, the coin of the realm of romantic music, exposed (as it is in Kafka's “Hunger Artist”) as an addictive codependency between the artist (up on the cross) and the audience who get their kicks watching the bloody spectacle, then crawl back to their humdrum everyday lives.
    To replace the weltschmerz that died on the cross at the end of part II,