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Fron/ispiece by Ado/phe Willelle one
oI
/he Iounders oI he Cha/ Noir n Mon/-
martre, JOT thejirst issue 0 he arlts/ic journal Le Pierrot re Annee. no. J 6 Juillet
1888, with the coption, La Parisienne: Pierrot blanc. Pi errot noir, je vous
lais
che
valiers du el ir de Lune; allez. boycottez et amusez-moi'
EXCAVATING AN ALLEGORY:
THE
TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNAIRE
Susan Youens
or his song cycle Pierrot Lunaire Op.
2
of 1912,
Schoenberg selected twenty-one poems from the fifty rondels in Pierrot
Lunaire
(1884) by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud, a collection translated
into German in 89 - 1892 by the poet and playwright Otto Erich Hartleben
(1864-1905).' Through his choice and arrangement of those twenty-one
poems, Sehoenberg carved from Giraud's collection
of
harlequinades the
tripartite tale
of
a creative artist's rebellion and frenzied dereglement
des sens, the sterility and des pair tha t follow, and, finally, the journey
horne. The cycle ends in reconciliation with the past and recognition
of
a
new artistic order in which those elements
of
beauty and value from the
past, from tradition and one's cultural homeland, are incorporated.
Nach Bergamo zur Heimat
Kehrt nun Pierrot zurck
Schwach dmmert schon im Osten
Der grne Horizont
Der
Mondstrahl
ist das uder
.
This allegory of a modern artist is present within Giraud's and Hartle
ben's Pierrot Lunaire but scattered throughout the volume and obscured
from
view
by glimpses into other corners
of
Pierrot-Poet's often chaotic
inner world. Schoenberg recognized affinities between poems dispersed
throughout the work and rearranged them in order to clarify those rela
tionships, heighten the effect of the recurring images, and trace more
clearly the steps of the Poet s progression from ecstasy to despair and
finally to peace and homecoming. To do so, he pruned away all the
poems from which either Pierrot or the moon is absent: the tale unfolds
by night, and the Moon is the embodiment of Poetry and Pierrot's alter
ego, the very souree
of
poetry at the beginning of Op.
21.
Schoenberg never, to my knowledge, explained or diseussed the ra
tionale of his choice and ordering of the twenty-one poems in the cycle,
but it is easy to reeognize in Op.
2
a more meaningful order than the
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SUSAN YO UENS
(deliberately?) jumbled series of fifty poems in the complete Giraud
Hartleben collection. There, the poet's mind leaps from one image, phan
tasm, fear,
or
caprice to another in the seemingly irrational fashion of
an unfettered imagination- behind the inscrutable mask of a clown is
unregulated whimsy. The pairs or even trios of successive poems linked
by a common image or theme always give way in Giraud's and Hartleben's
work 10 a disconcerting change of scene, a leap to another region of a
psychic landscape outside the dictates of Reason and the waking world.
Schoenberg imposed a coherent structure on those poems he chose and, in
so
doing, excavated from the
t rger
souree its principal idea
cr
con
cept,
purifying it and liberating it from the unrelated images that cluster
abou t and hide it from view.
The moonstruck
Pierrot
of the title is the prototype of an artist,
including Giraud hirnself: in the last poem, Crista l de Boheme, he writes
that he wears Pierrot's garb and s a Pierrot- Je suis un Pierrot costume
or, in Hartleben's translation, with its changed nuances, Ich hab mich als
Pierrot verkleidet .' Pierrots were endemie everywhere in late nineteenth l
early twentieth century Europe as an archetype of the self-dramatizing
artist, who presents to the world a stylized mask both to symbolize and
veil artistic ferment, to distinguish the creative artist from the human being.
Behind the all-enveloping traditional costume of white blouse, white trou
sers, and floured face, the Pierrot-character changed with the passage of
time, from uncaring prankster to Romantic malheureux to Dandy, Deca
dent, and finally, into a brilliant, tormented figure submerged in a bizarre,
airless inner world. The Pierrots of the 1880's had already, before Giraud's
Pierrot Lunaire, assumed a sadistic and sinister guise, so to find hirn
thieving and torturing was nothing new, but here, he
is
in turn tortured
and killed, the prey of self-exacerbated agonies of the mind and imagina
tion. In his heightened self-consciousness, he
is
a Janus-faced creature:
the poseur,
the je m'en moque of extravagant gestures compounded
equally
of
elegance and violence, calculated for their effect upon others,
gives way on occasion to the death-haunted introvert who, all alone,
trembles at the phantasmagorical and multiple deaths conjured by an over
wrought fancy.
Giraud's Pierrot evolved from the zannis, or comic clown-servant fig
ures from Bergamo who were part of the panoply of stock characters in the
commedia deli arte. Pierrot's most distant ancestor was Pulcinella, a
character created in Naples who, chameleon-like, played many roles' and
who had a knack for parody, pranks, and playing the imposter. The French
Pierrot became a distinct figure, differentiated from the Italian Pulcinella
or Pedrolino, during the early days of the commedia dell'arte in France
during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pierrot and another
THE TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNA/RE
9
A sketch 01 Albert Giraud born Albert Kayenbergh in Louvain,
1860-1929)
rom
Camille Hantet, Les Ecrivains
Belges
Contemporains
de
langue f r n ~ i s e 1800-1946,
val. 1 (Liege:
H
Dessain,
1946), p /45 .
Giraud initially hoped
10
become a concer
pianist.
Photograph 0 Quo Erich Hart/eben
fram
the jrontispiece
10 Otto Erich Hartleben .
Briefe an Freunde. vo/. 2, ed. by Franz Ferdinand Heilmue/ler (Eer/in: S Fische;
Verlag 1912).
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$USAN YOUENS
Gille,
by Antoine Watteau (168
4-
1721), n the Louvre, one
1
the painter s last
works. Same art hislorians, including Donald Posner
in Antoine Watteau
London:
Weidenjeld Nicolson. 1984), p 2
70
conjecture that /he painting was intended os
a shopsign Jor the actar Bel/on;, who op ened a cole after his retirement Irom the
foires.
T
H T XTS
OF
PIERROT LUNA
/RE
99
of the zannis- Harlequin- developed into more fixed and easily identifi
able personalities in France, the central characters in such late seventeenth
century plays as Arlequin Empereur de la Lune by a certain Monsieur
Anne de Fatouville (died ca. 17(0), performed several times between 684
and 1719. Watteau's famous Comediens Italiens (1719-1720?), now in the
National Gallery in Washington, D.C., is among the earliest transfigura
tions of Pierrot into the melancholy artist-prototype:' here, as in Arlequin,
Pierrot et Scapin of 1716, and, most strikingly, in Oilles (another name
far the French Pierrot), Pierrot is the central figure, clearly separate from
the remainder of the troupe.
It is
in part this detachment, this aloofness
from the quotidian life around hirn, that appealed so strongly to nineteenth
century France). In Oilles, he is larger-than-life, larger than the other
comedians dustered in back of his feet and legs, who seem to leer and
gossip and peer in other directions while he looks straight ahead. Tbe full
frontal pose
is
expressive of a self-sufficient, lonely pride and of vulnera
bility, the latter quality heightened by the hands hanging limply
at
his
sides. The unblinking gaze, resigned
and
withdrawn, seems to see through
and beyond the viewer, and yet, the passivity has a certain air of confron
tation as well.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, in their essay on Watteau, later pub
lished in L Art au dix-huilieme siecle, made of the eighteenth-century
master the precursor of the modern artist in the fine, the disinterested
sense, the modern artist in pursuit of an ideal, despising money, carele
ss
of
the morrow, leading a hazardous a bohemian . existence 7whose
ill health, melancholy, and, eventually, misanthropy left their imprint on
his work, for all the beauty of
the amber light that plays about his fingers.
The commedia dell'arte players of Watteau's canvases become, accarding
to Romantic legend, lyrical personages,
no
longer real. This f course is
Watteau th rough nineteenth cen tury eyes that saw in the paintings
a
world
beyond and in the arti st hirnself a Romantic befare his time, an inaccurate
conception and thoroughly tainted by the biographical fallacy but powerful
and long-lived: Giraud begins his
Pierrot Lunaire by
dreaming of a
theatre de chambre/Dont Breughel peindrait
les
volets (the Breughel of
Dulle Griet,
surely?) ,/ Shakespeare,
les
pales palais,
lEt
Watteau, les fonds
couleur d'ambre .
Other Pierrot-incarnations after the eighteenth-century playactors in
Watteau's sunlit canvases went into the making of Giraud's moonstruck
poet, induding the nouveau Pierrot created by the famous Parisian
pantomime artist Jean-Gaspard, called Baptiste, Deburau (1796-1846) at
the Thetre des Funambules, the Deburau subsequently of Jean-Louis
Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis.' Deburau changed the traditional
costume, leaving off the frilled white ruff and donning instead a black skull-
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SUSAN YOUENS
eap, and, more important, altered the familiar eharaeterizations of the
prankish buffoon or
the melaneholy and lovesiek suitor by adding elements
of
perversion,
of
macabre and violent actions committed y an insouciant,
jaded, detaehed, ironie ereature, no longer naive. Baudelaire wrote
of
hirn in his study De l'Essenee du rire et generalement du eomique dans
les arts plastiques as a mysterious creature, pale as the
IDoon
supple
and mute as a serpent. 9 Giraud, who wrote three essays
on
Baudelaire's
poetry published in the
Jeune Revue Litteraire
in 1881, would surely have
known both Baudelaire's essay and Deburau. Certainly Baudelaire's influ
enee is evident in mueh
of
Giraud's poetry: the spleen, grotesquerie, alle
gories
of
the Poet and the World, the fascination with death and vice, entire
borrowed phrases and images, have their souree in
Les F eurs du mal.
Deburau's Pierrot quickly found its way into written theatre, both
lighthearted farees such as Pierrot Posthume: Arlequinade en un aete
et en vers by Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), first performed at the
Theatre du Vaudeville on Oetober 4, 1847, and, later, the bizarre mime
eomedies of the Belle Epoque. Despite the suggestively maeabre title,
Gautier's play
is
an amusing pasquinade but there are hints
of
the later
moondrunk ereature: in a monologue in scene iv, Pierrot speaks of Colom
bine's disquiet when she discovers his true nature after their
marriage
Elle s'inquietait de mes ehants la lune, /De mes moyens de vivre et de
chereher fortu ne. Almost forty years before Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire the
down has
a ready
become a nocturnal prowler. Later, the Parisian artist and
earicaturist Adolphe Willette (1857- 1926) made of Pierrot an even more
sophisticated deseendant of the earlier
dandies-Giraud
refers to Willette
in the thirty-eighth poem of Pierrot Lunaire Brosseur de lune :
Un
tres pale rayon de lune/Sur
le
dos de son habit noir,iPierrot-Willette sort
e soir /Pour aller en bonne fortune (Hartleben omits the topieal-nation
a istie referenee in his translation). Theodore de Banville (1823-1891) also
sang the newly-transformed Pierrot's praise in his poem Au Pierrot de
Willette, written in 1884, the same year that Pierrot Lunaire appeared:
Cher Pierrot, qui d'un clin d'oeil
Me mentre tout ce qui m'aime,
J'aime ta joie, et ton dueil
Meme
Taime ton regard de feu,
Ta bravoure et ton coeur mle,
Bien que tu sembles un peu
Ple.
L
In
1888, Willette founded a short-lived weekly artistie and satirieal jour
nal in Paris ealled
e
Pierrot (the last issue appeared on 20 March 1891).
In his pen-and-ink drawings of the motto figure, he alternated between
TH
TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNA RE
0
a Pierrot blane dressed in the traditional white-smoeked eostume and
a Pierrot nair, who combines the white
Tuff
floury make-up, skull
eap, and slippers of older Pierrots with blaek evening dress, half Parisian
sophisticate and half eommedia down. For the frontispieee of the first
issue
on
6 July 1888, both the Pierrot blane and Willette's
Pierrot
noir
are dubbed chevaliers du Clair de
Lune
by a bare-breasted
woman,
her
scepter ornamented
with
acrescent moon, who seems a
debased, cafe-concert descendant of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the
People. The journal is filled with poetry, farces, miniature dramas about
the commedia characters, induding works in which Giraud's influence
is
apparent La Ballade des Pierrots
Morts
by Maurice Guillemot,
a moonlight poem in three
dizains
and an
Invoi
(sie) begins with
apolar
scene,
Sur les fonds blemis du ciel boreal.
Les nuits de Noel, quand la lune est claire,
Les Pierrots dHunts, fils de l'Ideal.
Montent des tombeaux au pays polaire.
I
reminiscent of the ninth poem, Pierrot Polaire, in
Pierrot Lunaire
Pierrots like Giraud's wreak havoc in other late nineteenth century
works
as
weil. Joris-Karl Huysmans eollaborated with the writer Leon
Hennique and an artist named Jules Cheret on a drama, part pantomime
action, part written dialogue, entitled Pierrot sceptique, printed in
1881, in which Pierrot is utterly unaffected by the death of his wife and
runs
off
with the femme de carton Therese when his tailor's skeleton
is discovered in his
doset.
Willette in e Pierrot illustrated an adver
tisement for a pantomime, Paul Margueritte's Pierrot assassin de sa
fernrne in which Sarah Bernhardt played the leading role in 1883 at
the Trocadero. But the dosest kin to Giraud's Pierrot lunaire is Verlaine's
mad, phosphorescent specter
of
a Pierrot (1868, published in 1882),
a figure unlike the better-known Pierrot of
Pantomime
in Fetes galan-
tes (1869). There, he is a gaily irreverent glutton and nonchalant jester
whose pranks lighten the overall gentle melancholy of the volume, but in
the lesser-known sonnet, he is a death's-head figure, his blouse a winding
sheet, a personification of the inmost terrors of the death-obsessed soul.
Avec le bruit d'un vol d'oiseaux de nuit qui passe,
Ses manches blanches font vaguement par l'espace
Des signes fous auxquels personne ne repond.
Ses yeux sont deux grands trous ou rampe du phosphore
Et la farine rend plus effroyable encore
Sa face exsangue aux nez pointu de moribond. 1 S
Giraud's Pierrot is less horrifie of countenance, but his mad gestures
and violent actions fill fifty poems, not one. The hallucinatory mayhem
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SUSAN YOUENS
is gentled, however, rendered in pastels by a poet seemingly incapable
of a forcefulness of expression
to
match the content and images of his
poetry.
Pierrot Lunaire was the first of three Pierrot works by the Belgian
poet and literary critic Jean Heurtaut, born in Louvain
on
23 June
186
and died in Brussels on
26
December 1929. The second was
Pierrot
Narcisse (1887), averse play in alexandrines which Giraud described on
the title page as a songe d'hiver, comedie fiabesque, and the third and
last, published in 1898, was Heros et Pierrots. In
Pierrot
Narcisse,
the clown, long an egocentric narcissist, falls in love with his own reflec
tion in the mirror, recalling the forty-seventh poem of Pierrot Lunaire,
Le miro ir. There, Pierrot looks in the mirror and laughs to see his
reflection crowned, coiffe, by the crescent moon. In the rhyming dedi
cation to uPierrot Narcisse/' iraud writes that Pierrot, a creature "sans
profession, would be his lifelong shadow:
Voici bien trcis ans et demi
Que j'ai rirne "Pierrot Lunaire."
Je suis eneore ton ami:
e'est
vraiment
extraordinaire.
e est pourquoi, - puisque e'est mon sort,
Captif de la rime et
du nombre,
D'avoir Pierrot jusqu'a la mort
A cte du mai,
comme une
ombre
HeurtautiGiraud's memoirs, published the year he died in 1929, are
entitled
Les souvenirs d'un autrecontemplation
not only
of
another and
younger self, but a fabled alter ego whose artistic tribulations and escapades
could be separated from its creator in much the same fashion as Schu
mann's
troupe
of
F1orestan, Eusebius, and Magister Raro. Pierrot removes
his mask to reveal Albert Giraud who in turn strips
off his mask to reveal
a shadowy figure named Heurtaut about whom we know very little.
We
do
know, from Giraud's own testimony, that
Pierrot Lunaire
is
the poetic record of his rebellion against and return to those Parnassian
ideals which he had earlier condemned:
Petits rapsodes impeccables, ennemies de la passion et I'eloquence, cherehant
I'absolue beaute dans la ligne et dans la couleur, pipeurs de rirnes et de metres.
impersonnels par necessite, originaux par imitation, gonfIes d'erudition,
pedante, indechiffrables comme des sphinx.
7
Only a few years after writing this tirade, Giraud was hirnself concerned
with line and meter, the imitation of past masters and forms-fifty rondels
in a row-, and ingenious rhymes. His first volume as a penitent Parnassian
returned to the fold is divided between a smaller number of pastel or beau
tifully jewelled landscapes, purely Iyrical evocations- the great purpie and
THE TEXTS OF PI RROT LUNA RE 103
gold birds of Decor, the clouds like celestial fish with fins of gold,
pearl, and ivory in Les Nuages, the fireflies sprinkled across the ladies'
gowns in the fete galante of Souper sur
I'eau
- and the gruesome,
macabre images that predominate. Pierrot drills hole in the screaming
Cassander's skulI, an executioner strides about with a dripping basket
full of decapitated heads, a tubercular moon oozes white blood, the sun
opens up its veins and red blood stains the sky, Pierrot quakes in terror
beneath a giant scimitar-horror piled upon horror in a crescendo through
out the volume, relieved only periodically by images of unalloyed beauty.
And yet, the power of these images
is
weakened,
at
times negated entirely
by
Giraud's flat, paIlid, remote tone, an unemotionaI narrative manner,
dry and distanced that
is
often
at
variance with the subject. f the gap
between tone and content were ironic, the matter would be different, but
Giraud, unlike his much greater contemporary and Pierrot-puppeteer Jules
Laforgue, was no master of irony.
Hartleben utterly transforms Giraud's poetry for the better-immea
surably better. lt
is
a rare occurrence when a translation transcends its
source, when literature of less than the first rank
is
elevated to a con
siderably higher level through the intermediary of the translator but
Pierrot lunaire
in Hartleben's German
is
one of those rare instances. It
is
as if Giraud's rondels were a draft in one language for Hartleben's
fin
ished work in another . Hartleben surpassed his own original works by far
with
Pierrot lunaire the
erotic comedies, the charming but inconsequential
Iyric verse, the satires, and the single tragedy, famous in its day, are not
nearly its
equal.
He worked
on
the translations for six years, and, in a
letter
to
a friend and fellow writer Otto Julius Bierbaum, said that he
labored so hard on this task that many of the poems existed in three or
four differen t versions.
Freu mich sehr. dass Ihnen die Rondels
so
gut gefallen Es sind aber auch in
der That wundervolle Sachen. Ich kann das sagen, weil sie wirklich nicht
von mir sind. Albert Giraud ist ein lebender Belgier. Seine Sachen sind bei
Lacombeez in Brussel erscheinen.
Allerdings-von diesen bersetzungen gehrt viel mir. Ich habe vielfach
berhaupt nicht "bersetzt," sondern nur ein
Motiv aus
dem franzsischen
Gedichte genommen und darber meins geschrieben . Ob das "erlaubt" ist oder
nicht, ist mir schnuppe, wenn nur was dabei herauskommt. Ich "arbeite" an
dieser Sammlung seit 1886, also sechs Jahre. Immer wieder bin ich mit zher
Liebe daran gegangen, manches ist drei-, viermal gedichtet. Ich hoffe also,
dass die Verse wirklich nicht den Eindruck
von
bersetzungen machen. 9
Significantly, Ha rtleben says of Giraud only, Er ist ein lebender Belgier.
He abstains from any overt criticism of the poet, but the nature of his
translations- the fact that he often took only a motif or an image from the
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SU$AN YOUENS
original and freely exercised his license to transform utterly the tone and
style-constitutean implicit negative judgment of Giraud.
With the exception of two brief poems from Heros et Pierrots this
w s
Hartleben's last translation, and that is to be regretted. He was a
brilliant translator far more gifted at that difficult metier than he was
either in original prose or poetry. Curiously, the distinctive mannerisms
and methods by which he transformed Giraud's poems are not to be found
so brilliantly employed in his own works. Giraud's poetry was certainly a
challenge: the Belgian poet's earlier criticisms of Parnassian poetry are
true of his own verse (the displacement of personal dissatisfactions onto
some other person
or
group of people is hardly uncommon). t is ironie
that poetry with so much blood and violence and pillage should be so
intrinsically bloodless, even when he is depicting a fantastic and horrifying
scene. The slimy, pulpy creatures that grip the poet's ship in the sea of
absinthe and sink it (number twenty-two,
Absinthe ),
the vampire-like
and monstrous black butterflies in search of blood to drink (number nine
teen, "PapilIons
Noir )
appear and disappear seemingly without a trace of
surprise, horror, cr strang emotion
of
any kind on Giraud's cr Pierrot's
part. Hartleben breaks up the even flow
of
Giraud's flat and preternaturally
calm recitation with fragmented phrases, exclamations, and questions ,
much more vivid language expressive of stronger feelings . In order to do
so, he sometimes omits entirely one
of
Giraud's images and substitutes a
more colorful one
of
his own invention-in place of the slimy eddy
or
backwash into which the poet's ship sinks in the last stanza
of Absinthe,
Hartleben introduces a giant arm that suddenly appears from nowhere
attached to what or whom? and knocks the mast off the ship, sink
ing it
iraud
Mais soudain ma barque est etreinte
Par des poulpes visqueux et mous:
Au
milieu d'un gluant remous
Je
disparais, sans une plainte,
Dans une immense mer d absinthe.
Hartleben
Doch wehe
Was
umklammert jah
Mein Schiff'?-Polypen, widrig, klebrig
Ein
Riesenarm zerknickt den
ast-
Und ohne Klagelaut versink
ich
Im
Ozeane
des
Absinths .
TH T XTSOF
PIERROT LU
A RE
105
The change of verb tense from past and imperfect in Giraud to present
tense in Hartleben's translation, along with the breathless, agitated , tele
graphie exclamations in the German, make the bizarre scene come alive.
Similarly, in the thirty-eighth poem, "Brosseur de
lune,
when Pierrot
first discovers the speck of moonlight on the back of his coat, Giraud
writes in his customary flat, narrative tone, "Mais sa toilette l'importune."
which Hartleben in Der Mondfleck" translates as "Pltzlich- strt ihn
was an seinem Anzug
.
Later in the same poem, when Giraud in a
matter-of-fact way says, 11 s'imagine que c'est une /Tache de pltre
. .
.
,
Hartleben, typically for hirn, breaks the line up into jagged fragments
. .
.
" Warte denkt er: das ist so ein Gipsfleck Wischt und wischt,
doch
bringt ihn nicht herunter ". Giraud's almost unvarying octosyllabic lines
become in Hartleben a variety of different poetic meters and line lengths,
ranging from the trochaic tetrameters and pentameters of " Rot und
Wei ss
, wi
th its masterly use of enjambement , beautifully unlike Giraud's
seemingly random use of the same gesture,
Ern
st
und
schweigend streck t die
Gebietenn
Nach Pierrot die
ge
schmeidig
en
Hnde aus.
Langsam whlt sie die Finger
in
s lockige
Haar und presst sein fieberndes Haupt an
Kalte
, feste starrende
Br
s
te
.
to the brief, breathless lines of Gebet an Pierrot" :
Pierrot Mein Lachen
Hab ich verlernt
Das Bild des Glanzes
Zerflosst - Zerfloss
Hartleben often repeats key words or phrases in this emphatic and Expres
sionistic way, unlike Giraud, who seems to shy away from bold accentua
tion of any kind. The German translator also transforms Giraud's frequent
similes into metaphors
or
anthropomorphizing allegorical embodiments:
"the moon
s
a washerwoman" father
than
"camme une
lavandiere."
With similes, the poet shows his hand, interposing an analogy that comes
from outside, rather than seeming to originate within the poem itself, and
therefore lessens the confrontationa l effect of the image.
Hartleben translated all fifty poems in Giraud 's order, but Schoenberg
of course set only twenty-one, less than half. The following table shows
which works from the complete Pierrot Lunaire Schoenberg selected and
their placement in the song cycle.
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106
Hartleben s translation
1 Ein BOhne
2. Feerie
3. DerDandy
4. Schweres Loos
5. Eine blasse
Wscherin
6. Serenade
7 Der Koch
8 Harlequinade
9. Nordpolfahrt
10
Colombine
11 Harlequin
12 Die Wolken
13 Mein Bruder
Raub
15 Herbst
16. Mondestrunken
17. Galgenlied
18
Selbstmord
19
Nacht
20. Sonnen-Ende
21
Der kranke
Mond
22. Absinth
23. Kpfe Kpfe
24. Enthauptung
25. Rot und Weiss
26 VaIse de
Chopin
27. Die Kirche
28. Madonna
29. Rote Messe
30. Die Kreuze
31. Gebet an Pierrot
32. Die Violine
33. Abend
34. Heimweh
35.
0
alter
uf
t
36. Heimfahrt
37. Pantomime
38. Der Mondfleck
39. Das Alphabet
40. Das heilige Weiss
41. Morgen
42. Parodie
43. Moquerie
44. Die Laterne
45. Gemeinheit
46. Landschaft
47. Im Spiegel
48. Souper
49. Die Estrade
50. Bhmischer Krystall
SUSAN YOUENS
Schoenberg sOp.21
3.
Der
Dandy
4. Eine blasse Wscherin
19 Serenade
2. Colombine
10
Raub
I. Mondestrunken
12 Galgenlied
8. Nacht
7. Der kranke Mond
13
Enthauptung
5. Valse de Chopin
6. Madonna
11 Rote Messe
14
Die Kreuze
9. Gebet an Pierrot
15 Heimweh
21.
0
alter Duft
20. Heimfahrt
18 Der Mondfleck
17 Parodie
16
. Gemeinheit
THE
TEXTS OF
PIERROT LUN IRE
107
Sehoenberg ruthlessly pruned and re-arranged his chosen poems in order
to
ereate three smalI, interrelated eydes from a non-eydic source. The fact
that Giraud's eolleetion has little apparent strueture
or
sehematic organiza
tion, beyond the existenee of an introduction and eondusion that frame
the fifty poems, is perhaps deliberate, the poetie eoneomitant of an interiar
world that contains all sorts of images and notions jumbled together. The
raw material from whieh poetry, erafted and fashioned and molded,
eventually emerges is not itself logical and ordered, but is instead marked
by the obsessive, disordered repetition of eertain themes and images and
by the diseontinuity eommon in mueh of twentieth eentury art.
Sehoenberg's purpose was different and required a different and
apparent strueture. In the first group of seven poems, Sehoenberg first
presents the poet revelling in the souree of poetry,
or
moonlight , rejecting
the
past-symbolized
by erystal-, then growing swiftly more disturbed ,
his mind more and more diseased and disordered. In the seeond
and
eentral
eyde, night deseends,
and
terror, death, poetie martyrdom and sterility
dose in, and in the final eyde, he beeomes reeonciled with his past, with
poetie tradition, and returns horne.
I
1. Mondestrunken 11 8. Nacht
111
15. Heimweh
2. Colombine 9 Gebet
an
Pierrot
16. Gemeinheit
3.
Der
Dandy 10. Raub
17
. Parodie
4. Eine blasse Wscherin
11
. Rote Messe
18. Der
Mondfleck
5. Valse de Chopin
12.
Galgenlied
19. Serenade
6.
Madonna 13. Enthauptung
20. Heimfahrt
7. Der kranke Mond 14 Die Kreuze
21.
alter Duft
To create the three smaller eydes, he omitted those poems that were ex
traneous to his tale. The first two poems, "Eine Bhne" and "Feerie, "
have no mention
of
Pierrot, the moon,
or
poetry, and the referenees to
Breughel, Shakespeare, and Watteau in Eine
Bhne would draw the
foeus away from the hallueinatory inner world, outward into the reader's
historical past. Furthermore,
Feerie
is a daylight poem, while Op.
21
is
a work that begins by night, sinks into even blaeker and gloomier realms
in the eentral eyde, and only gradually emerges into the light of dawn in
the last two poems,
Heimfahrt
and 0 alter Duft. The other daylight
poems, such as "Morgen" (no. 41),
Ein rosig blasser. feiner Staub
Tanzt frh am Morgen auf den Grsern.
Leis
klingt ein Singen
hell
und
klar,
Gleich fernem Himmelschor
and "Feerie"
are
omitted. In "Morgen," the central figure is Cassander,
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1 8
5USAN YUENS
the plump, boorish bourgeois, who pursues a sweet, young maiden through
the flowers in a beautiful daylit setting, with no mention
of
Pierrot.
Ein zartes. junges Dirnehen flieht
Scheu vor
dem
lsternen Cassander.
Die weissen Rckchen streifen leicht
Die Blumen und es hebt sich duftend
Ein
rosig blasser. feiner Staub.
The focus in the complete poems shifts away from the moonstruc k
Pierrot rather frequently, but not so in the song cyde. Schoenberg thus
omits the three poems in which Harlequin is the central or the only figure:
number eight, "Harlequinade"; number eleven, "Harlequin"; and number
thirty-nine, "Das Alphabet," in which "lieutenant" Harlequin leads the
regiment of the vari-colored alphabet. The two beautifully Iyrical commedia
scenas, without a trace of grotesquerie
or
terror, are also omitted: number
forty-eight, Souper, with its moonlit gondola for Pierrot and Colom
bine, who has fireflies in her hair and withered violets strewn at her feet,
and number thirty-seven, "Pantomime," in which Pierrot sings aserenade
from the bushes with the blue Italian sky shining overhead. Pier rot
is
simply
an element
of
the decor in these two static, if delightful, tableaux; he
is
not
the central figure.
If Pierrot or the moon or poetry are missing, the poem
is
not induded
in Op. 21. The fourth poem, "Schweres Laos," or "Deconvenue" in
Giraud,
is
certainly fanciful and grotesque- like a Breughel parable paint
ing on gluttony, The Land
o
ockaigne perhaps, with its brutish louts
deprived of their roasts, tarts, and quince jellies, while insects with blue
wing-sheaths thump
at
the rose windows-, and the commedia characters
are
there-a
group of Gilles pull grimaces in the corner-, but Pierrot
is
not, neither are the moon and poetry, so the poem
is
exduded from the
cyde. Other commedia figures, Cassander and Columbine, only appear
in Schoenberg's Op. 21 when they react to something Pierrot does: Cassan
der screaming in protest as Pierrot drills a hole in his head and smokes
Turkish tobacco through his human pipe. In
Gebet
an
Pierrot,
someone
in mourning ( Schwarz weht die Flagge /Mir nun vom
Mast )
pleads with
Pierrot to restore light and laughter: one way to interpret the poem
is to
infer that Pierrot, who wished to deflower Colombine in the tenth poem
(the second in Op . 21), has done so, and that she now pleads for an im
possible return to innocence and joy, in one sense, to the commedia tradi
tion in which she
is
courted and pursued but never won.
None of the landscape
or
nature poems lacking either Pierrot
or
the
moon are included, among them, number twelve, "Die Wolken" in which
the evening douds, with their tints of ivory, gold, and pearl, are captured
by the Night in nets; number thirty-three, Abend,
with its melancholy
TH
T XTS OF PIERROT LUNAIRE
109
white storks against a black background, the last rays of light shining from
a "hoffnungsleere Sonne"; and number forty-six, "Landschaft,"
in
which
black birds cry out, a cold, sad light shines feebly through the grayish
atmosphere, and the sun, yellow-red like a great egg , sinks. All three
poems have to do with sunset or the approach of night, three of five such
poems
in Pierrot Lunaire
The others are number nineteen, "Nacht,"
which Schoenberg set and number twenty,
Sonnen
-
Ende,
in which the
sun's blood flows out over the douds and the land, dyeing both red, as
an exhausted young voluptuary, an unknown, unnamed creature, also
dies. Similarly, in number fifteen, Herbst, an unnamed and terrified
figure trembles in the midst of an autumn landscape of withered, brown
leaves Hartleben transformed Giraud' s peculiarly French concept
of spleen (the title of the poem) into the peculiarly German Angst.
Of the sunset poems, Schoenberg chose the most violent and bizarre,
Nacht, with its swarm of giant, black butterflies that kill the sun's rays
and omits the four other sunset poems. Nacht furthermore has signifi
cant links with the end of Schoenberg's cyde: in Nacht, a scent arises
from the depths, killing remembrance and accompanying the fall of utter
darkness,
Aus
dem
Qualm verlorner Tiefen
Steigt ein Duft, Errinrung mordend
while in the last poem, a scent from olden times returns to bewitch the
senses: 0 alter Duft aus Mrchenzeit,
Berauschest
wieder
meine Sinne
Poetry, the moon, the poet: those crucial themes in Op.
21
are all
introduced in the first song of Schoenberg's cyde (the sixteenth poem of
Giraud's and Hartleben's complete volume).
Den Wein,
den man mit
Augen trinkt,
Giesst Nachts
der Mond in
Wogen nieder,
Und eine Springflut berschwimmt
Den stillen Horizont.
Gelste, schauerlich
und
sss,
Durchschwimmen ohne Zahl
die
Fluten
Den Wein,
den man mit
Augen trinkt,
Giesst Nachts der Mond
in
Wogen nieder.
er Dichter,
den
die Andacht treibt,
Berauscht sich an
dem
heilgen Tranke
Gen Himmel wendet
er
verzckt
Das Haupt
und
taumelnd saugt
und
schlrft
er
Den Wein, den man mit Augen trinkt.
The moonlight is sacramental wine, an intoxicant that the
Poet
greedily
drinks
mit
Augen. Wave after wave of moonlight floods the still hori
zon with numberless desires and emotions until Pierrot/Poet is drunk
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11
SUSAN YUENS
and ecstatic. The moonlight is the source of poetry, filled with "Gelste"
that are both dreadful and sweet, and the poet steeps hirnself in that light
until he is dizzied and staggers to and fro, his senses reeling. The Rimbaud
esque perception that a poet must experience all sorts of desires, to the
point of saturation, "dereglement" and beyond, leads to unexpected and
undesirable results, no t the making of a poet but very nearly his undoing.
In every detail of "Mondestrunken, " there are links to other poems
that Schoenberg set in Op. 21, words, images, and themes: the wine is a
holy drink (Giraud speaks of Ie poete religieuxlDe l'etrange absinthe
se soille ) and poetry a mystical, religious experience art as a
religion whose adherents
at
times imitate, parody
or
invert the rituals and
symbols of Catholicism and whose
holy
figures" - Poetry and the Poet
suffer the martyrdom and death of Christ-figures . In the sixth poem,
Madonna (the twenty-eighth poem in Giraud/Hartleben), the poet begs
the
mother
of all sorrows" (the moon?), with her bleeding breasts like two
red eyes- the poetic leitmotif of eyes again- , to mount the altar of his
verses and there hold the body of her son (the poet?) before mankind's
averted gaze, and in Rote Messe," Pierrot celebrates a ghastly Com
munion by ripping the heart
out
of
his breast and offering this new Host,
the sacramental chalice that contains poetry,
at
the altar. Madonna and
Rote
Messe" are paired in the complete
Pierrot Lunaire
but separated
in the cycle: "Madonna" is in the first cyc1e "Rote Messe" in the second.
Madonna
is
linked to the image of the gentle maiden from the heavens
("sanfte Magd des Himmels," an expression that evokes both the Moon
and the Virgin Mary), but the moon-madonna who earlier washed "cloths
woven from light" (poems formed from the source of poetry?)
is
now
wounded and cradles her dead son. With the second cycle, the moonlight
disappears, and P ierrot becomes poet-priest-martyr.
When a swarm of giant moths extinguish the sun in
Nacht,
dark-
ness falls. The entire central cycle
is
largely devoid
of
light,
Finstre, schwarze Riesenfalter
Tteten der Sonne Glanz.
("Nacht")
Das Bild des Glanzes
Zerfloss-Zerfloss
("Gebet an Pierrot")
Durch die
Finsterniss
("Raub")
Durch schmerzensdunkle Nacht . . .
("Enthauptung")
THE TEXTS OF PI RROT LUNA RE
111
and the poems are shot through with references to the colors black and
red and to blood-no longer an analogy, as in "Valse de Chopin.
schwarze Riesenfalter
("Nacht")
Schwarz weht die Flagge .
("Gebet an Pierrot")
Rote, frstliche Rubine
Blutge Tropfen alten
Ruhmes
.
( Raub )
Auf einem schwarzen
Seiden kissen
.
("Enthauptung")
Die triefend rote Hostie:
Sein Herz-in blutgen Fingern
("Rote Messe")
Dran die
Dichter
stumm
verbluten,
.
Prunkend
in des
Blutes Scharlach
.
Eine rote Konigskrone.
("Die Kreuze")
The blood-red rubies in the tombs are "Iike eyes," recalling the Madon
na's wounded breasts, "wie Augen, rot und
offen -in
each, a bloodshot
accusatory stare mutely confronts the guilty plunderer and anarchist.
The earlier poem also foreshadows Pierro 's and the poets' wounds
shortly after in the central section, when the blasphemer of religion
becomes hirnself a martyr. The blood and violence escalate in a terrifying
crescendo throughout the cycle, beginning with a monstrous nightfall
and Colombine's bitter prayer.
The thirteenth and fourteenth poems,
Enthauptung
(no. 24 in
the complete collection)
and
Die
Kreuze" (no. 39), exemplify Schoen
berg's perception of close relationships between rondels separated in the
complete Giraud-Hartleben volume. The metaphor of poems as holy
crosses upon which mute, Christ-like poets bleed, their bodies pierced
by sword strokes
and
their heads crowned with the setting sun's blood
red glow,
is
preceded in Op. 21 by a poem in which Pierrot paces in terror
before an eerie, hallucinatory vision of a siekle moon, metamorphosed
into a Turkish scimitar
on
a black silk cushion.
f
the moon
is
the fons
et origo
of poetry in
Pierrot lunaire
then perhaps the scimitar represents
the immense power
of
incipient poetry-the exotie weapon rests, not
yet in use, on the black cushion of an otherwise unilluminated night
sky- , its death-dealing potential and the poe 's terror
at
such a dread
realization. "Die Kreuze"
is
the consequence
of
"Enthauptung": the
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112
SCSA:\
YOCE:\S
"schwelgten Schwerter" of
Die
Kreuze" are multiples cf the single
Turkish seimitar of number rhirteen,
and
rhe feared deeapitarion in Ent
hauptung
is followed by Tot das
Haupt
at the elose of the second
eycle. Mind
and
intellection (the head) are dead, killed by rebellion
and
the martyrdom that ensues.
When night falls ( Nacht ), a
Pandora's
Box of il1s descends vvith
the darkness, the host of evils analogous to the flood of Gelste in
the waves of moonlight at the beginning of the first cycle. Throughout
the second cyc1e Pierrot is besieged by woes incurred in the first seven
poems:
Gebet an
Pierrot,
the second poem of the central segment,
is
the response to the seeond poem of the first eycle, the consequences of
his desire in HColombine." In
Raub,
he and his companions (the
eonternporaneous radical poets who have similarly swept tradition off
their dressing tables?) attempt to plunder the past
of
its jewels, tom
from their context, but without success; in 'Rote Messe, " he tears off
the garments
of
one priestly order and dedicates himself to another as
eelebrant and Host alike; in "Galgenli ed, " he sings
of
the special inti
maey between poets and death and in both Enthauptung and Die
Kreuze"
of
the agony
of
poetic creation. Here, Pierrot reaps the can
sequenees
of
three aetions in the first group: the draught
of
moonlight
so greedily imbibed in Mondestrunken, the seduetion so desperately
desired in Colombine, and the disguise assumed in "'Der Dandy
when he rejeets the past.
With the beginning
of
the third eycle, the tone
of
the poetry changes.
Pierrot hears a crystalline chiming sigh the word "crystalli ne
is an
indieation that the sound comes from the past and, hearing
it,
for
gets his sorrow: Da vergisst Pierrot die Trauermienenl -Hartleben
emphasizes the infusion
of
new hope and meaning with an exuberance
not found in the more restrained Giraud. The floods
of
moonlight
eine Springflut" in number one and "lichtmeers Fluten in number
fifteen-banished from the second cycle reappear, and the time
of
artistic
rebellion and sterility ( durch seines erzens Wste -the heart, the
seat
of
the emotions, not the head) is over. Hartleben obviously under
stood the artist's relationship to the past in Giraud's volume and under
scores it with a signifieant change
of
wording in his translation:
Comme un doux soupir de cristal
L'ame des vieilles comedies
Se plaint des allures raidies
Du lent Pierrot sentimental.
Lieblich klagend-ein kristallnes Seufzen
Aus Italiens alter Pantomime,
Klingts herber: wie Pierrot so holzern,
So modern sentimental geworden.
THE TEXTS OF
PIERROT
UiS fRE
113
The note of mingled lamentation and accusation ( klagend )-the oid
pantomime
has missed the clown and mourned his
absence-is
placed
first, and the recurring
k
consonants lend a klingendes') quality
lacking in the original Freneh. t
is
the identification of Pierrot's spiritual
and poetic maladies with modernism, however, that distinguishes Hart
leben's diamond from Giraud's du1ler are
and
brings the allegory into
sharper foeus at this, the turning point of the work.
In the final group of songs, the poet-Pierrot, no longer co\vering
beneath the moon in fear, masters poetry
and
uses it to affeet others.
In
Gemeinheit ", he drills open Cassander's bourgeois skull, despite the
Philistine's piercing screams
of
protest, stuffs Turkish tobacco into the
grisly opening, and calmly smokes away. Just as the moon, the souree
of
poetry,
is
an intoxicant in the first poem
of
Op. 21, so Pierrot's
tobacco exotic and Turkish, like the scimitar in HEnthauptu ng"
acts on the reluctant Cassander like an intoxicant, fiHing the brain with
fumes
of
poetry. Again in ~ ' S e r e n a d e , Pierrot plays upon the outraged
and un\villing Cassander, the insensitive buffoon his favorite target anee
more. The Picasso-esque clown's sadness and awkwardness, the mien
of
a stork standing on one leg, are in contrast to the delicacy and sureness
with whieh he plays the viola. The grotesque and gigamic
bow-Giraud's
shocking, violent imagery?-is necessary because ordinary instruments
cannot move such as Cassander; only the exaggeration of grotesquerie
can force them to take notice and reaet.
After Pierrot hears the
VOlee
of the pas and remembers his origins
in Heimweh, number flfteen, there follows a group of poems in which
he must accept, however sadly or resentfully at times, his identity as a
poet. Only then can he begin the journey to his homeland in
Heim
fahrt, the next-to-Iast lied in Op. 21. In number eighteen, Der Mond
fleck," he sets out to seek that which others wha are not poets seek,
fortune and adventure, but he discovers that his black garb (black again)
is indelibly stained with moonlight. Try though he might to rid himself
of
the spot, he cannot he is rnarked as a poet. Significantly, the SPOt
is on the back
of
his garment, where he can only see t with difficulty,
but others can easily see it. He does not, one notices, attempt to remove
the garment itself.
Onee Pierrot arrives back horne in the last poem, 0 alter Duft
aus Mrchenzeit, " the "G elst e, schauerlich und sss"
of
number one
become Ein narriseh Heer von Schelmerein" that vanishes in the breeze,
and the Duft, Errinrung mordend of number eight
is
replaced by the
alter Duft aus Mrchenzeit." The dawn of Heimfahrt turns to day,
and the poet's Unmut disappears through a sunlit window, the oppo
sire of the
Gelste
that descend with the rays of rnoonlight at the
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4
SUSAN YOCE?\S
beginning of the tale. The fairy-tale props
of
the journey horne to Ber
gamo-a ray
of
moonlight as a rudder and a waterlily as a boat-belong
to a ~ ' M r c h e n z e i t ,
an
enchanted past that Pierrot reclaims. Ein Mond
strahl -poetry-is the rudder or guide by which he returns to die liebe
Welt
and to happiness; for the first time, the real warId, sunlit and
beautiful, shines forth in all its glory, no longer hideously transformed
by moonlight misused.
In conclusion. Op.
21
is, at its core, the narration of
an
artist's
rejection
of and
reconciliation with his past,
of
the spiritual violence
that
comes from the attempt to obliterate tradition
and
therefore to
deny who
and
what one iso Looking back at the time when Schoenberg
was working on the composition of
Pierrot
l u n a i r e ~ the significance seerns
both
personal
and
historieal,
an
exemplum
of
the artistic rebellion against
tradition before World
War land
a foreshadowing
of
the chaos
of
the
war itself
and
the longing for order
that
followed. For Schoenberg, who
told his students Bach is the father
of
us all, who set
Nacht
the
beginning
of
the nightfall
of
anarchy-as a passacaglia, awareness
of
the
past and it5 synthesis with the newer musical vocabularies of
achanging
world were seemingly always present, but, for all the perils
of
biographi
cal fallacy, there might have been a more personal meaning
to
the alle
gorical journey
of
Pierrot Poet-Artist-Composer as weIl. Giraud's pi
grimage apparently ended with the acceptance
of
the Parnassian creed,
but Schoenberg's journey
nach
Bergamo, zur Heimat was far more
intensive, ending only with his death.1 Il
Notes
'Albert Giraud,
Pierrot lunaire,
trans. by Otto Erich Hartleben (Beriin: Der Verlag
Deutscher Phantasten, 1893).
"'Bhmischer Krystall"
Ein Strahl des Mondes, wohl verschlossen
Im Glass von bhmischem Krystall,
Ein Kleinod, wundersam und selten,
Ist dieses versetolle Buch.
Ich hab mich als Pierrot verkleidet
Ihr die ich liebe, bring ich
dar
Den Strahl des Mondes, wohl verschlossen
Im Glas von bhmischem Krystall.
In
diesem schimmernden Symbole
Liegt Alles, was ich hab und bin.
Gleichwie Pierrot im bleichen Schade ,
Trag ich in Herz und Sinnen nur
Den
Strahl des
Mondes-wohl
verschlossen.
JS
ee
Allardyce Nicoll,
The World
01
Harlequin: A Critica Study
of
the Commedia
deli' Arte
(Cambridge University Press, 1963),
p.
87.
THE TEXTS OF
PIERROT LUNA RE
115
See
Robert F. Swrey, Pierrot: A CriricaI HislOry of a Mask (Princeton University
Press,
1980).
'Nicoll,
ap. eil.,
p.
93.
For abrief period dming the firs( decade of the eighteenth
century, Watteau was the apprentice
of
the Parisian painter Claude Gillot, a member
of the Royal Academy. After GHlot introduced Watteau
to
the theatrical world, the Italian
troupe in Paris was thereafter one of his most frequent subjects, induding the
Artequin
galant, Sous
un
habit de Mezzetin
(1717?)
in the Wallace Collection,
L 'amour
au
thilitre
italien (circa
1714) in
Berlin, a painting in the Charlottenburg Castle in Berlin
of
a group
of
Italian comedians at rest on the stone terrace of achateau,
Le Docleur irOuvanl sa
filIe en feste teste avec son amant
of 1706,
Les ja/oux
(1712?), depicIing Pierrot and
five mher mascherare,
Le Parlie quarree
(1712),
and others.
'There is a marked resemblance between the face of Gilles in Gil es and Waneau's face
in a drawing
by
Fraw;:ois Boucher a fter a lost e l f ~ p o r t r a i t by Waneau.
7Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,
French Eighteenth Century Fainrers N.Y.:
Cornell
University Press,
1981,
first ed. Phaidon Books
1948),
trans. by Robin lronside, p.
38.
~ S e e
Jules Gabriel Janin,
Deburau: Histoire du Thelitre d qualre sous
(Paris: Librairie
des Bibliophiles, 1881, firs[ ediEion, 1832). Janin describes the characrerization of Pierrot
as Deburau's greatest triumph, and he indudes the complete scenario for a highly complex
entenainment in ten scenes entitled Ma Mere ['Oie ou Arlequin et l'oeuf d'or : Pamo
mirne-Arlequinade-Feerie a grand spectade. See also Pierrm and
Fin-de-Siec e"
bv
A.
G. Lehmann in
Romantic Mythologies,
ed. by lan Fletcher (London: Routledge .
Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 209-223, also
The
Sad Clown: some nates on a nineteenth-cenwry
myth by Francis Haskeil in
French .Nineteenth Century Painting and Literarure,
ed.
by
Ulrich Finke (Manchester University Press,
1972), p. 2f.
9Charles Baudelaire, L'Essence du rire et generalemem du comique dans
fes
arts
plastiques" from
Oeuvres completes: Curiosires esthetiques,
eG. by Jacques Creper (Paris:
Louis Conard, 1923), p. 389. Baudelaire contrasts the Pierrot of Deburau wirh an EogEsh
pantomime performance at the Theatre des Varietes that made a great impression
On hirn.
'VThe first of the articles on Baudelaire appeared on
15
September
1881.
Adolphe Willette, eu
Pierrot
1857-19? (Paris: H. Floury, ed., 1919).
: ~ T h e o d o r e de Banville,
Dans a Fournaise: Dernieres Poesies
(Paris: Bibliotheque
Charpentier,
1892),
pp.
124-125.
iJEach of Guillemot's three dixains and the envoi, a cinquain, ends with the line,
Ils
sautent en
rand
sous la lune blanche. The pack of phantom Pierrors in Guillernot's
poem is compared in the second stanza to a fIock of swans, and their gathering is called
ce
pale sabbat cliehes of literary Par is
in
the Decadence.
Paris: Librairie ancienne et moderne,
1881.
Hennique and Huysmans Wrote this
comedie as a mixture
of
indications for the stage sets, descriptions
of
the pantomime
action, and actual dialogue.
In
"Sonnets et autres vers" from Jadis in Oeuvres poetiques comp etes, ed. by
Y.-G.
Le Dantec, ed. revised by Jacques Borel (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1962), pp. 320-32l.
~ B r u s s e l s : Veuve Monnorn, 1887.
Heros et Pierrots
was published in a volume that also
contained the earlier Pierrot works,
Pierrot lunaire, Pierrot
Narcisse," and
Les Dernieres
eres (Paris: Collection des Poetes frano;ais a 'etranger,
1898).
t
'See Luden Christophe,
Albert Giraud: Son Oeuvre
er
son remps
(Brussels: Palais
des Academies, 1960), p. 16.
~ H a n s
Landsberg, Otto Erich Hartieben
in Moderne Essays,
ed. by Landsberg
(Berline: Gose Tetzlaf f, 1905). Auch in Hanleben wohnen zwei Seelen: die eine zum
Spott und zur Karikat ur die andere , von der Ahnung dunkler Tiefen erfllt
He has almost nothing to say about Pierrot lunaire. Cesar Flaischlen, in
OUo
Erich Hart
leben: Beitrag zu einer GeschiChte der modernen Dichwng
(Berlin:
S.
Fischer, 1896), p. 18.
Flaischlen, a friend of Hartleben's, a fellow poet, and the editor of the literary periodical
Pan,
obviously could not begin
w
fathom PierrOl
lunaire
and says on y,
Das
Ganze
aber ist ein Buch, nur
fr-Verrckte
(p. 44).
Otta Erich Hartleben,
Briefe an Freunde,
ed. by Franz Ferdinand Heitmueller (BerEn:
S. Fischer, 1912), pp. 162-163.