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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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96

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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98

$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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'00

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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1 2

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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104

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.

7/26/2019 You Ens November 1984

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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

7/26/2019 You Ens November 1984

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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.