Arnold Schönbergs Pierrot lunaire op. 21, a key work of musical modernism, was written in 1912 in Berlin for the elocutionist Albertine Zehme. Zehme, a singer, professional reciter of texts, and voice coach (as well as a former student of Cosima Wagner) followed a highly idiosyncratic aesthetic in her recitation, in which she wanted to “reclaim the ear’s place in life”: “I demand not freedom of thought, but rather freedom of sound! […] In order to communicate our poets and our composers, we need both the sound of song and the sound of speech. The unrelenting work to find the ultimate expressive possibilities for ‘artistic experiences in sound’ has taught me this necessity.” (Program note from an evening of recitation featuring the Pierrot lunaire poems in 1911) This quest for a boundless “freedom of sound” led her, consequently, to a kindred spirit also fighting for a similar freedom: “I have neither to work with a fundamental tone nor any other tone; I could use any of the 12 tones, I don’t have to constrain myself to the Procrustean bed of motivic work, nor do I need to incorporate conventional formal sections or phrase structures.” (Schönberg’s note on the page margin of a copy of Ferruccio Busoni’s Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, 1916)

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/musicapp_historical/chapter/196/
https://www.laphil.com/musicdb/pieces/2885/pierrot-lunaire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrot_lunaire