Since its premiere in 1912, Arnold Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” has been regarded by generations of musicians and audiences as an icon of artistic originality. Igor Stravinsky, who knew something of originality, referred to Pierrot as the “solar plexus of twentieth century music”. While Schoenberg embraced new techniques to frame his work and stretch the listener’s imagination, even as he turned to the aesthetics of melodrama in Pierrot, Kurt Weill sought to frame the realities of modern society with music that reflects its popular culture.

Both Schoenberg and Kurt Weill (with dramatist Bertolt Brecht), whose Threepenny Opera”, “The Rise and Fall of the House of Mahagonny”, and “Happy End” appear alongside the first stirrings of the Second World War, found the cabaret to be an environment well-suited to work that blurred the lines separating art and popular music, and the socialist and capitalist worlds to which their music reacted.