Definition of "sprechstimme" []

• A form of dramatic declamation between singing and speaking, in which the speaker uses lilt and rhythm but not precise pitches. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The "rude mechanicals" rehearsing their impossibly bad "Pyramus and Thisbe" tragedy have music that makes fun of everything from Schoenberg's "sprechstimme" to Donizetti's mad scene from "Lucia di Lammermoor.""
• "And the score is a hodgepodge of dreamy ballads, folk and patriotic song parodies and dense bits of sprechstimme, or speak-singing."
• "In Alexei Ratmansky's "Pierrot Lunaire," a quartet of Pierrots dance to Arnold Schönberg's 1912 sprechstimme"