Arguably the most important work of the 20th century, Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,” was presented on Friday evening at Brooklyn’s Bargemusic. Schoenberg, who for a while managed a cabaret, would have felt right at home.

The intimacy of the room was just perfect for a work that delves deeply into previously taboo areas of the psyche. The floating nature of the concert hall added a surrealistic element to this masterpiece of expressionistic tone painting. Schoenberg was especially fond of this revolutionary piece of chamber music and often conducted it himself. When he took it to Florence, he met a very impressed Giacomo Puccini. Once in America, he chose “Pierrot” as his contribution to the Meet the Composer series at Columbia Records. That original piece of vinyl is highly prized today.

Pierrot consists of “thrice seven” songs — Schoenberg had a thing for numerology — on poems of Albert Giraud for reciter and quintet. The vocalist employs the Sprechstimme technique — that is, she must speak in pitch rather than sing. This performance was notable for its precision and passion. The five instrumentalists (Alex Sopp, flute and piccolo, Pascal Archer, clarinet and bass clarinet, Colin Jacobsen, violin and viola, Eric Jacobsen, cello, and Steven Beck, piano) were totally invested in this high-powered music making, digging in strongly during exciting ensemble passages — such as the stirring conclusion of “Die Kreuze” — and individually bringing out the vivid colors that make this music both appealing and disturbing at the same time.

Schoenberg required 40 rehearsals before the work’s premiere and Eric Jacobsen mentioned at the beginning of this program that he and his mates had scheduled almost as many. Their diligence showed in their dedicated performance, but the decision to not employ a conductor led to some distortion of balances, especially between the five and their poetry presenter.

That reciter turned out to be the renowned flutist Paula Robison, who does have experience in vocalism because of certain contemporary works written for her. This was a brave and noble effort, although there was insufficient variance in characterization and mood between individual songs and not a very large palette of vocal color available to her. Against the odds, she did a fine job, but had to attempt to overcome a major stumbling block: the words that she was intoning were not the ones set to music by Arnold Schoenberg.

For some misguided reason, Ms. Robison was reduced to an English translation rather than the original German text that Schoenberg so painstakingly matched syllable for syllable in his musical thought. As a result, the meter was askew and the coloration of instrumental ornamentation was misaligned. Somehow “fearsome, gruesome giant black moths” just doesn’t have the frightening power of “Finstre, schwarze Riesenfalter.”

It is never a good idea to go against the composer’s wishes, but it seems particularly wrongheaded to eliminate the very materials that formed the building blocks of the musical construction. In the case of “Pierrot,” the words are often the de facto notes, since it is their spoken sound in tones that comprises many of the melodies of this architectural marvel. If these players felt free to change those sounds, then they might as well have eliminated the key signature altogether!

Oh wait, Schoenberg already did that.