Youens, Excavating an Allegory Pierrot Lunaire Texts (JASI 8-2, 1984)

Frontispiece by Adolphe Willette, one of the founders of the Chat Noir in Mont-martre, for the first issue of the artistic journal Le Pierrot, Jre Anmffe, no. /, 6 Jui//et 1888, with the caption, "La Parisienne: Pierro! blanc, Pierro! noir, je vous fais che-valiers du Clair de Lune; a//ez, boycottez et amusez-moi!"

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EXCAVATING AN ALLEGORY: THE TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNAIRE

Susan Youens

For his song cycle Pierro! Lunaire, Op. 21 of 1912, Schoenberg selected twenty-one poems from the fifty rondels in Pierro! Lunaire (1884) by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud, a collection translated into German in 1891-1892 by the poet and playwright Otto Erich Hartleben (1864-1905). ' Through his choice and arrangement of those twenty-one poems, Schoenberg carved from Giraud's collection of harlequinades the tripartite tale of a creative artist's rebellion and frenzied "dereglement des sens," the sterility and despair that follow, and, finally, the journey home. 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 zuriick, Schwach dammert schon im Osten Der griine Horizont --Der Mondstrahl ist das Ruder.

This allegory of a modern artist is present within Giraud's and Hartle-ben's Pierro! 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 source of poetry at the beginning of Op. 21.

Schoenberg never, to my knowledge, explained or discussed the ra-tionale of his choice and ordering of the twenty-one poems in the cycle, but it is easy to recognize in Op. 21 a more meaningful order than the

96 SUSAN YOUENS

(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 to 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 larger source its principal "idea" or "con~ cept," purifying it and liberating it from the unrelated images that cluster about and hide it from view.

The "moonstruck Pierrot" of the title is the prototype of an artist, including Giraud himself: in the last poem, "Crista! de Boheme," he writes that he wears Pierrot's garb and is a Pierrot-" Je suisun Pierrot costume" or, in Hartleben's translation, with its changed nuances, "lch hab mich als Pierrot verkleidet". 2 Pierrots were endemic everywhere in late nineteenth/ 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 ma/heureux 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 Pierro! Lunaire, assumed a sadistic and sinister guise, so to find him 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 dell'arte. Pierrot's most distant ancestor was Pulcinella, a character created in Naples who, chameleon-like, played many roles 3 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

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THE TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNAIRE 97

A sketch of Albert Giraud (born Albert Kayenbergh in Louvain, 1860-1929) from Camille Hanlet, Les Ecrivains Belges Contemporains de langue francaise 1800-1946, vol. 1 (Liege: H. Dessain, 1946), p. 145. Giraud initially hoped to become a concert pianist.

Photograph of Otto Erich Hart/eben from the frontispiece to Otto Erich Hartle ben: Briefe an Freunde, vol. 2, ed. by Franz Ferdinand Heitmueller (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1912).

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Gilles by Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), in the Louvre, one of the painter's last works. Some art historians, including Donald Posner in Antoine Watteau (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984), p. 270, conjecture that the painting was intended as a shopsign for the actor Belloni, who opened a cafe after his retirement from the foires.

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THE TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNA IRE 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 Ia Lune" by a certain Monsieur Anne de Fatouville (died ca. 1700), performed several times between 1684 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: 5 here, as in Ar/equin, Pierrot et Scapin of 1716, and, most strikingly, in Gilles (another name for 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 him, that appealed so strongly to nineteenth-century France). In Gilles, he is larger-than-life, larger than the other comedians clustered in back of his feet and legs, who seem to leer and gossip and peer in other directions while he looks straight ahead. The 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, 6 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-huitieme 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, careless of the morrow, leading a hazardous ... a bohemian ... existence"' whose 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, according to Romantic legend, "lyrical personages," no longer real. This of course is Watteau through nineteenth century eyes that saw in the paintings "a world beyond" and in the artist himself a Romantic before 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 Breugliel peindrait les volets (the Breughel of Dulle Grief, surely?),/Shakespeare, les pales palais, /Et 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, including the "nouveau Pierrot" created by the famous Parisian pantomime artist J ean-Gaspard, called Baptiste, Deburau (1796-1846) at the Theatre des Funambules, the Deburau subsequently of Jean-Louis Barrault in "Les Enfants du Paradis. " 8 Deburau changed the traditional costume, leaving off the frilled white ruff and donning instead a black skull-

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cap, and, more important, altered the familiar characterizations of the prankish buffoon or the melancholy and lovesick suitor by adding elements of perversion, of macabre and violent actions committed by an insouciant, jaded, detached, ironic creature, no longer naive. Baudelaire wrote of him in his study "De !'Essence du rire et generalement du comique dans les arts plastiques" as a mysterious creature, "pale as the moon ... supple and mute as a serpent.'" 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-ence is evident in much 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 source in Les F/eurs du mal.

Deburau's Pierrot quickly found its way into written theatre, both lighthearted farces such as "Pierrot Posthume: Arlequinade en un acte et en vers" by Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), first performed at the Theatre du Vaudeville on October 4, 1847, and, later, the bizarre mime-comedies of the Belle Epoque. Despite the suggestively macabre title, Gautier's play is an amusing pasquinade, but there are hints of the later moondrunk creature: 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 chants a Ia June,/ De mes moyens de vivre et de chercher fortune." Almost forty years before Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire, the clown has already become a nocturnal prowler. Later, the Parisian artist and caricaturist Adolphe Willette ( 1857 -1926)" made of Pierrot an even more sophisticated descendant of the earlier dandies-Giraud refers to Willette in the thirty-eighth poem of Pierrot Lunaire, "Brosseur de June": "Un tn!s pale rayon de June I Sur le dos de son habit noir ,I Pierrot-Willette sort Ie soir I Pour aller en bonne fortune" (Hartle ben omits the topical-nation-alistic reference 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 montre tout ce qui m'aime, J'aime ta joie, et ton dueil

Meme! J'aime ton regard de feu, Ta bravoure et ton coeur mille, Bien que tu sembles un peu

Pille." In 1888, Willette founded a short-lived weekly artistic and satirical jo!lr-nal in Paris called Le Pierrot (the last issue appeared on 20 March 1891). In his pen-and-ink drawings of the motto figure, he alternated between


a "Pierrot blanc" dressed in the traditional white-smocked costume and a "Pierrot noir," who combines the white ruff, floury make-up, skull-cap, and slippers of older Pierrots with black evening dress, half Parisian sophisticate and half commedia clown. For the frontispiece of the first issue on 6 July 1888, both the "Pierro! blanc" and Willette's "Pierrot noir" are dubbed "chevaliers du Clair de Lune" by a bare-breasted woman, her scepter ornamented with a crescent 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, including 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 (sic) begins with a polar scene,

Sur les fonds blemis du ciel boreal, Les nuits de Noel, quand Ia June est claire, Les Pierrots defunts, fils de !'Ideal, Montent des tom beaux au pays polaire."

reminiscent of the ninth poem, "Pierrot Polaire," in Pierrot Lunaire. Pierrots like Giraud's wreak havoc in other late nineteenth century

works as well. Joris-Karl Huysmans collaborated with the writer Leon Hennique and an artist named Jules Cheret on a drama, part pantomime action, part written dialogue, entitled "Pierro! sceptique," printed in 1881, in which Pierro! 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 closet. 1 ' Willette in Le Pierrot illustrated an adver-tisement for a pantomime, Paul Margueritte's "Pierro! assassin de sa femme" in which Sarah Bernhardt played the leading role in 1883 at the Trocadero. But the closest kin to Giraud's Pierrot /unaire is Verlaine's mad, phosphorescent specter of a "Pierrot" (1868, published in 1882), a figure unlike the better-known Pierrot of "Pantomime" in Fetes go/an-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 Ia farine rend plus effroyable encore Sa face exsangue aux nez pointu de moribond. 1 '

Giraud's Pierrot is less horrific of countenance, but his mad gestures and violent actions fill fifty poems, not one. The hallucinatory mayhem

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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 frrst of three Pierrot works by the Belgian poet and literary critic Jean Heurtaut, born in Louvain on 23 June 1860 and died in Brussels on 26 December 1929. The second was "Pierrot Narcisse" (1887), a verse 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. ' 6 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 miroir." There, Pierrot looks in the mirror and laughs to see his reflection crowned, "coiffe," by the crescent moon. In the rhyming dedi-cation to "Pierrot Narcisse," Giraud writes that Pierrot, a creature "sans profession," would be his lifelong shadow:

Voici bien trois ans et demi Que j'ai rime "Pierrot Lunaire." Je suis encore ton ami: C'est vraiment extraordinaire. C'est pourquoi, - puisque c'est mon sort, Captif de Ia rime et du nombre, D'avoir Pierrot jusqu'a Ia mort A cote du moi, comme une ombre ...

Heurtaut/Giraud's memoirs, published the year he died in 1929, are entitled Les souvenirs d'un autre-contemplation 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 Florestan, 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 Ia passion et !'eloquence, cherchant l'absolue beaute dans Ia ligne et dans Ia couleur, pipeurs de rimes et de metres, irnpersonnels par necessite, originaux par imitation, gonfles d erudition, pCdante, indechiffrables comme des sphinx.''

Only a few years after writing this tirade, Giraud was himself 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 lyrical evocations-the great purple and

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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 l'eau"-and the gruesome, macabre images that predominate. Pierrot drills hole in the screaming Cassander's skull, 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, pallid, remote tone, an unemotional narrative manner, dry and distanced that is often at variance with the subject. If the gap between tone and content were ironic, the matter would be different, but Giraud, unlike his much greater contemporary and Pierrot-puppeteer Jules Lafargue, was no master of irony.

Hartleben utterly transforms Giraud's poetry for the better-immea-surably better. It 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 /unaire 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 lyric 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 different versions.

Freu mich sehr, dass Ihnen die Rondels so gut gefallen! Es sind aber auch in der That wundervolle Sachen. Ich kann das sagen, wei! sie wirklich nicht von mir sind. Albert Giraud ist ein lebender Belgier. Seine Sachen sind bei Lacombeez in Brussel erscheinen.

Allerdings-von diesen Obersetzungen gehOrt vie! mir. Ich babe vielfach Oberhaupt nicht "Obersetzt," sondern nur ein Motiv aus dem franzOsischen Gedichte genommen und darOber 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 til.her Liebe daran gegangen, manches ist drei-, viermal gedichtet. Ich hoffe also, dass die Verse wirklich nicht den Eindruck von Obersetzungen mach en."

Significantly, Hartle ben 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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original and freely exercised his license to transform utterly the tone and style-constitute an implicit negative judgment of Giraud.

With the exception of two brief poems from Heros et Pierrots, this was 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). It is ironic 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, "Papillons Noir") appear and disappear seemingly without a trace of surprise, horror, or strong emotion of any kind on Giraud's or 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:

Giraud Mais soudain rna 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. Hart/eben Doch wehe! Was umklammert jah Mein Schiff?-Polypen, widrig, klebrig! Ein Riesenarm zerknickt den Mast-Und ohne Klagelaut versink ich Im Ozeane des Absinths.

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THE TEXTS OF PlERROT LUNA IRE lOS

The change of verb tense from past and imperfect in Giraud to present tense in Hartleben's translation, along with the breathless, agitated, tele-graphic exclamations in the German, make the bizarre scene come alive. Similarly, in the thirty-eighth poem, "Brosseur de June," 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 !'importune," which Hartleben in "Der Mondfleck" translates as "PIOtzlich-stOrt ibn was an seinem Anzug ... ". Later in the same poem, when Giraud in a matter-of-fact way says, "II s'imagine que c'est une/Tache de phitre ... ", Hartleben, typically for him, breaks the line up into jagged fragments .. . "Warte! denkt er: das ist so ein Gipsfleck! /Wischt und wischt, doch-bringt ibn 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 Weiss," with its masterly use of enjambement, beautifully unlike Giraud's seemingly random use of the same gesture,

Ernst und schweigend streckt die Gebieterin Nach Pierro! die geschmeidigen Hande aus. Langsam wfihlt sie die Finger ins lockige Haar und presst sein fieberndes Haupt an Kalte, feste starrende Brtiste.

to the brief, breathless lines of "Gebet an Pierrot": Pierro!! Mein Lachen Hab ich verlernt! Das Bild des Glanzes Zerfloss!-Zertloss!

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 is a washerwoman" rather than "comme 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 confrontational 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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Han/eben's translation I. Ein Bilhne 2. Feerie 3. Der Dandy 4. Schweres Loos S. Eine blasse Wascherin 6. Serenade 7. Der Koch 8. Harlequinade 9. Nordpolfahrt

10. Colombine II. Harlequin 12. Die Wolken 13. Mein Bruder 14. Raub IS. Herbst 16. Mondestrunken 17. Galgenlied 18. Selbstmord 19. Nacht 20. Sonnen-Ende 21. Der kranke Mond 22. Absinth 23. KOpfe!KOpfe! 24. Enthauptung 25. Rot und Weiss 26. Y alse de Chopin 27. Die Kirche 28. Madonna 29. Rote Messe 30. Die Kreuze 31. Gebet an Pierro! 32. Die Yioline 33. Abend 34. Heimweh 3S. 0 alter Duft 36. Heimfahrt 37. Pantomime 38. Der Mondfleck 39. Das Alphabet 40. Das heilige Weiss 41. Morgen 42. Parodie 43. Moquerie 44. Die Lateme 4S. Gemeinheit! 46. Landschaft 47. lm Spiegel 48. Souper 49. Die Estrade SO. BOhmischer Krystall

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Schoenberg'sOp. 21

3. Der Dandy

4. Eine blasse Wl!scherin 19. Serenade

2. Colombine

10. Raub

I. Mondestrunken 12. Galgenlied

8. Nacht

7. Der kranke Mood

13. Enthauptung

S. Y alse de Chopin

6. Madonna II. Rote Messe 14. Die Kreuze 9. Gebel an Pierro!

IS. Heimweh 21. 0 alter Duft 20. Heimfahrt

18. Der Mondfleck

17. Parodie

16. Gerneinheit!

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Schoenberg ruthlessly pruned and re-arranged his chosen poems in order to create three small, interrelated cycles from a non-cyclic source. The fact that Giraud's collection has little apparent structure or schematic organiza-tion, beyond the existence of an introduction and conclusion that frame the fifty poems, is perhaps deliberate, the poetic concomitant of an interior world that contains all sorts of images and notions jumbled together. The raw material from which poetry, crafted and fashioned and molded, eventually emerges is not itself logical and ordered, but is instead marked by the obsessive, disordered repetition of certain themes and images and by the discontinuity common in much of twentieth century art.

Schoenberg's purpose was different and required a different and apparent structure. In the first group of seven poems, Schoenberg first presents the poet revelling in the source of poetry, or moonlight, rejecting the past-symbolized by crystal-, then growing swiftly more disturbed, his mind more and more diseased and disordered. In the second and central cycle, night descends, and terror, death, poetic martyrdom and sterility close in, and in the final cycle, he becomes reconciled with his past, with poetic tradition, and returns horne. I. I. Mondestrunken II. 8. Nacht III. 15. Heimweh

2. Colombine 9. Gebet an Pierrot 16. Gemeinheit! 3. Der Dandy 10. Raub 17. Parodie 4. Eine blasse Wlischerin II. 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. 0 alter Duft

To create the three smaller cycles, he omitted those poems that were ex-traneous to his tale. The first two poems, "Eine Biihne" and "Feerie," have no mention of Pierrot, the moon, or poetry, and the references to Breughel, Shakespeare, and Watteau in "Eine Biihne" would draw the focus away from the hallucinatory 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 blacker and gloomier realms in the central cycle, and only gradually emerges into the light of dawn in the last two poems, "Heirnfahrt" and "0 alter Duft." The other daylight poems, such as "Morgen" (no. 41),

Ein rosig blasser, feiner Staub Tanzt frllh am Morgen auf den Grllsem. Leis klingt ein Singen, heU und klar, Gleich femem Himmelschor.

and "Feerie" are omitted. In "Morgen," the central figure is Cassander,

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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 Dirnchen flieht Scheu vor dem !Usternen Cassander. Die weissen R6ckchen streifen Ieicht Die Blumen-und es hebt sich duftend Ein rosig blasser, feiner Staub.

The focus in the complete poems shifts away from the "moonstruck Pierrot" rather frequently, but not so in the song cycle. 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 lyrical 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 a serenade from the bushes with the blue Italian sky shining overhead. Pierro! 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 included in Op. 21. The fourth poem, "Schweres Loos," or "Deconvenue" in Giraud, is certainly fanciful and grotesque-like a Breughel parable paint-ing on gluttony, The Land of Cockaigne 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 excluded from the cycle. 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 F1agge/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 clouds, with their tints of ivory, gold, and pearl, are captured by the Night in nets; number thirty-three, "Abend," with its melancholy

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THE TEXTS OF PIERROT L UJVAIRE 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 clouds 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 cycle: 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 Marchenzeit,

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 cycle (the sixteenth poem of Giraud's and Hartle ben's complete volume).

Den Wein, den man mit Augen trinkt, Giesst Nachts der Mond in Wogen nieder, Und eine Springflut Oberschwimmt Den stillen Horizont. Geliiste, schauerlich und sOss, Durchschwimmen ohne Zahl die Fluten! Den Wein, den man mit Augen trinkt, Giesst Nachts der Mond in Wogen nieder. Der Dichter, den die Andacht treibt, Berauscht sich an dem heilgen Tranke Gen Himmel wendet er verzOckt Das Haupt und taume1nd saugt und schliirft 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

110 SUSAN YOUENS

and ecstatic. The moonlight is the source of poetry, filled with "Gelilste" that are both dreadful and sweet, and the poet steeps himself 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, not 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 "le poete religieux/De l'etrange absinthe se sofile ... ") 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 frrst cycle, "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 Pierrot 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 TOteten der Sonne Glanz. ("Nacht")

Das Bild des Glanzes Zerfloss-Zerfloss! ("Gebet an Pierrot")

Durch die Finsterniss-("Raub")

Durch schmerzensdunk1e Nacht ... ("Enthauptung")

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THE TEXTS OF PlERROT LUNAlRE Ill

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 F1agge ... ("Gebet an Pierrot") Rote, fllrstliche Rubine Blutge Tropfen alten Ruhmes ... ("Raub") Auf einem schwarzen Seidenkissen ... ("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 "like eyes," recalling the Madon-na's wounded breasts, "wie Augen, rotund offen"-in each, a bloodshot accusatory stare mutely confronts the guilty plunderer and anarchist. The earlier poem also foreshadows Pierrot's and the poets' wounds shortly after in the central section, when the blasphemer of religion becomes himself 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 sickle moon, metamorphosed into a Turkish scimitar on a black silk cushion. If the moon is the fans et origo of poetry in Pierro! lunaire, then perhaps the scimitar represents the immense power of incipient poetry-the exotic weapon rests, not yet in use, on the black cushion of an otherwise unilluminated night sky-, its death-dealing potential and the poet's terror at such a dread realization. "Die Kreuze" is the consequence of "Enthauptung": the

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"schwelgten Schwerter" of "Die Kreuze" are multiples of the single Turkish scimitar of number thirteen, and the feared decapitation in "Ent-hauptung" is followed by "Tot das Haupt" at the close of the second cycle. Mind and intellection (the head) are "dead," killed by rebellion and the martyrdom that ensues.

When night falls ("Nacht"), a Pandora's Box of ills descends with the darkness, the host of evils analogous to the flood of "Geliiste" in the waves of moonlight at the beginning of the first cycle. Throughout the second cycle, Pierro! is besieged by woes incurred in the first seven poems: "Gebet an Pierro!," the second poem of the central segment, is the response to the second poem of the first cycle, the consequences of his desire in "Colombine." In "Raub," he and his companions (the contemporaneous 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 celebrant and Host alike; in "Galgenlied," he sings of the special inti-macy between poets and death and in both "Enthauptung" and "Die Kreuze" of the agony of poetic creation. Here, Pierrot reaps the con-sequences of three actions in the first group: the draught of moonlight so greedily imbibed in "Mondestrunken," the seduction so desperately desired in "Colombine," and the disguise assumed in "Der Dandy" when he rejects the past.

With the beginning of the third cycle, the tone of the poetry changes. Pierro! hears a crystalline chiming sigh ... the word "crystalline" is an indication that the sound comes from the past ... and, hearing it, for-gets his sorrow: "Da vergisst Pierro! die Trauermienen! "-Hartle ben 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 Herzens WU.ste"-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 significant change of wording in his translation:

Comme un doux soupir de crista! L 'arne des vieilles comedies Se plaint des allures raidies Du lent Pierrot sentimental. Lieblich klagend-ein kristallnes Seufzen Aus Italiens alter Pantomime, Klingts heriiber: wie Pierro! so holzern, So modern sentimental geworden.

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The note of mingled lamentation and accusation ("klagend")-the "old 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 French. It is the identification of Pierrot's spiritual and poetic maladies with modernism, however, that distinguishes Hart-leben's diamond from Giraud's duller ore and brings the allegory into sharper focus at this, the turning point of the work.

In the final group of songs, the poet-Pierrot, no longer cowering beneath the moon in fear, masters poetry and uses it to affect 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 source of poetry, is an intoxicant in the first poem of Op. 21, so Pierrot's tobacco ... exotic and Turkish, like the scimitar in "Enthauptung" ... acts on the reluctant Cassander like an intoxicant, filling the brain with fumes of poetry. Again in "Serenade," Pierro! plays upon the outraged and unwilling Cassander, the insensitive buffoon his favorite target once 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 which he plays the viola. The grotesque and gigantic 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 react.

After Pierrot hears the voice of the past and remembers his origins in "Heimweh," number fifteen, 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-last lied in Op. 21. In number eighteen, "Der Mond-fleck," he sets out to seek that which others who 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 marked as a poet. Significantly, the spot is on the back of his garment, where he can only see it with difficulty, but others can easily see it. He does not, one notices, attempt to remove the garment itself.

Once Pierrot arrives back home in the last poem, "0 alter Duft aus Marchenzeit," the "Geliiste, schauerlich und suss" of number one become "Ein narrisch Heer von Schelmerein" that vanishes in the breeze, and the "Duft, Errinrung mordend" of number eight is replaced by the "alter Duft aus Marchenzeit." The dawn of "Heimfahrt" turns to day, and the poet's "Unmut" disappears through a sunlit window, the oppo-site of the "Geliiste" that descend with the rays of moonlight at the

114 SUSAN YOUENS

beginning of the tale. The fairy-tale props of the journey home to Ber-gamo-a ray of moonlight as a rudder and a waterlily as a boat-belong to a "Mlirchenzeit," an enchanted past that Pierrot reclaims. "Ein Mond-strahl"-poetry-is the rudder or guide by which he returns to "die Iiebe Welt" and to happiness; for the first time, the real world, 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 is. Looking back at the time when Schoenberg was working on the composition of Pierrot lunaire, the significance seems both personal and historical, an exemplum of the artistic rebellion against tradition before World War I and a foreshadowing of the chaos of the war itself and the longing for order that followed. For Schoenberg, whe 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 its synthesis with the newer musical vocabularies of a changing 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 well. Giraud's pil-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.

Notes

'Albert Giraud, Pierrot lunaire, trans. by Otto Erich Hartleben (Berlin: Der Verlag Deutscher Phantasten, 1893).

2''BOhmischer Krystall''

Ein Strahl des Mondes, wohl verschlossen Im Glass von bOhmischem Krystall, Ein Kleinod, wundersam und selten, 1st dieses versetoUe Buch. Ich hab mich als Pierro! verkleidet-Ihr, die ich Iiebe, bring ich dar Den Strahl des Mondes, wohl verschlossen Im Glas von bOhmischem Krystall. In diesem schimmemden Symbole Liegt Alles, was ich hab und bin. Gleichwie Pierrot im bleichen Schadel, Trag ich in Herz und Sinnen nur Den Strahl des Mondes-wohl verschlossen.

'See Allardyce Nicoll, The World of Harlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia dell' Arte (Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 87.

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'See Robert F. Storey, Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask (Princeton University Press, 1980).

'Nicoll, op. cit., p. 93. For a brief period during the first decade of the eighteenth century, Watteau was the apprentice of the Parisian painter Claude Gillot, a member of the Royal Academy. After Gillot introduced Watteau to the theatrical world, the Italian troupe in Paris was thereafter one of his most frequent subjects, including the Arlequin galant, Sous un habit de Mezzetin (1717?) in the Wallace Collection, L 'amour au theatre 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 a chateau, Le Docteur trouvant sa fi/le en teste d teste avec son amant of 1706, Les jaloux (17127), depicting Pierro! and five other mascherate, Le Partie quam!e (1712), and others.

'There is a marked resemblance between the face of Gilles in Gilles and Watteau 's face in a drawing by Fran~ois Boucher after a lost self-portrait by Watteau.

'Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, French Eighteenth Century Painters (N.Y.: CorneD University Press, 1981, first ed. Phaidon Books 1948), trans. by Robin Ironside, p. 38.

'See Jules Gabriel Janin, Deburau: Histoire du Theatre a quatre sous (Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1881, first edition, 1832). Janin describes the characterization of Pierro! as Deburau's greatest triumph, and he includes the complete scenario for a highly complex entertainment in ten scenes entitled "Ma Mere l'Oie ou Arlequin et l'oeuf d'or": Panto-mime-Arlequinade-Feerie a grand spectacle." See also "Pierro! and Fin-de-Siec/e" by A. G. Lehmann in Romantic Mythologies, ed. by tan Fletcher (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 209-223, also "The Sad Clown: some notes on a nineteenth-century myth" by Francis Haskell in French Nineteenth Century Painting and Literature, ed. by Ulrich Finke (Manchester University Press, 1972), p. 2f.

'Charles Baudelaire, "L'Essence du rire et generalement du comique dans Jes arts plastiques" from Oeuvres completes: Curiosites estht!tiques, ed. by Jacques Crepe! (Paris: Louis Conard, 1923), p. 389. Baudelaire contrasts the Pierro! of Deburau with an English pantomime performance at the Theatre des Yarietes that made a great impression on him.

"1be first of the articles on Baudelaire appeared on 15 September 1881. "Adolphe Willette, Feu Pierro! 1857-19? (Paris: H. Floury, ed., 1919). "Theodore de BanviUe, Dans Ia Fournaise: Dernieres Poesies (Paris: Bibliotheque-

Charpentier, 1892), pp. 124-125. 11Each of Guillemot's three dixains and the envoi, a cinquain, ends with the line,

"lis sautent en rond sous Ia June blanche." The pack of phantom Pierrots in Guillemot's poem is compared in the second stanza to a flock of swans, and their gathering is caUed "ce pale sabbat" ... cliches of literary Paris in the Decadence.

14Paris: 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 completes, ed. by Y.-G. Le Dantec, ed. revised by Jacques Borel (Paris: Editions GaUimard, 1962), pp. 320-321.

"Brussels: Veuve Monnom, 1887. Heros et Pierrots was published in a volume that also contained the earlier Pierrot works, Pierrot lunaire, "Pierrot Narcisse," and Les Demieres Fetes (Paris: Collection des Poetes fran~ais a l'etranger, 1898).

"See Lucien Christophe, Albert Giraud: Son Oeuvre et son temps (Brussels: Palais des Academies, 1960), p. 16.

"Hans Landsberg, "Otto Erich Hartleben" in Moderne Essays, ed. by Landsberg (Berline: Gose & Tetzlaff, 1905). "Auch in Hartleben wohnen zwei Seelen: die eine zum Spot! und zur Karikatur ... die andere, von der Ahnung dunkler Tiefen erfilllt .... " He has almost nothing to say about Pierrot lunaire. Cesar Flaischlen, in Otto Erich Hart-/eben: Beitrag zu einer Geschichte der modernen Dichtung (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1896), p. 18. Flaischlen, a friend of Hartleben's, a feUow poet, and the editor of the literary periodical Pan, obviously could not begin to fathom Pierrot lunaire and says only, "Das Ganze aber ist ein Buch, nur fiir-Verriickte" (p. 44).

"Otto Erich Hartleben, Briefe an Freunde, ed. by Franz Ferdinand Heitmueller (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1912), pp. 162-163.

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Documents

Youens, Excavating an Allegory Pierrot Lunaire Texts (JASI 8-2, 1984)