Pierrot lunaire (book)

[1] The early 19th-century Romantics, Théophile Gautier most notably, had been drawn to the figure by his Chaplinesque pluckiness and pathos,[2] 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.

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).

[6] (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,[7] 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 was committed to traditional techniques and structures as opposed to the comparatively amorphous constraints of free verse.

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.

"[8] 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.

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 refrains, or repeated lines.

Sometimes these vignettes are clustered rather coherently (as in those dealing with Pierrot-as-modern-Christ—27: "The Church", 28: "Evocation", 29: "Red Mass", and 30: "The Crosses"),[16] 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 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.

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" (20: "Sunset").

Madness seems to be lurking at Pierrot's elbow, as when he makes up his face with moonlight (3: "Pierrot-Dandy"), then spends an evening trying to brush a spot of it from his black jacket (38: "Moon-Brusher").

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 (24: "Decapitation").

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" (28: "Evocation").

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 1892, the poet and dramatist Otto Erich Hartleben 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.

"For all the rough critical ride Schoenberg's compositions have received in general," writes the musicologist Jonathan Dunsby, "Pierrot lunaire has come to be regarded since its first performance in 1912 as a masterpiece."

[28]The most obvious manifestation of that originality is the Sprechstimme required of its vocalist, and among those who have met its challenges should be mentioned Albertine Zehme (who commissioned the work and performed, dressed as Columbine, in its first productions), Bethany Beardslee, Jan DeGaetani, and Christine Schäfer.

[29] The similarly inspired Pierrot Lunaire Ensemble Wien, founded in Vienna by flautist Silvia Gelos and pianist Gustavo Balanesco, is still performing internationally.

In 1987, the Arnold Schoenberg Institute in Los Angeles commissioned the settings of the remaining twenty-nine poems that Schoenberg had neglected, utilizing the Pierrot ensemble (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, Stephen L. Mosko, Marc Neikrug, Mel Powell, Roger Reynolds, and Leonard Rosenman.

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.

"[32] The first of its events unfolded in the fall of that same year, when the music group Dr. K Sextet, which had been born at London's Royal College of Music in 2009, performed extracts from Pierrot lunaire, accompanied by an exhibition of artworks responding to each of its three sections (October 2014); mounted a "Pierrot-Kabarett" featuring new settings of Schoenberg's Brettl-Lieder (January 2015); and offered original interpretive responses to the central "dark" section of Pierrot lunaire (April 2015).

Beginning in the early 1980s, scholars and musicians began to take a fresh look at Giraud's original texts, thereby initiating an implicit interrogation of the superiority of the Hartleben translations.

[38] Giraud's original texts (and apparently one of Hartleben's) 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.

In these new settings, Pierrot, "erotomane, cinéaste, clown, troubadour, analysand, synaesthete", goes wandering "through circles of a moonlit inferno, where he confronts shadows of charmed, histrionic luminaries", including Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf, Patty Duke, Mae West, and Diana Vreeland.

[42] The painters Paul Klee, Federico García Lorca, Theodor Werner, Marc Chagall, Markus Lüpertz, and Fernando Botero have all produced a Pierrot Lunaire (in 1924, 1928, 1942, 1969, 1984, and 2007, respectively).

In 2011, the French graphic novelist Antoine Dodé published the first volume of his projected trilogy, Pierrot Lunaire, and in issue #676 of DC Comics, Batman R.I.P.