Pierrot lunaire (book)
Encyclopedia
Pierrot lunaire: rondels bergamasques (Moonstruck Pierrot: bergamask rondels) is a collection of fifty poems published in 1884 by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud
(born Emile Albert Kayenburgh), who is usually associated with the Symbolist Movement
. The protagonist of the cycle is Pierrot
, the comic servant of the French Commedia dell'Arte
and, later, of Parisian boulevard pantomime
. The early 19th-century Romantics
, Théophile Gautier
most notably, had been drawn to the figure by his Chaplinesque
pluckiness and pathos, and by the end of the century, especially in the hands of the Symbolists and Decadents
, Pierrot had evolved into an alter-ego of the artist, particularly of the so-called poète maudit
. He became the subject of numerous compositions, theatrical, literary, musical, and graphic.
Giraud's collection is remarkable in several respects. It is among the most dense and imaginatively sustained works in the Pierrot canon, eclipsing by the sheer number of its poems Jules Laforgue
's celebrated Imitation of Our Lady the Moon
(1886). Its poems have been set to music by an unusually high number of composers (see Musical, balletic, and pictorial settings below), including one, Arnold Schoenberg
, who derived from it one of the landmark masterpieces of the 20th century. Finally, it is noteworthy for the number of themes of the fin-de-siècle—which is to say, of Symbolism, the Decadence, and early Modernism
—that it elaborates within the tight confines of Giraud's verse form:
, a form he admired in the work of the Parnassians, especially of Théodore de Banville
. (It is a "bergamask" rondel, not only because the jagged progress of the poems recalls the eponymous rustic dance
, but also because 19th-century admirers of the Commedia dell'Arte characters [or "masks"] often associated them with the Italian town of Bergamo
, from which Harlequin is said to have hailed.) Unlike many of the Symbolist poets (though certainly not all: Verlaine
, Mallarmé
, even the early Rimbaud and Laforgue, worked comfortably within strict forms), Giraud found free verse
to be anathema. He exclaimed to his friend Emile Verhaeren
, after reading the latter's Les Moines (The Monks), "What I disapprove of with horror, what angers and irritates me is your improvising disdain for verse form, your profound and vertiginous ignorance of prosody and language." Such an attitude leads the critic Robert Vilain to conclude that, while Giraud shared "the Symbolists' concern for the careful, suggestive use of language and the power of the imagination to penetrate beyond the surface tension of the here-and-now", he was equally committed to a Parnassian aesthetic. He adheres to the sparer of the rondel forms, concluding each poem with a quintet
rather than a sestet
and working within strictly observed eight-syllable lines. As is customary, each poem is restricted to two rhymes alone, one masculine
, the other feminine
, resulting in a scheme
of ABba abAB abbaA, in which the capital letters represent the refrain
s, or repeated lines. Within this austere structure, however, the language is—to use Vilain's words—"suggestive" and the imaginative penetration beneath the "here-and-now" daring and provocative.
Like Laforgue after him, Giraud uses neologisms ("Bourrèle!" ["Executioner!" or "Torturer!"]), unusual word choices ("patte" [which usually means "paw"] for Pierrot's foot), and ambiguities ("Arlequin porte un arc-en-ciel", meaning "Harlequin bears [or carries or wears] a rainbow") to enrich the fantastic atmosphere of the poems. His syntax is sometimes elliptical or fractured, as in the first line of the cycle: "Je rêve un théâtre de chambre" ("I dream a chamber theater"), instead of the usual "Je rêve d'un théâtre de chambre". And the imagery, especially in the simile
s, traffics often in the jarringly unexpected. Sometimes it is lyrically tender (clouds are "like splendid fins/Of chameleonic fish of the sky" ["The Clouds"]); sometimes it is shockingly brutal (Pierrot's thought of his "last mistress", the gallows, "is like a nail/That drunkenness drives into his head" ["The Gallows' Song"]). At its most dreamlike, it has a disturbing obscurity of reference ("sinister"—and unexplained—"black butterflies" swarm in the sky and blot out the sun ["Black Butterflies"]); at times it suspends all laws of materiality (a moonbeam penetrates the "varnished case" of a violin to caress its "soul" with its "irony"—"like a luminous white bow" ["Lunar Violin"]). The result is Dali-esque: a series of sharply etched transcriptions of proto-Surreal
visions. "With its Baroque intensity of detail and its fin de siècle aura," as Giraud's American translator writes, "Pierrot Lunaire is a work not to be forgotten."
Because the rondel is such a tightly "closed" form, each poem seems to stand as an independent unit, isolated from the other poems around it. Giraud heightens this sense of disconnection by eschewing sustained narrative, presenting Pierrot's situation as a series of stark vignette
s. Sometimes these vignettes are clustered rather coherently (as in those dealing with Pierrot-as-modern-Christ: "The Church", "Evocation", "Red Mass", and "The Crosses"), but, more often than not, they seem random in their placement (and thus may be explained, at least in part, Schoenberg's not scrupling to change their order in his song-cycle). The effect of all these structural and stylistic techniques is both comic and unsettling, as the poem "Disappointment" ("Déconvenue") suggests:
The scene is completely without context: the poem that precedes it, "Pierrot-Dandy", is about Pierrot's making up his face with moonlight; the poem that follows it, "Moon over the Wash-House", identifies the moon as a washerwoman. Nowhere else in the cycle is this party revisited; it is impossible, therefore, to understand the import of the gathering or the identity of the guests. (Are the "Gilleses" among the guests? or are they part of the entertainment? Is it Pierrot who has whimsically stolen away the viands? or is it stingy Cassander?) The frozen gestures ("their forks in their fists"), the air of blank incomprehension (shared as much by the reader as by the guests), the finicking nicety of the language ("elytra" [pl. of "elytron" = "wing-case"]) all contribute to the ambiguous black comedy
of the poem.
"arches her back", apparently in expectation of sexual pleasure ("Theater"). The meretriciously multicolored Harlequin
—"shining like a solar spectrum" ("Harlequin")—is an "artificial serpent" whose "essential goal" is "falsehood and deceit" ("Harlequinade"). An old serving-woman connives in his scheming by accepting a bribe to procure Columbine's favors ("Harlequin"). These puppets live under a sky swarming with "sinister black butterflies" that "seek blood to drink", having "extinguished the sun's glory" with their wings ("Black Butterflies"). The sun itself is nearing the end of that glory: at its setting it seems like a Roman reveler, "full of disgust", who slits his wrists and empties his blood into "filthy sewers" ("Sunset"). It is a "great sun of despair" ("The Storks").
Pierrot is of the dreaming, moonlit world. His is an enchanted interior space, in which sequestered violins are caressed by moonbeams, thereby setting their souls, "full of silence and harmony", thrumming ("Lunar Violin"). He lives there as an aloof isolato, encountering in a "sparkling polar icicle" a "Pierrot in disguise" ("Polar Pierrot") and seeking, "all along the Lethe", not Columbine the fickle woman but her ethereal floral namesakes—"pale flowers of moonbeams/Like roses of light" ("To Columbine"). The moon is, aptly, a "pale washerwoman" ("Moon over the Wash-House") whose ablutions minister chiefly to the mind. For Pierrot has lost the happy enchantments of the past: the moribund pantomimic world seems "absurd and sweet, like a lie" ("Pantomime"), and the "soul" of its old comedies, to which he sometimes mentally propels himself, with an imaginary oar of moonlight ("Pierrot's Departure"), is "like a soft crystal sigh" bemoaning its own extinction ("Nostalgia").
Now, at the end of the century, Pierrot resides in a "sad mental desert" ("Nostalgia"). He is bored and splenetic: "His strange, mad gaiety/Has flown away, like a white bird" ("Spleen"). Too often the moon seems like a "nocturnal consumptive" tossing about on the "black pillow of the skies", deceiving the "carefree lover passing by" into mistaking for "graceful rays/[Its] white and melancholy blood" ("Sick Moon"). When he cannot find relief in her customary magic—in the "strange absinthe" of her beams, this "wine that we drink with our eyes" ("Moon-Drunk")—he takes pleasure in tormenting his enemies: he makes music by drawing a bow across Cassander's pot-belly ("Pierrot's Serenade"); he bores a hole in his skull as a bowl for his pipe ("Cruel Pierrot"). (Cassander is a target because he is an "academician" ["Pantomime"], a dry-as-dust guardian of the Law.) Madness seems to be lurking at Pierrot's elbow, as when he makes up his face with moonlight ("Pierrot-Dandy"), then spends an evening trying to brush a spot of it from his black jacket ("Moon-Brusher"). At his most despairing, he is visited by thoughts of his "last mistress"—the gallows ("The Song of the Gallows"), at the end of whose rope he dangles in "his white Moon robe" ("Suicide"). That the moon, indeed, seems to connive in his extinction is suggested by its sometime appearance as "a white saber/On a somber cushion of watered silk" that threatens to come whistling down on Pierrot's neck ("Decapitation").
His consolation is that the art in which he resides will have eternal life: "Beautiful verses are great crosses/On which red Poets bleed" ("The Crosses"). The old succor of religion is replaced by that of poetry, but at a cost—and with a difference. What is summoned to "the altar of [these] verses" is not the gentle Mary but the "Madonna of Hysteria", who holds out "to the incredulous universe/[Her] Son, with his limbs already green,/His flesh sagging and decayed" ("Evocation"). To the assembled faithful, Pierrot offers his heart: "Like a red and horrible Host/For the cruel Eucharist" ("Red Mass"). The new Lamb of God is a consumptive, his Word a confession of both self-sacrifice and impotence.
In "The Alphabet", an apparent anomaly in the cycle, in which Giraud imagines himself as Harlequin, not Pierrot, the poet recalls dreaming, as a child, of "a multicolored alphabet,/In which each letter was a mask", a dream that agitates his "foolish heart" today. It is a revealing confession: an admission that the agents of his creations as an artist, the alphabet, are ideally not agents of self-expression but of self-fabrication under the mask of an Other. And this Other—Pierrot—is himself a fabrication, a mercurial puppet in a "chamber theater" of the mind ("Theater"). Pierrot lunaire offers a performance, not an expression, of the self—a fact in which much of its "modernity" resides.
published a German translation of Pierrot lunaire; he retained the rondel form of the poems, but he attempted no rhymes, altered line lengths, and made other substantive changes. Some commentators see his versions as improvements on the originals, although recent criticism has shifted somewhat in Giraud's favor. However their respective merits will eventually be judged, it was Hartleben's versions that first drew composers to the poems and that provide the texts for almost all of the settings we have. The bullet-point that follows lists early 20th-century musical settings chronologically and notes how many poems were set by each composer (all are in the Hartleben translations) and for which instruments.
The most famous of these settings is Schoenberg's atonal Thrice-Seven Poems from Albert Giraud's "Pierrot lunaire"
(1912), scored for what is now known as the Pierrot ensemble
and a Sprechstimme voice.
The importance of this work in the musical world was signaled by an homage paid by the Arnold Schoenberg Institute in Los Angeles as recently as 1987: it commissioned the settings of the remaining twenty-nine poems that Schoenberg had neglected, using his original scoring (Sprechstimme optional), by sixteen American composers—Milton Babbitt
, Leslie Bassett
, Susan Morton Blaustein
, Paul Cooper, Miriam Gideon
, John Harbison
, Donald Harris, Richard Hoffmann, Karl Kohn
, William Kraft
, Ursula Mamlok
, Steve Mosco, Marc Neikrug, Mel Powell
, Roger Reynolds
, and Leonard Rosenman
. The settings were given their premieres between 1988 and 1990 in four concerts sponsored by the Institute. (The director of the Institute, Leonard Stein, added a setting of his own to the final concert of the project.)
Schoenberg's Pierrot has kindled inspiration not only among fellow composers but also among choreographers and singer-performers. Dancers who have staged Pierrot lunaire include the Russian-born American Adolph Bolm
(1926), the American Glen Tetley
(1962), the German Marco Goecke (2010) and the French Kader Belarbi (2011). The theatrical/operatic possibilities of Schoenberg's score have been realized by at least two major ensembles: the Opera Quotannis
, which staged a version of Pierrot lunaire (with singer Christine Schadeberg) at the New School for Social Research in 1995 and, more recently, the internationally acclaimed contemporary music sextet eighth blackbird
, which premiered a "cabaret opera" dramatizing the Schoenberg cycle in 2009. Its percussionist, Matthew Duvall, played Pierrot, and, in addition to the remaining five musicians and a singer/speaker, Lucy Shelton, the production included a dancer, Elyssa Dole. The work, which will be toured in 2012 to mark the centennial of Schoenberg's composition of Pierrot lunaire, was conceived, directed, and choreographed by Mark DeChiazza. (View excerpts.)
In 2001 and 2002, the British composer Roger Marsh set all fifty French poems for a (mostly) a cappella
group of singers. Sometimes they sing in French accompanied by a narrator, whose English translations are woven into the music; sometimes they sing in both French and English; sometimes they speak the poems in both languages (in various combinations). The few songs entirely in French are intended to be glossed by action in performance. Instruments occasionally brought in, usually solo, are violin, cello, piano, organ, bells, and beatbox. The English texts were derived from literal translations of Giraud's poems by Kay Bourlier.
Giraud's original texts also stand behind the Seven Pierrot Miniatures (2010) by the Scottish composer Helen Grime
, though hers cannot be called "settings", since voice and words are absent. The seven poems she selected—"The Clouds", "Decor", "Absinthe", "Suicide", "The Church", "Sunset", and "The Harp", none used by Schoenberg—were merely "points of departure" for her suite for mixed ensemble.
The painters Paul Klee
, Theodor Werner, Marc Chagall
and Fernando Botero
have all produced a Pierrot Lunaire (in 1924, 1942, 1969, and 2007, respectively). And Pierrot Lunaire is a familiar figure in popular art: Brazilian, Italian
, and Russian rock groups have called themselves Pierrot Lunaire. The Soft Machine
, a British group, included the song "Thank You Pierrot Lunaire" in its 1969 album Volume Two. And in issue #676 of DC Comics
, Batman R.I.P.: Midnight in the House of Hurt (2008), Batman
acquired a new nemesis, who shadowed him for seven more issues: his name was Pierrot Lunaire.
Albert Giraud
Albert Giraud , was a Belgian poet who wrote in French.-Biography:Giraud was born Emile Albert Kayenbergh in Leuven, Belgium. He studied law at the University of Louvain. He left university without a degree and took up journalism and poetry...
(born Emile Albert Kayenburgh), who is usually associated with the Symbolist Movement
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
. The protagonist of the cycle is Pierrot
Pierrot
Pierrot is a stock character of pantomime and Commedia dell'Arte whose origins are in the late 17th-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne; the name is a hypocorism of Pierre , via the suffix -ot. His character in postmodern popular culture—in...
, the comic servant of the French Commedia dell'Arte
Commedia dell'arte
Commedia dell'arte is a form of theatre characterized by masked "types" which began in Italy in the 16th century, and was responsible for the advent of the actress and improvised performances based on sketches or scenarios. The closest translation of the name is "comedy of craft"; it is shortened...
and, later, of Parisian boulevard pantomime
Mime
The word mime is used to refer to a mime artist who uses a theatrical medium or performance art involving the acting out of a story through body motions without use of speech.Mime may also refer to:* Mime, an alternative word for lip sync...
. The early 19th-century Romantics
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
, Théophile Gautier
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....
most notably, had been drawn to the figure by his Chaplinesque
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
pluckiness and pathos, and by the end of the century, especially in the hands of the Symbolists and Decadents
Decadent movement
The Decadent movement was a late 19th century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe. It flourished in France, but also had devotees in England and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.-Overview:...
, Pierrot had evolved into an alter-ego of the artist, particularly of the so-called poète maudit
Poète maudit
A poète maudit is a poet living a life outside or against society. Abuse of drugs and alcohol, insanity, crime, violence, and in general any societal sin, often resulting in an early death are typical elements of the biography of a poète maudit....
. He became the subject of numerous compositions, theatrical, literary, musical, and graphic.
Giraud's collection is remarkable in several respects. It is among the most dense and imaginatively sustained works in the Pierrot canon, eclipsing by the sheer number of its poems Jules Laforgue
Jules Laforgue
Jules Laforgue was an innovative Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist".-Life:...
's celebrated Imitation of Our Lady the Moon
L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune
L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune is a collection of poems by French poet Jules Laforgue. It is dedicated to Gustave Kahn and "to the memory of little Salammbô, priestess of Tanit." It contains the following twenty-two poems:* "Un mot au Soleil pour commencer"* "Litanies des premiers quartiers...
(1886). Its poems have been set to music by an unusually high number of composers (see Musical, balletic, and pictorial settings below), including one, Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...
, who derived from it one of the landmark masterpieces of the 20th century. Finally, it is noteworthy for the number of themes of the fin-de-siècle—which is to say, of Symbolism, the Decadence, and early Modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
—that it elaborates within the tight confines of Giraud's verse form:
- the growing materialism and vulgarity of late-19th-century life, and the artist's flight into an interior world;
- the quest of that artist for a purity and untrammeled freedom of the soul, often through a derangement of the senses (advocated most famously by Arthur RimbaudArthur RimbaudJean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
) via the ecstasy of music or drugs like alcohol; - the deconstruction of romantic love, inspired in part by a skepticism a là Arthur SchopenhauerArthur SchopenhauerArthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
and a growing scientific candor (which will result in Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia SexualisPsychopathia SexualisPsychopathia Sexualis may refer to:* Psychopathia Sexualis, an 1886 book about human sexuality by Richard von Krafft-Ebing* Psychopathia Sexualis , an 1843 moral psychology book about human sexuality by Heinrich Kaan...
of 1886) about sex; - the dogging of young genius by disease, especially consumption, leading to the facile equation (elaborated notoriously in the DegenerationDegeneration (Max Nordau)Degeneration , was Max Nordau's major work. It is a moralistic attack on so-called degenerate art, as well as a polemic against the effects of a range of rising social phenomena of the period, such as rapid urbanization and its perceived effects on the human body.-Summary:Nordau begins his work...
of Max NordauMax NordauMax Simon Nordau , born Simon Maximilian Südfeld in Pest, Hungary, was a Zionist leader, physician, author, and social critic....
) of modern art with degeneracy; - the assumption of a religious burden by the modern artist, and his or her consequent ascension as prophet;
- the transmutation of art into a hermeticism (vide Stéphane MallarméStéphane MallarméStéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
, T.S. Eliot, James JoyceJames JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
) through which it can be enriched with sacred value, spared the gaze of the philistinePhilistinismPhilistinism is a derogatory term used to a particular attitude or set of values perceived as despising or undervaluing art, beauty, spirituality, or intellectualism. A person with this attitude is referred to as a Philistine and may also be considered materialistic, favoring conventional social...
, and engaged with the dissonant incongruities of modern life: Giraud's poems are non-linear fragments shored against Pierrot's ruins; - and yet finally: an undermining of the whole enterprise by self-mockery and irony, calling the high creative project (and the motives of the artist indulging in it) in doubt.
Verse form, style, and structure
Each of Giraud's poems is a rondelRondel (poem)
A rondel is a verse form originating in French lyrical poetry, later used in the verse of other languages as well, such as English and Romanian. It is a variation of the rondeau consisting of two quatrains followed by a quintet or a sestet...
, a form he admired in the work of the Parnassians, especially of Théodore de Banville
Théodore de Banville
Théodore Faullain de Banville was a French poet and writer.-Biography:Banville was born in Moulins in Allier, Auvergne, the son of a captain in the French navy. His boyhood, by his own account, was cheerlessly passed at a lycée in Paris; he was not harshly treated, but took no part in the...
. (It is a "bergamask" rondel, not only because the jagged progress of the poems recalls the eponymous rustic dance
Bergamask
Bergamask, bergomask, bergamesca, or bergamasca , is dance and associated melody and chord progression. It was considered a clumsy rustic dance Bergamask, bergomask, bergamesca, or bergamasca (from the town of Bergamo in Northern Italy), is dance and associated melody and chord progression. It was...
, but also because 19th-century admirers of the Commedia dell'Arte characters [or "masks"] often associated them with the Italian town of Bergamo
Bergamo
Bergamo is a town and comune in Lombardy, Italy, about 40 km northeast of Milan. The comune is home to over 120,000 inhabitants. It is served by the Orio al Serio Airport, which also serves the Province of Bergamo, and to a lesser extent the metropolitan area of Milan...
, from which Harlequin is said to have hailed.) Unlike many of the Symbolist poets (though certainly not all: Verlaine
Verlaine
Verlaine is a municipality of Belgium. It lies in the country's Walloon Region and Province of Liege. On January 1, 2006 Verlaine had a total population of 3,507. The total area is 24.21 km² which gives a population density of 145 inhabitants per km². The municipality contains the villages...
, Mallarmé
Mallarmé
Mallarmé can refer to:* Stéphane Mallarmé , French poet and critic.* François-René-Auguste Mallarmé , politician during the French Revolution....
, even the early Rimbaud and Laforgue, worked comfortably within strict forms), Giraud found free verse
Free verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...
to be anathema. He exclaimed to his friend Emile Verhaeren
Emile Verhaeren
Emile Verhaeren was a Belgian poet who wrote in the French language, and one of the chief founders of the school of Symbolism....
, after reading the latter's Les Moines (The Monks), "What I disapprove of with horror, what angers and irritates me is your improvising disdain for verse form, your profound and vertiginous ignorance of prosody and language." Such an attitude leads the critic Robert Vilain to conclude that, while Giraud shared "the Symbolists' concern for the careful, suggestive use of language and the power of the imagination to penetrate beyond the surface tension of the here-and-now", he was equally committed to a Parnassian aesthetic. He adheres to the sparer of the rondel forms, concluding each poem with a quintet
Quintet
A quintet is a group containing five members.It is commonly associated with musical groups, such as a string quintet, or a group of five singers, but can be applied to any situation where five similar or related objects are considered a single unit....
rather than a sestet
Sestet
A sestet is the name given to the second division of an Italian sonnet , which must consist of an octave, of eight lines, succeeded by a sestet, of six lines. The first documented user of this poetical form was the Italian poet, Petrarch. In the usual course the rhymes are arranged abc abc, but...
and working within strictly observed eight-syllable lines. As is customary, each poem is restricted to two rhymes alone, one masculine
Masculine rhyme
A masculine rhyme is a rhyme that matches only one syllable, usually at the end of respective lines. Often the final syllable is stressed.-English:In English prosody, a masculine rhyme is a rhyme on a single stressed syllable at the end of a line of poetry...
, the other feminine
Feminine rhyme
A feminine rhyme is a rhyme that matches two or more syllables, usually at the end of respective lines, in which the final syllable or syllables are unstressed.-English:...
, resulting in a scheme
Rhyme scheme
A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyme between lines of a poem or song. It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme. In other words, it is the pattern of end rhymes or lines...
of ABba abAB abbaA, in which the capital letters represent the refrain
Refrain
A refrain is the line or lines that are repeated in music or in verse; the "chorus" of a song...
s, or repeated lines. Within this austere structure, however, the language is—to use Vilain's words—"suggestive" and the imaginative penetration beneath the "here-and-now" daring and provocative.
Like Laforgue after him, Giraud uses neologisms ("Bourrèle!" ["Executioner!" or "Torturer!"]), unusual word choices ("patte" [which usually means "paw"] for Pierrot's foot), and ambiguities ("Arlequin porte un arc-en-ciel", meaning "Harlequin bears [or carries or wears] a rainbow") to enrich the fantastic atmosphere of the poems. His syntax is sometimes elliptical or fractured, as in the first line of the cycle: "Je rêve un théâtre de chambre" ("I dream a chamber theater"), instead of the usual "Je rêve d'un théâtre de chambre". And the imagery, especially in the simile
Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two different things, usually by employing the words "like", "as". Even though both similes and metaphors are forms of comparison, similes indirectly compare the two ideas and allow them to remain distinct in spite of their similarities, whereas...
s, traffics often in the jarringly unexpected. Sometimes it is lyrically tender (clouds are "like splendid fins/Of chameleonic fish of the sky" ["The Clouds"]); sometimes it is shockingly brutal (Pierrot's thought of his "last mistress", the gallows, "is like a nail/That drunkenness drives into his head" ["The Gallows' Song"]). At its most dreamlike, it has a disturbing obscurity of reference ("sinister"—and unexplained—"black butterflies" swarm in the sky and blot out the sun ["Black Butterflies"]); at times it suspends all laws of materiality (a moonbeam penetrates the "varnished case" of a violin to caress its "soul" with its "irony"—"like a luminous white bow" ["Lunar Violin"]). The result is Dali-esque: a series of sharply etched transcriptions of proto-Surreal
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
visions. "With its Baroque intensity of detail and its fin de siècle aura," as Giraud's American translator writes, "Pierrot Lunaire is a work not to be forgotten."
Because the rondel is such a tightly "closed" form, each poem seems to stand as an independent unit, isolated from the other poems around it. Giraud heightens this sense of disconnection by eschewing sustained narrative, presenting Pierrot's situation as a series of stark vignette
Vignette (literature)
In theatrical script writing, sketch stories, and poetry, a vignette is a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a trenchant impression about a character, an idea, or a setting and sometimes an object...
s. Sometimes these vignettes are clustered rather coherently (as in those dealing with Pierrot-as-modern-Christ: "The Church", "Evocation", "Red Mass", and "The Crosses"), but, more often than not, they seem random in their placement (and thus may be explained, at least in part, Schoenberg's not scrupling to change their order in his song-cycle). The effect of all these structural and stylistic techniques is both comic and unsettling, as the poem "Disappointment" ("Déconvenue") suggests:
Les convives, fourchette au poing,
Ont vu subtiliser les litres,
Les rôtis, les tourtes, les huîtres,
Et les confitures de coing.
Des Gilles, cachés dans un coin,
Tirent des grimaces de pitres.
Les convives, fourchette au poing,
Ont vu subtiliser les litres.
Pour souligner le désappoint,
Des insectes aux bleus élytres,
Viennent cogner les roses vitres,
Et leur bourdon nargue de loin
Les convives, fourchette au poing.
(The guests, their forks in their fists,
Have seen the bottles snatched away,
The roasts, the pies, the oysters,
And the quince jam.
A few Gilleses, hidden in a corner,
Pull clown faces.
The guests, their forks in their fists,
Have seen the bottles disappear.
To underscore the disappointment,
Some insects with blue elytra
Come beating against the rose-colored panes,
And their distant buzzing taunts
The guests, their forks in their fists.)
The scene is completely without context: the poem that precedes it, "Pierrot-Dandy", is about Pierrot's making up his face with moonlight; the poem that follows it, "Moon over the Wash-House", identifies the moon as a washerwoman. Nowhere else in the cycle is this party revisited; it is impossible, therefore, to understand the import of the gathering or the identity of the guests. (Are the "Gilleses" among the guests? or are they part of the entertainment? Is it Pierrot who has whimsically stolen away the viands? or is it stingy Cassander?) The frozen gestures ("their forks in their fists"), the air of blank incomprehension (shared as much by the reader as by the guests), the finicking nicety of the language ("elytra" [pl. of "elytron" = "wing-case"]) all contribute to the ambiguous black comedy
Black comedy
A black comedy, or dark comedy, is a comic work that employs black humor or gallows humor. The definition of black humor is problematic; it has been argued that it corresponds to the earlier concept of gallows humor; and that, as humor has been defined since Freud as a comedic act that anesthetizes...
of the poem.
Synopsis
In a familiar dichotomy of the Symbolists, Pierrot lunaire occupies a divided space: a public realm, over which the sun presides, and a private realm, dominated by the moon. The waking, sunlit world, populated by Pierrot's Commedia dell'Arte companions, is marked by deformity, degeneracy, avarice, and lust. Its Crispins are "ugly", and its ColumbineColumbina
Columbine is a fictional character in the Commedia dell'Arte. She is Harlequin's mistress, a comic servant playing the tricky slave type, and wife of Pierrot...
"arches her back", apparently in expectation of sexual pleasure ("Theater"). The meretriciously multicolored Harlequin
Harlequin
Harlequin or Arlecchino in Italian, Arlequin in French, and Arlequín in Spanish is the most popularly known of the zanni or comic servant characters from the Italian Commedia dell'arte and its descendant, the Harlequinade.-Origins:...
—"shining like a solar spectrum" ("Harlequin")—is an "artificial serpent" whose "essential goal" is "falsehood and deceit" ("Harlequinade"). An old serving-woman connives in his scheming by accepting a bribe to procure Columbine's favors ("Harlequin"). These puppets live under a sky swarming with "sinister black butterflies" that "seek blood to drink", having "extinguished the sun's glory" with their wings ("Black Butterflies"). The sun itself is nearing the end of that glory: at its setting it seems like a Roman reveler, "full of disgust", who slits his wrists and empties his blood into "filthy sewers" ("Sunset"). It is a "great sun of despair" ("The Storks").
Pierrot is of the dreaming, moonlit world. His is an enchanted interior space, in which sequestered violins are caressed by moonbeams, thereby setting their souls, "full of silence and harmony", thrumming ("Lunar Violin"). He lives there as an aloof isolato, encountering in a "sparkling polar icicle" a "Pierrot in disguise" ("Polar Pierrot") and seeking, "all along the Lethe", not Columbine the fickle woman but her ethereal floral namesakes—"pale flowers of moonbeams/Like roses of light" ("To Columbine"). The moon is, aptly, a "pale washerwoman" ("Moon over the Wash-House") whose ablutions minister chiefly to the mind. For Pierrot has lost the happy enchantments of the past: the moribund pantomimic world seems "absurd and sweet, like a lie" ("Pantomime"), and the "soul" of its old comedies, to which he sometimes mentally propels himself, with an imaginary oar of moonlight ("Pierrot's Departure"), is "like a soft crystal sigh" bemoaning its own extinction ("Nostalgia").
Now, at the end of the century, Pierrot resides in a "sad mental desert" ("Nostalgia"). He is bored and splenetic: "His strange, mad gaiety/Has flown away, like a white bird" ("Spleen"). Too often the moon seems like a "nocturnal consumptive" tossing about on the "black pillow of the skies", deceiving the "carefree lover passing by" into mistaking for "graceful rays/[Its] white and melancholy blood" ("Sick Moon"). When he cannot find relief in her customary magic—in the "strange absinthe" of her beams, this "wine that we drink with our eyes" ("Moon-Drunk")—he takes pleasure in tormenting his enemies: he makes music by drawing a bow across Cassander's pot-belly ("Pierrot's Serenade"); he bores a hole in his skull as a bowl for his pipe ("Cruel Pierrot"). (Cassander is a target because he is an "academician" ["Pantomime"], a dry-as-dust guardian of the Law.) Madness seems to be lurking at Pierrot's elbow, as when he makes up his face with moonlight ("Pierrot-Dandy"), then spends an evening trying to brush a spot of it from his black jacket ("Moon-Brusher"). At his most despairing, he is visited by thoughts of his "last mistress"—the gallows ("The Song of the Gallows"), at the end of whose rope he dangles in "his white Moon robe" ("Suicide"). That the moon, indeed, seems to connive in his extinction is suggested by its sometime appearance as "a white saber/On a somber cushion of watered silk" that threatens to come whistling down on Pierrot's neck ("Decapitation").
His consolation is that the art in which he resides will have eternal life: "Beautiful verses are great crosses/On which red Poets bleed" ("The Crosses"). The old succor of religion is replaced by that of poetry, but at a cost—and with a difference. What is summoned to "the altar of [these] verses" is not the gentle Mary but the "Madonna of Hysteria", who holds out "to the incredulous universe/[Her] Son, with his limbs already green,/His flesh sagging and decayed" ("Evocation"). To the assembled faithful, Pierrot offers his heart: "Like a red and horrible Host/For the cruel Eucharist" ("Red Mass"). The new Lamb of God is a consumptive, his Word a confession of both self-sacrifice and impotence.
The poet and Pierrot
Giraud's imagined identification of himself with his protagonist is complete; it is, in fact, often difficult to determine whether the subject of a given poem is Pierrot or Giraud. (To distinguish a "narrator" here is probably to make too nice a distinction.) The "I" that makes occasional appearances claims relation to Pierrot "through the Moon"; he lives, like Pierrot, "by sticking out. . ./[His] bleeding tongue at the Law" ("To my Bergamask Cousin"). Also like Pierrot, he "discovers drunken landscapes" in absinthe ("Absinthe") and savors the "morbid and mournful charm"—"Like a bloody drop of spittle/From a consumptive's mouth"—of melancholy music ("Chopin Waltz"). Both are nostalgic for Pierrot's past, that "adorable snow" of yesteryear, when the zanni of the old comedies was a "lyre-bearer,/Healer of wounded spirits" ("Plea"). And both are staunch in their commitment to an anti-materialistic idealism, Giraud seeing in the whiteness of Pierrot—and of snow, swans, and lilies—a "scorn of unworthy things" and a "disgust for weak hearts" ("Sacred Whitenesses"). Art they hold in worshipful regard: Giraud's book, his "poem", is "a ray of moonlight stoppered up/In a beautiful flagon of Bohemian glass" ("Bohemian Crystal"). But, paradoxically, both, as artists, are self-estranged: ironically, the interior quest for "sacred whitenesses", for a purity of soul, is synonymous with the assumption of a falsehood, a mask—one of theatrically clownish extravagance that borders on madness and fatal excess.In "The Alphabet", an apparent anomaly in the cycle, in which Giraud imagines himself as Harlequin, not Pierrot, the poet recalls dreaming, as a child, of "a multicolored alphabet,/In which each letter was a mask", a dream that agitates his "foolish heart" today. It is a revealing confession: an admission that the agents of his creations as an artist, the alphabet, are ideally not agents of self-expression but of self-fabrication under the mask of an Other. And this Other—Pierrot—is himself a fabrication, a mercurial puppet in a "chamber theater" of the mind ("Theater"). Pierrot lunaire offers a performance, not an expression, of the self—a fact in which much of its "modernity" resides.
Musical, balletic, and pictorial settings
In 1892, the poet and dramatist Otto Erich HartlebenOtto Erich Hartleben
Otto Erich Hartleben was a German poet and dramatist from Clausthal, known for his translation of Pierrot Lunaire.-Childhood, Education and Marriage:...
published a German translation of Pierrot lunaire; he retained the rondel form of the poems, but he attempted no rhymes, altered line lengths, and made other substantive changes. Some commentators see his versions as improvements on the originals, although recent criticism has shifted somewhat in Giraud's favor. However their respective merits will eventually be judged, it was Hartleben's versions that first drew composers to the poems and that provide the texts for almost all of the settings we have. The bullet-point that follows lists early 20th-century musical settings chronologically and notes how many poems were set by each composer (all are in the Hartleben translations) and for which instruments.
- Marschalk, Max: 5 poems for voice and piano (1901); Vrieslander, Otto: 50 poems for voice and piano (46 in 1905, the remainder in 1911); Graener, PaulPaul GraenerPaul Graener was a German composer and conductor.-Biography:Graener was born in Berlin and orphaned as a young child. A boy soprano, he taught himself composition and in 1896 moved to London, where he gave private lessons and served briefly as conductor at the Haymarket Theatre...
: 3 poems for voice and piano (c. 1908); Marx, JosephJoseph MarxJoseph Rupert Rudolf Marx was an Austrian composer, teacher and critic.-Life and career:Marx pursued studies in philosophy, art history, German studies, and music at Graz University, earning several degrees including a doctorate in 1909. He began composing seriously in 1908 and over the next four...
: 4 poems for voice and piano (1909; 1 of 4, "Valse de Chopin", reset for voice, piano, and string quartet in 1917); Schoenberg, ArnoldArnold SchoenbergArnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...
: 21 poems for speaking voice, piano, flute (also piccolo), clarinet (also bass clarinet), violin (also viola), and violoncello (1912); Kowalski, MaxMax KowalskiMax Kowalski was a Polish-German composer, singer and singing teacher.Kowalski's family moved to Germany in 1883, a year after he was born. He studied law in Marburg, obtaining a doctorate and worked as a lawyer in Frankfurt am Main...
: 12 poems for voice and piano (1913); Lothar, MarkMark LotharMark Lothar [ló:tar] was a German composer.-References: Lothar, Mark ; Ott, Alfons : Mark Lothar. Ein Musikerporträt. München, Süddeutscher Verlag 1968. 228 Seiten. Mark Lothar 1902-1985, Seine Musik - sein Leben. Eine Ausstellung aus den Beständen der Münchner Stadtbibliothek Am Gasteig vom 4...
: 1 poem for voice and piano (1921).
The most famous of these settings is Schoenberg's atonal Thrice-Seven Poems from Albert Giraud's "Pierrot lunaire"
Pierrot Lunaire
Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds 'Pierrot lunaire' , commonly known simply as Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 , is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg...
(1912), scored for what is now known as the Pierrot ensemble
Pierrot ensemble
A Pierrot ensemble is a musical ensemble comprising flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, frequently augmented by the addition of a singer or percussionist, and/or by the performers doubling on other woodwind/stringed/keyboard instruments.-History:...
and a Sprechstimme voice.
The importance of this work in the musical world was signaled by an homage paid by the Arnold Schoenberg Institute in Los Angeles as recently as 1987: it commissioned the settings of the remaining twenty-nine poems that Schoenberg had neglected, using his original scoring (Sprechstimme optional), by sixteen American composers—Milton Babbitt
Milton Babbitt
Milton Byron Babbitt was an American composer, music theorist, and teacher. He is particularly noted for his serial and electronic music.-Biography:...
, Leslie Bassett
Leslie Bassett
Leslie Bassett is an American composer of classical music, and the University of Michigan’s Albert A. Stanley Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Composition...
, Susan Morton Blaustein
Susan Morton Blaustein
Susan Morton Blaustein is an American pianist and composer. She was born in Palo Alto, California, and studied piano and composition at Pomona College with Karl Kohn, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1975. She continued her studies in composition at the Liege Conservatory in Belgium...
, Paul Cooper, Miriam Gideon
Miriam Gideon
Miriam Gideon was an American composer.-Life:She studied organ with her uncle Henry Gideon and piano with Felix Fox. She also studied with Martin Bernstein, Marion Bauer, Charles Haubiel, and Jacques Pillois...
, John Harbison
John Harbison
John Harris Harbison is an American composer, best known for his operas and large choral works.-Life:...
, Donald Harris, Richard Hoffmann, Karl Kohn
Karl Kohn
Karl Georg Kohn is an American composer, teacher and pianist.- Biography :Kohn began playing the piano as a child in Vienna and, after he, at the age of 13, immigrated to the United States, continued his education in New York City and at Harvard where he studied composition with Walter Piston,...
, William Kraft
William Kraft
William Kraft is a composer, conductor, teacher, and percussionist.-Undergrad and Graduate School Years :...
, Ursula Mamlok
Ursula Mamlok
Ursula Mamlok is a German-born, American composer and teacher.-Education and influences:Mamlok was born as Ursula Meyer in Berlin, Germany and studied piano and composition with Professor Gustav Ernest and Emily Weissgerber until her family fled Nazi Germany following the nationwide pogrom in 1938...
, Steve Mosco, Marc Neikrug, Mel Powell
Mel Powell
Mel Powell was a jazz pianist and composer of classical music.Mel Epstein was born to Russian Jewish parents, Milton Epstein and Mildred Mark Epstein, and began playing piano as a child. He performed jazz professionally in New York City as a teenager...
, Roger Reynolds
Roger Reynolds
Roger Reynolds is an American composer born July 18, 1934 in Detroit, Michigan. He is a professor at the University of California at San Diego. He received an undergraduate degree in engineering physics from the University of Michigan where he later studied composition with Ross Lee Finney...
, and Leonard Rosenman
Leonard Rosenman
Leonard Rosenman was an American film, television and concert composer.-Life and career:Leonard Rosenman was born in Brooklyn, New York. After service in the Pacific with the Army Air Forces in World War II, he earned a bachelor's degree in music from the University of California, Berkeley...
. The settings were given their premieres between 1988 and 1990 in four concerts sponsored by the Institute. (The director of the Institute, Leonard Stein, added a setting of his own to the final concert of the project.)
Schoenberg's Pierrot has kindled inspiration not only among fellow composers but also among choreographers and singer-performers. Dancers who have staged Pierrot lunaire include the Russian-born American Adolph Bolm
Adolph Bolm
Adolph Rudolphovitch Bolm was a Russian born American ballet dancer and choreographer....
(1926), the American Glen Tetley
Glen Tetley
Glen Tetley was an American ballet and modern dancer as well as a choreographer who mixed ballet and modern dance to create a new way of looking at dance, and is best known for his piece Pierrot Lunaire.-Biography:Glenford Andrew Tetley, Jr. was born on February 3, 1926 in Cleveland, Ohio...
(1962), the German Marco Goecke (2010) and the French Kader Belarbi (2011). The theatrical/operatic possibilities of Schoenberg's score have been realized by at least two major ensembles: the Opera Quotannis
Opera Quotannis
Opera Quotannis was a New York-based opera company which was founded in 1990, with conductor Bart Folse as Music Director and stage director Brian Morgan serving as Artistic Director...
, which staged a version of Pierrot lunaire (with singer Christine Schadeberg) at the New School for Social Research in 1995 and, more recently, the internationally acclaimed contemporary music sextet eighth blackbird
Eighth blackbird
eighth blackbird is a Grammy Award-winning contemporary music sextet based in Chicago. The group derives its name from the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens' poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird...
, which premiered a "cabaret opera" dramatizing the Schoenberg cycle in 2009. Its percussionist, Matthew Duvall, played Pierrot, and, in addition to the remaining five musicians and a singer/speaker, Lucy Shelton, the production included a dancer, Elyssa Dole. The work, which will be toured in 2012 to mark the centennial of Schoenberg's composition of Pierrot lunaire, was conceived, directed, and choreographed by Mark DeChiazza. (View excerpts.)
In 2001 and 2002, the British composer Roger Marsh set all fifty French poems for a (mostly) a cappella
A cappella
A cappella music is specifically solo or group singing without instrumental sound, or a piece intended to be performed in this way. It is the opposite of cantata, which is accompanied singing. A cappella was originally intended to differentiate between Renaissance polyphony and Baroque concertato...
group of singers. Sometimes they sing in French accompanied by a narrator, whose English translations are woven into the music; sometimes they sing in both French and English; sometimes they speak the poems in both languages (in various combinations). The few songs entirely in French are intended to be glossed by action in performance. Instruments occasionally brought in, usually solo, are violin, cello, piano, organ, bells, and beatbox. The English texts were derived from literal translations of Giraud's poems by Kay Bourlier.
Giraud's original texts also stand behind the Seven Pierrot Miniatures (2010) by the Scottish composer Helen Grime
Helen Grime
Helen Grime is a Scottish composer. Though born in England, her parents returned to Scotland when she was a baby. Her family raised her in her early years in Ellon, Aberdeenshire. Her grandparents were music teachers in Macduff, Aberdeenshire. Her mother teaches music at St...
, though hers cannot be called "settings", since voice and words are absent. The seven poems she selected—"The Clouds", "Decor", "Absinthe", "Suicide", "The Church", "Sunset", and "The Harp", none used by Schoenberg—were merely "points of departure" for her suite for mixed ensemble.
The painters Paul Klee
Paul Klee
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism...
, Theodor Werner, Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century."According to art historian Michael J...
and Fernando Botero
Fernando Botero
Fernando Botero Angulo is a Colombian figurative artist. His works feature a figurative style, called by some "Boterismo", which gives them an unmistakable identity...
have all produced a Pierrot Lunaire (in 1924, 1942, 1969, and 2007, respectively). And Pierrot Lunaire is a familiar figure in popular art: Brazilian, Italian
Pierrot Lunaire (band)
Pierrot Lunaire was an Avant-prog/Progressive folk band from Italy.Two albums were released: A self-titled one in 1974 and Gudrun in 1976....
, and Russian rock groups have called themselves Pierrot Lunaire. The Soft Machine
Soft Machine
Soft Machine were an English rock band from Canterbury, named after the book The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs. They were one of the central bands in the Canterbury scene, and helped pioneer the progressive rock genre...
, a British group, included the song "Thank You Pierrot Lunaire" in its 1969 album Volume Two. And in issue #676 of DC Comics
DC Comics
DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...
, Batman R.I.P.: Midnight in the House of Hurt (2008), Batman
Batman
Batman is a fictional character created by the artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger. A comic book superhero, Batman first appeared in Detective Comics #27 , and since then has appeared primarily in publications by DC Comics...
acquired a new nemesis, who shadowed him for seven more issues: his name was Pierrot Lunaire.