Frontispiece by Adolphe Willette, one of the founders of the Chat Noir in Mont-

martre, for the first issue of the artistic journal Le Pierrot, Jre Anmffe, no. /, 6 Jui//et
1888, with the caption, "La Parisienne: Pierro! blanc, Pierro! noir, je vous fais che-
valiers du Clair de Lune; a//ez, boycottez et amusez-moi!"
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EXCAVATING AN ALLEGORY:
THE TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNAIRE
Susan Youens
For his song cycle Pierro! Lunaire, Op. 21 of 1912,
Schoenberg selected twenty-one poems from the fifty rondels in Pierro!
Lunaire (1884) by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud, a collection translated
into German in 1891-1892 by the poet and playwright Otto Erich Hartleben
(1864-1905). ' Through his choice and arrangement of those twenty-one
poems, Schoenberg carved from Giraud's collection of harlequinades the
tripartite tale of a creative artist's rebellion and frenzied "dereglement
des sens," the sterility and despair that follow, and, finally, the journey
home. The cycle ends in reconciliation with the past and recognition of a
new artistic order in which those elements of beauty and value from the
past, from tradition and one's cultural homeland, are incorporated.
Nach Bergamo, zur Heimat,
Kehrt nun Pierrot zuriick,
Schwach dammert schon im Osten
Der griine Horizont
--Der Mondstrahl ist das Ruder.
This allegory of a modern artist is present within Giraud's and Hartle-
ben's Pierro! Lunaire, but scattered throughout the volume and obscured
from view by glimpses into other corners of Pierrot-Poet's often chaotic
inner world. Schoenberg recognized affinities between poems dispersed
throughout the work and rearranged them in order to clarify those rela-
tionships, heighten the effect of the recurring images, and trace more
clearly the steps of the Poet's progression from ecstasy to despair and
finally to peace and homecoming. To do so, he pruned away all the
poems from which either Pierrot or the moon is absent: the tale unfolds
by night, and the Moon is the embodiment of Poetry and Pierrot's alter
ego, the very source of poetry at the beginning of Op. 21.
Schoenberg never, to my knowledge, explained or discussed the ra-
tionale of his choice and ordering of the twenty-one poems in the cycle,
but it is easy to recognize in Op. 21 a more meaningful order than the
96 SUSAN YOUENS
(deliberately?) jumbled series of fifty poems in the complete
Hartleben collection. There, the poet's mind leaps from one image,
tasm, fear, or caprice to another in the seemingly irrational fashion of
an unfettered imagination-behind the inscrutable mask of a clown is
unregulated whimsy. The pairs or even trios of successive poems linked
by a common image or theme always give way in Giraud's and Hartleben's
work to a disconcerting change of scene, a leap to another region of a
psychic landscape outside the dictates of Reason and the waking world.
Schoenberg imposed a coherent structure on those poems he chose and, in
so doing, excavated from the larger source its principal "idea" or
cept," purifying it and liberating it from the unrelated images that cluster
about and hide it from view.
The "moonstruck Pierrot" of the title is the prototype of an artist,
including Giraud himself: in the last poem, "Crista! de Boheme," he writes
that he wears Pierrot's garb and is a Pierrot-" Je suisun Pierrot costume"
or, in Hartleben's translation, with its changed nuances, "lch hab mich als
Pierrot verkleidet".
2
Pierrots were endemic everywhere in late nineteenth/
early twentieth century Europe as an archetype of the self-dramatizing
artist, who presents to the world a stylized mask both to symbolize and
veil artistic ferment, to distinguish the creative artist from the human being.
Behind the all-enveloping traditional costume of white blouse, white trou-
sers, and floured face, the Pierrot-character changed with the passage of
time, from uncaring prankster to Romantic ma/heureux to Dandy, Deca-
dent, and finally, into a brilliant, tormented figure submerged in a bizarre,
airless inner world. The Pierrots of the 1880's had already, before Giraud's
Pierro! Lunaire, assumed a sadistic and sinister guise, so to find him
thieving and torturing was nothing new, but here, he is in turn tortured
and killed, the prey of self-exacerbated agonies of the mind and imagina-
tion. In his heightened self-consciousness, he is a Janus-faced creature:
the poseur, the "je m'en moque" of extravagant gestures compounded
equally of elegance and violence, calculated for their effect upon others,
gives way on occasion to the death-haunted introvert who, all alone,
trembles at the phantasmagorical and multiple deaths conjured by an over-
wrought fancy.
Giraud's Pierrot evolved from the zannis, or comic clown-servant fig-
ures from Bergamo who were part of the panoply of stock characters in the
commedia dell'arte. Pierrot's most distant ancestor was Pulcinella, a
character created in Naples who, chameleon-like, played many roles
3
and
who had a knack for parody, pranks, and playing the imposter. The French
Pierrot became a distinct figure, differentiated from the Italian Pulcinella
or Pedrolino, during the early days of the commedia dell'arte in France
during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pierrot and another
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THE TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNAIRE 97
A sketch of Albert Giraud (born Albert Kayenbergh in Louvain, 1860-1929) from
Camille Hanlet, Les Ecrivains Belges Contemporains de langue francaise 1800-1946,
vol. 1 (Liege: H. Dessain, 1946), p. 145. Giraud initially hoped to become a concert
pianist.
Photograph of Otto Erich Hart/eben from the frontispiece to Otto Erich Hartle ben:
Briefe an Freunde, vol. 2, ed. by Franz Ferdinand Heitmueller (Berlin: S. Fischer
Verlag, 1912).
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SUSAN YOUENS
Gilles by Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), in the Louvre, one of the painter's last
works. Some art historians, including Donald Posner in Antoine Watteau (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984), p. 270, conjecture that the painting was intended as
a shopsign for the actor Belloni, who opened a cafe after his retirement from the
foires.
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THE TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNA IRE 99
of the zannis-Harlequin-developed into more fixed and easily identifi-
able personalities in France, the central characters in such late seventeenth-
century plays as "Arlequin Empereur de Ia Lune" by a certain Monsieur
Anne de Fatouville (died ca. 1700), performed several times between 1684
and 1719. Watteau's famous Comediens Italiens (1719-1720?), now in the
National Gallery in Washington, D.C., is among the earliest transfigura-
tions of Pierrot into the melancholy artist-prototype:
5
here, as in Ar/equin,
Pierrot et Scapin of 1716, and, most strikingly, in Gilles (another name
for the French Pierrot), Pierrot is the central figure, clearly separate from
the remainder of the troupe. (It is in part this detachment, this aloofness
from the quotidian life around him, that appealed so strongly to nineteenth-
century France). In Gilles, he is larger-than-life, larger than the other
comedians clustered in back of his feet and legs, who seem to leer and
gossip and peer in other directions while he looks straight ahead. The full-
frontal pose is expressive of a self-sufficient, lonely pride and of vulnera-
bility, the latter quality heightened by the hands hanging limply at his
sides. The unblinking gaze, resigned and withdrawn, seems to see through
and beyond the viewer,
6
and yet, the passivity has a certain air of confron-
tation as well.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, in their essay on Watteau, later pub-
lished in L 'Art au dix-huitieme siecle, made of the eighteenth-century
master the precursor ". . . of the modern artist in the fine, the disinterested
sense, the modern artist in pursuit of an ideal, despising money, careless
of the morrow, leading a hazardous ... a bohemian ... existence"' whose
ill health, melancholy, and, eventually, misanthropy left their imprint on
his work, for all the beauty of the amber light that plays about his fingers.
The commedia dell'arte players of Watteau's canvases become, according
to Romantic legend, "lyrical personages," no longer real. This of course is
Watteau through nineteenth century eyes that saw in the paintings "a world
beyond" and in the artist himself a Romantic before his time, an inaccurate
conception and thoroughly tainted by the biographical fallacy but powerful
and long-lived: Giraud begins his Pierrot Lunaire by dreaming of a " . . .
theatre de chambre/Dont Breugliel peindrait les volets (the Breughel of
Dulle Grief, surely?),/Shakespeare, les pales palais, / Et Watteau, les fonds
couleur d'ambre".
Other Pierrot-incarnations after the eighteenth-century playactors in
Watteau's sunlit canvases went into the making of Giraud's moonstruck
poet, including the "nouveau Pierrot" created by the famous Parisian
pantomime artist J ean-Gaspard, called Baptiste, Deburau (1796-1846) at
the Theatre des Funambules, the Deburau subsequently of Jean-Louis
Barrault in "Les Enfants du Paradis. "
8
Deburau changed the traditional
costume, leaving off the frilled white ruff and donning instead a black skull-
100 SUSAN YOUENS
cap, and, more important, altered the familiar characterizations of the
prankish buffoon or the melancholy and lovesick suitor by adding elements
of perversion, of macabre and violent actions committed by an insouciant,
jaded, detached, ironic creature, no longer naive. Baudelaire wrote of
him in his study "De !'Essence du rire et generalement du comique dans
les arts plastiques" as a mysterious creature, "pale as the moon ... supple
and mute as a serpent.'" Giraud, who wrote three essays on Baudelaire's
poetry published in the Jeune Revue Litteraire in 1881," would surely have
known both Baudelaire's essay and Deburau. Certainly Baudelaire's influ-
ence is evident in much of Giraud's poetry: the spleen, grotesquerie, alle-
gories of the Poet and the World, the fascination with death and vice, entire
borrowed phrases and images, have their source in Les F/eurs du mal.
Deburau's Pierrot quickly found its way into written theatre, both
lighthearted farces such as "Pierrot Posthume: Arlequinade en un acte
et en vers" by Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), first performed at the
Theatre du Vaudeville on October 4, 1847, and, later, the bizarre mime-
comedies of the Belle Epoque. Despite the suggestively macabre title,
Gautier's play is an amusing pasquinade, but there are hints of the later
moondrunk creature: in a monologue in scene iv, Pierrot speaks of Colom-
bine's disquiet when she discovers his true nature after their marriage-
"Elle s'inquietait de mes chants a Ia June,/ De mes moyens de vivre et de
chercher fortune." Almost forty years before Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire, the
clown has already become a nocturnal prowler. Later, the Parisian artist and
caricaturist Adolphe Willette ( 1857 -1926)" made of Pierrot an even more
sophisticated descendant of the earlier dandies-Giraud refers to Willette
in the thirty-eighth poem of Pierrot Lunaire, "Brosseur de June": "Un
tn!s pale rayon de June I Sur le dos de son habit noir ,I Pierrot-Willette sort
Ie soir I Pour aller en bonne fortune" (Hartle ben omits the topical-nation-
alistic reference in his translation). Theodore de Banville (1823-1891) also
sang the newly-transformed Pierrot's praise in his poem "Au Pierrot de
Willette," written in 1884, the same year that Pierrot Lunaire appeared:
Cher Pierrot, qui d'un clin d'oeil
Me montre tout ce qui m'aime,
J'aime ta joie, et ton dueil
Meme!
J'aime ton regard de feu,
Ta bravoure et ton coeur mille,
Bien que tu sembles un peu
Pille."
In 1888, Willette founded a short-lived weekly artistic and satirical jo!lr-
nal in Paris called Le Pierrot (the last issue appeared on 20 March 1891).
In his pen-and-ink drawings of the motto figure, he alternated between

THE TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNAIRE 101
a "Pierrot blanc" dressed in the traditional white-smocked costume and
a "Pierrot noir," who combines the white ruff, floury make-up, skull-
cap, and slippers of older Pierrots with black evening dress, half Parisian
sophisticate and half commedia clown. For the frontispiece of the first
issue on 6 July 1888, both the "Pierro! blanc" and Willette's "Pierrot
noir" are dubbed "chevaliers du Clair de Lune" by a bare-breasted
woman, her scepter ornamented with a crescent moon, who seems a
debased, cafe-concert descendant of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the
People. The journal is filled with poetry, farces, miniature dramas about
the commedia characters, including works in which Giraud's influence
is apparent ... "La Ballade des Pierrots Morts" by Maurice Guillemot,
a moonlight poem in three dizains and an Invoi (sic) begins with a polar
scene,
Sur les fonds blemis du ciel boreal,
Les nuits de Noel, quand Ia June est claire,
Les Pierrots defunts, fils de !'Ideal,
Montent des tom beaux au pays polaire."
reminiscent of the ninth poem, "Pierrot Polaire," in Pierrot Lunaire.
Pierrots like Giraud's wreak havoc in other late nineteenth century
works as well. Joris-Karl Huysmans collaborated with the writer Leon
Hennique and an artist named Jules Cheret on a drama, part pantomime
action, part written dialogue, entitled "Pierro! sceptique," printed in
1881, in which Pierro! is utterly unaffected by the death of his wife and
runs off with the "femme de carton" Therese when his tailor's skeleton
is discovered in his closet.
1
' Willette in Le Pierrot illustrated an adver-
tisement for a pantomime, Paul Margueritte's "Pierro! assassin de sa
femme" in which Sarah Bernhardt played the leading role in 1883 at
the Trocadero. But the closest kin to Giraud's Pierrot /unaire is Verlaine's
mad, phosphorescent specter of a "Pierrot" (1868, published in 1882),
a figure unlike the better-known Pierrot of "Pantomime" in Fetes go/an-
tes (1869). There, he is a gaily irreverent glutton and nonchalant jester
whose pranks lighten the overall gentle melancholy of the volume, but in
the lesser-known sonnet, he is a death's-head figure, his blouse a winding-
sheet, a personification of the inmost terrors of the death-obsessed soul.
Avec le bruit d'un vol d'oiseaux de nuit qui passe,
Ses manches blanches font vaguement par l'espace
Des signes fous auxquels personne ne repond.
Ses yeux sont deux grands trous ou rampe du phosphore
Et Ia farine rend plus effroyable encore
Sa face exsangue aux nez pointu de moribond.
1
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Giraud's Pierrot is less horrific of countenance, but his mad gestures
and violent actions fill fifty poems, not one. The hallucinatory mayhem
r
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SUSAN YOUENS
is gentled, however, rendered in pastels by a poet seemingly incapable
of a forcefulness of expression to match the content and images of his
poetry.
Pierrot Lunaire was the frrst of three Pierrot works by the Belgian
poet and literary critic Jean Heurtaut, born in Louvain on 23 June 1860
and died in Brussels on 26 December 1929. The second was "Pierrot
Narcisse" (1887), a verse play in alexandrines which Giraud described on
the title page as a "songe d'hiver, comedie fiabesque," and the third and
last, published in 1898, was Heros et Pierrots. '
6
In "Pierrot Narcisse,"
the clown, long an egocentric narcissist, falls in love with his own reflec-
tion in the mirror, recalling the forty-seventh poem of Pierrot Lunaire,
"Le miroir." There, Pierrot looks in the mirror and laughs to see his
reflection crowned, "coiffe," by the crescent moon. In the rhyming dedi-
cation to "Pierrot Narcisse," Giraud writes that Pierrot, a creature "sans
profession," would be his lifelong shadow:
Voici bien trois ans et demi
Que j'ai rime "Pierrot Lunaire."
Je suis encore ton ami:
C'est vraiment extraordinaire.
C'est pourquoi, - puisque c'est mon sort,
Captif de Ia rime et du nombre,
D'avoir Pierrot jusqu'a Ia mort
A cote du moi, comme une ombre ...
Heurtaut/Giraud's memoirs, published the year he died in 1929, are
entitled Les souvenirs d'un autre-contemplation not only of another and
younger self, but a fabled alter ego whose artistic tribulations and escapades
could be separated from its creator in much the same fashion as Schu-
mann's troupe of Florestan, Eusebius, and Magister Raro. Pierrot removes
his mask to reveal Albert Giraud who in turn strips off his mask to reveal
a shadowy figure named Heurtaut about whom we know very little.
We do know, from Giraud's own testimony, that Pierrot Lunaire is
the poetic record of his rebellion against and return to those Parnassian
ideals which he had earlier condemned:
Petits rapsodes impeccables, ennemies de Ia passion et !'eloquence, cherchant
l'absolue beaute dans Ia ligne et dans Ia couleur, pipeurs de rimes et de metres,
irnpersonnels par necessite, originaux par imitation, gonfles d erudition,
pCdante, indechiffrables comme des sphinx.''
Only a few years after writing this tirade, Giraud was himself concerned
with line and meter, the imitation of past masters and forms-fifty rondels
in a row-, and ingenious rhymes. His first volume as a penitent Parnassian
returned to the fold is divided between a smaller number of pastel or beau-
tifully jewelled landscapes, purely lyrical evocations-the great purple and
'
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THE TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNAIRE 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 l'eau"-and the gruesome,
macabre images that predominate. Pierrot drills hole in the screaming
Cassander's skull, an executioner strides about with a dripping basket
full of decapitated heads, a tubercular moon oozes white blood, the sun
opens up its veins and red blood stains the sky, Pierrot quakes in terror
beneath a giant scimitar-horror piled upon horror in a crescendo through-
out the volume, relieved only periodically by images of unalloyed beauty.
And yet, the power of these images is weakened, at times negated entirely
by Giraud's flat, pallid, remote tone, an unemotional narrative manner,
dry and distanced that is often at variance with the subject. If the gap
between tone and content were ironic, the matter would be different, but
Giraud, unlike his much greater contemporary and Pierrot-puppeteer Jules
Lafargue, was no master of irony.
Hartleben utterly transforms Giraud's poetry for the better-immea-
surably better. It is a rare occurrence when a translation transcends its
source, when literature of less than the first rank is elevated to a con-
siderably higher level through the intermediary of the translator, but
Pierrot /unaire in Hartleben's German is one of those rare instances. It is
as if Giraud's rondels were a draft in one language for Hartleben's "fin-
ished" work in another. Hartleben surpassed his own original works by far
with Pierrot lunaire-the erotic comedies, the charming but inconsequential
lyric verse, the satires, and the single tragedy, famous in its day, are not
nearly its equal." He worked on the translations for six years, and, in a
letter to a friend and fellow writer Otto Julius Bierbaum, said that he
labored so hard on this task that many of the poems existed in three or
four different versions.
Freu mich sehr, dass Ihnen die Rondels so gut gefallen! Es sind aber auch in
der That wundervolle Sachen. Ich kann das sagen, wei! sie wirklich nicht
von mir sind. Albert Giraud ist ein lebender Belgier. Seine Sachen sind bei
Lacombeez in Brussel erscheinen.
Allerdings-von diesen Obersetzungen gehOrt vie! mir. Ich babe vielfach
Oberhaupt nicht "Obersetzt," sondern nur ein Motiv aus dem franzOsischen
Gedichte genommen und darOber meins geschrieben. Ob das "erlaubt" ist oder
nicht, ist mir schnuppe, wenn nur was dabei herauskommt. Ich "arbeite" an
dieser Sammlung seit 1886, also sechs Jahre. Immer wieder bin ich mit til.her
Liebe daran gegangen, manches ist drei-, viermal gedichtet. Ich hoffe also,
dass die Verse wirklich nicht den Eindruck von Obersetzungen mach en."
Significantly, Hartle ben says of Giraud only, "Er ist ein lebender Belgier."
He abstains from any overt criticism of the poet, but the nature of his
translations-the fact that he often took only a motif or an image from the
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SUSAN YOUENS
original and freely exercised his license to transform utterly the tone and
style-constitute an implicit negative judgment of Giraud.
With the exception of two brief poems from Heros et Pierrots, this
was Hartleben's last translation, and that is to be regretted. He was a
brilliant translator, far more gifted at that difficult metier than he was
either in original prose or poetry. Curiously, the distinctive mannerisms
and methods by which he transformed Giraud's poems are not to be found
so brilliantly employed in his own works. Giraud's poetry was certainly a
challenge: the Belgian poet's earlier criticisms of Parnassian poetry are
true of his own verse (the displacement of personal dissatisfactions onto
some other person or group of people is hardly uncommon). It is ironic
that poetry with so much blood and violence and pillage should be so
intrinsically bloodless, even when he is depicting a fantastic and horrifying
scene. The slimy, pulpy creatures that grip the poet's ship in the sea of
absinthe and sink it (number twenty-two, "Absinthe"), the vampire-like
and monstrous black butterflies in search of blood to drink (number nine-
teen, "Papillons Noir") appear and disappear seemingly without a trace of
surprise, horror, or strong emotion of any kind on Giraud's or Pierrot's
part. Hartleben breaks up the even flow of Giraud's flat and preternaturally
calm recitation with fragmented phrases, exclamations, and questions,
much more vivid language expressive of stronger feelings. In order to do
so, he sometimes omits entirely one of Giraud's images and substitutes a
more colorful one of his own invention-in place of the slimy eddy or
backwash into which the poet's ship sinks in the last stanza of" Absinthe,"
Hartleben introduces a giant arm that suddenly appears from nowhere ...
attached to what or whom? ... and knocks the mast off the ship, sink-
ing it:
Giraud
Mais soudain rna barque est etreinte
Par des poulpes visqueux et mous:
Au milieu d 'un gluant remous
Je disparais, sans une plainte,
Dans une immense mer d'absinthe.
Hart/eben
Doch wehe! Was umklammert jah
Mein Schiff?-Polypen, widrig, klebrig!
Ein Riesenarm zerknickt den Mast-
Und ohne Klagelaut versink ich
Im Ozeane des Absinths.
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The change of verb tense from past and imperfect in Giraud to present
tense in Hartleben's translation, along with the breathless, agitated, tele-
graphic exclamations in the German, make the bizarre scene come alive.
Similarly, in the thirty-eighth poem, "Brosseur de June," when Pierrot
first discovers the speck of moonlight on the back of his coat, Giraud
writes in his customary flat, narrative tone, "Mais sa toilette !'importune,"
which Hartleben in "Der Mondfleck" translates as "PIOtzlich-stOrt ibn
was an seinem Anzug ... ". Later in the same poem, when Giraud in a
matter-of-fact way says, "II s'imagine que c'est une/Tache de phitre ... ",
Hartleben, typically for him, breaks the line up into jagged fragments .. .
"Warte! denkt er: das ist so ein Gipsfleck! /Wischt und wischt, doch-
bringt ibn nicht herunter! ". Giraud's almost unvarying octosyllabic lines
become in Hartleben a variety of different poetic meters and line lengths,
ranging from the trochaic tetrameters and pentameters of "Rot und
Weiss," with its masterly use of enjambement, beautifully unlike Giraud's
seemingly random use of the same gesture,
Ernst und schweigend streckt die Gebieterin
Nach Pierro! die geschmeidigen Hande aus.
Langsam wfihlt sie die Finger ins lockige
Haar und presst sein fieberndes Haupt an
Kalte, feste starrende Brtiste.
to the brief, breathless lines of "Gebet an Pierrot":
Pierro!! Mein Lachen
Hab ich verlernt!
Das Bild des Glanzes
Zerfloss!-Zertloss!
Hartleben often repeats key words or phrases in this emphatic and Expres-
sionistic way, unlike Giraud, who seems to shy away from bold accentua-
tion of any kind. The German translator also transforms Giraud's frequent
similes into metaphors or anthropomorphizing allegorical embodiments:
"the moon is a washerwoman" rather than "comme une lavandiere."
With similes, the poet shows his hand, interposing an analogy that comes
from outside, rather than seeming to originate within the poem itself, and
therefore lessens the confrontational effect of the image.
Hartleben translated all fifty poems in Giraud's order, but Schoenberg
of course set only twenty-one, less than half. The following table shows
which works from the complete Pierrot Lunaire Schoenberg selected and
their placement in the song cycle.
106
Han/eben's translation
I. Ein Bilhne
2. Feerie
3. Der Dandy
4. Schweres Loos
S. Eine blasse Wascherin
6. Serenade
7. Der Koch
8. Harlequinade
9. Nordpolfahrt
10. Colombine
II. Harlequin
12. Die Wolken
13. Mein Bruder
14. Raub
IS. Herbst
16. Mondestrunken
17. Galgenlied
18. Selbstmord
19. Nacht
20. Sonnen-Ende
21. Der kranke Mond
22. Absinth
23. KOpfe!KOpfe!
24. Enthauptung
25. Rot und Weiss
26. Y alse de Chopin
27. Die Kirche
28. Madonna
29. Rote Messe
30. Die Kreuze
31. Gebet an Pierro!
32. Die Yioline
33. Abend
34. Heimweh
3S. 0 alter Duft
36. Heimfahrt
37. Pantomime
38. Der Mondfleck
39. Das Alphabet
40. Das heilige Weiss
41. Morgen
42. Parodie
43. Moquerie
44. Die Lateme
4S. Gemeinheit!
46. Landschaft
47. lm Spiegel
48. Souper
49. Die Estrade
SO. BOhmischer Krystall
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Schoenberg'sOp. 21
3. Der Dandy
4. Eine blasse Wl!scherin
19. Serenade
2. Colombine
10. Raub
I. Mondestrunken
12. Galgenlied
8. Nacht
7. Der kranke Mood
13. Enthauptung
S. Y alse de Chopin
6. Madonna
II. Rote Messe
14. Die Kreuze
9. Gebel an Pierro!
IS. Heimweh
21. 0 alter Duft
20. Heimfahrt
18. Der Mondfleck
17. Parodie
16. Gerneinheit!
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Schoenberg ruthlessly pruned and re-arranged his chosen poems in order
to create three small, interrelated cycles from a non-cyclic source. The fact
that Giraud's collection has little apparent structure or schematic organiza-
tion, beyond the existence of an introduction and conclusion that frame
the fifty poems, is perhaps deliberate, the poetic concomitant of an interior
world that contains all sorts of images and notions jumbled together. The
raw material from which poetry, crafted and fashioned and molded,
eventually emerges is not itself logical and ordered, but is instead marked
by the obsessive, disordered repetition of certain themes and images and
by the discontinuity common in much of twentieth century art.
Schoenberg's purpose was different and required a different and
apparent structure. In the first group of seven poems, Schoenberg first
presents the poet revelling in the source of poetry, or moonlight, rejecting
the past-symbolized by crystal-, then growing swiftly more disturbed,
his mind more and more diseased and disordered. In the second and central
cycle, night descends, and terror, death, poetic martyrdom and sterility
close in, and in the final cycle, he becomes reconciled with his past, with
poetic tradition, and returns horne.
I. I. Mondestrunken II. 8. Nacht III. 15. Heimweh
2. Colombine 9. Gebet an Pierrot 16. Gemeinheit!
3. Der Dandy 10. Raub 17. Parodie
4. Eine blasse Wlischerin II. Rote Messe 18. Der Mondfleck
5. Valse de Chopin 12. Galgenlied 19. Serenade
6. Madonna 13. Enthauptung 20. Heimfahrt
7. Der kranke Mond 14. Die Kreuze 21. 0 alter Duft
To create the three smaller cycles, he omitted those poems that were ex-
traneous to his tale. The first two poems, "Eine Biihne" and "Feerie,"
have no mention of Pierrot, the moon, or poetry, and the references to
Breughel, Shakespeare, and Watteau in "Eine Biihne" would draw the
focus away from the hallucinatory inner world, outward into the reader's
historical past. Furthermore, "Feerie" is a daylight poem, while Op. 21
is a work that begins by night, sinks into even blacker and gloomier realms
in the central cycle, and only gradually emerges into the light of dawn in
the last two poems, "Heirnfahrt" and "0 alter Duft." The other daylight
poems, such as "Morgen" (no. 41),
Ein rosig blasser, feiner Staub
Tanzt frllh am Morgen auf den Grllsem.
Leis klingt ein Singen, heU und klar,
Gleich femem Himmelschor.
and "Feerie" are omitted. In "Morgen," the central figure is Cassander,
108 SUSAN YOUENS
the plump, boorish bourgeois, who pursues a sweet, young maiden through
the flowers in a beautiful daylit setting, with no mention of Pierrot.
Ein zartes, junges Dirnchen flieht
Scheu vor dem !Usternen Cassander.
Die weissen R6ckchen streifen Ieicht
Die Blumen-und es hebt sich duftend
Ein rosig blasser, feiner Staub.
The focus in the complete poems shifts away from the "moonstruck
Pierrot" rather frequently, but not so in the song cycle. Schoenberg thus
omits the three poems in which Harlequin is the central or the only figure:
number eight, "Harlequinade"; number eleven, "Harlequin"; and number
thirty-nine, "Das Alphabet," in which "lieutenant" Harlequin leads the
regiment of the vari-colored alphabet. The two beautifully lyrical commedia
scenas, without a trace of grotesquerie or terror, are also omitted: number
forty-eight, "Souper ," with its moonlit gondola for Pierrot and Colom-
bine, who has fireflies in her hair and withered violets strewn at her feet,
and number thirty-seven, "Pantomime," in which Pierrot sings a serenade
from the bushes with the blue Italian sky shining overhead. Pierro! is simply
an element of the decor in these two static, if delightful, tableaux; he is not
the central figure.
If Pierrot or the moon or poetry are missing, the poem is not included
in Op. 21. The fourth poem, "Schweres Loos," or "Deconvenue" in
Giraud, is certainly fanciful and grotesque-like a Breughel parable paint-
ing on gluttony, The Land of Cockaigne perhaps, with its brutish louts
deprived of their roasts, tarts, and quince jellies, while insects with blue
wing-sheaths thump at the rose windows-, and the commedia characters
are there-a group of "Gilles" pull grimaces in the corner-, but Pierrot
is not, neither are the moon and poetry, so the poem is excluded from the
cycle. Other commedia figures, Cassander and Columbine, only appear
in Schoenberg's Op. 21 when they react to something Pierrot does: Cassan-
der screaming in protest as Pierrot drills a hole in his head and smokes
Turkish tobacco through his human pipe. In "Gebet an Pierrot," someone
in mourning ("Schwarz weht die F1agge/Mir nun vom Mast") pleads with
Pierrot to restore light and laughter: one way to interpret the poem is to
infer that Pierrot, who wished to deflower Colombine in the tenth poem
(the second in Op. 21), has done so, and that she now pleads for an im-
possible return to innocence and joy, in one sense, to the commedia tradi-
tion in which she is courted and pursued but never won.
None of the landscape or nature poems lacking either Pierrot or the
moon are included, among them, number twelve, "Die Wolken" in which
the evening clouds, with their tints of ivory, gold, and pearl, are captured
by the Night in nets; number thirty-three, "Abend," with its melancholy
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white storks against a black background, the last rays of light shining from
a "hoffnungsleere Sonne"; and number forty-six, "Landschaft," in which
black birds cry out, a "cold, sad light" shines feebly through the grayish
atmosphere, and the sun, "yellow-red like a great egg," sinks. All three
poems have to do with sunset or the approach of night, three of five such
poems in Pierrot Lunaire. The others are number nineteen, "Nacht,"
which Schoenberg set and number twenty, "Sonnen-Ende," in which the
sun's blood flows out over the clouds and the land, dyeing both red, as
an exhausted young voluptuary, an unknown, unnamed creature, also
dies. Similarly, in number fifteen, "Herbst," an unnamed and terrified
figure trembles in the midst of an autumn landscape of withered, brown
leaves .... Hartleben transformed Giraud's peculiarly French concept
of "spleen" (the title of the poem) into the peculiarly German "Angst."
Of the sunset poems, Schoenberg chose the most violent and bizarre,
"Nacht," with its swarm of giant, black butterflies that kill the sun's rays
and omits the four other sunset poems. "Nacht" furthermore has signifi-
cant links with the end of Schoenberg's cycle: in "Nacht," a scent arises
from the depths, killing remembrance and accompanying the fall of utter
darkness, Aus dem Qualm verlorner Tiefen
Steigt ein Duft, Errinrung mordend!
while in the last poem, a scent from olden times returns to bewitch the
senses: 0 alter Duft-aus Marchenzeit,
Berauschest wieder meine Sinne!
Poetry, the moon, the poet: those crucial themes in Op. 21 are all
introduced in the first song of Schoenberg's cycle (the sixteenth poem of
Giraud's and Hartle ben's complete volume).
Den Wein, den man mit Augen trinkt,
Giesst Nachts der Mond in Wogen nieder,
Und eine Springflut Oberschwimmt
Den stillen Horizont.
Geliiste, schauerlich und sOss,
Durchschwimmen ohne Zahl die Fluten!
Den Wein, den man mit Augen trinkt,
Giesst Nachts der Mond in Wogen nieder.
Der Dichter, den die Andacht treibt,
Berauscht sich an dem heilgen Tranke
Gen Himmel wendet er verzOckt
Das Haupt und taume1nd saugt und schliirft er
Den Wein, den man mit Augen trinkt.
The moonlight is sacramental wine, an intoxicant that "the Poet" greedily
drinks "mit Augen." Wave after wave of moonlight floods "the still hori-
zon" with numberless desires and emotions until Pierrot/Poet is drunk
110 SUSAN YOUENS
and ecstatic. The moonlight is the source of poetry, filled with "Gelilste"
that are both dreadful and sweet, and the poet steeps himself in that light
until he is dizzied and staggers to and fro, his senses reeling. The Rimbaud-
esque perception that a poet must experience all sorts of desires, to the
point of saturation, "dereglement" and beyond, leads to unexpected and
undesirable results, not the making of a poet but very nearly his undoing.
In every detail of "Mondestrunken," there are links to other poems
that Schoenberg set in Op. 21, words, images, and themes: the wine is a
"holy drink" (Giraud speaks of "le poete religieux/De l'etrange absinthe
se sofile ... ") and poetry a mystical, religious experience ... art as a
religion whose adherents at times imitate, parody or invert the rituals and
symbols of Catholicism and whose "holy figures"-Poetry and the Poet-
suffer the martyrdom and death of Christ-figures. In the sixth poem,
"Madonna" (the twenty-eighth poem in Giraud/Hartleben), the poet begs
the "mother of all sorrows" (the moon?), with her bleeding breasts like two
red eyes-the poetic leitmotif of eyes again-, to mount the altar of his
verses and there hold the body of her son (the poet?) before mankind's
averted gaze, and in "Rote Messe," Pierrot celebrates a ghastly Com-
munion by ripping the heart out of his breast and offering this new Host,
the sacramental chalice that contains poetry, at the altar. "Madonna" and
"Rote Messe" are paired in the complete Pierrot Lunaire, but separated
in the cycle: "Madonna" is in the frrst cycle, "Rote Messe" in the second.
"Madonna" is linked to the image of the gentle maiden from the heavens
("sanfte Magd des Himmels," an expression that evokes both the Moon
and the Virgin Mary), but the moon-madonna who earlier washed "cloths
woven from light" (poems formed from the source of poetry?) is now
wounded and cradles her dead son. With the second cycle, the moonlight
disappears, and Pierrot becomes poet-priest-martyr.
When a swarm of giant moths extinguish the sun in "Nacht," dark-
ness falls. The entire central cycle is largely devoid of light,
Finstre, schwarze Riesenfalter
TOteten der Sonne Glanz.
("Nacht")
Das Bild des Glanzes
Zerfloss-Zerfloss!
("Gebet an Pierrot")
Durch die Finsterniss-
("Raub")
Durch schmerzensdunk1e Nacht ...
("Enthauptung")
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and the poems are shot through with references to the colors black and
red and to blood-no longer an analogy, as in "Valse de Chopin."
... schwarze Riesenfalter
("Nacht")
Schwarz weht die F1agge ...
("Gebet an Pierrot")
Rote, fllrstliche Rubine
Blutge Tropfen alten Ruhmes ...
("Raub")
Auf einem schwarzen Seidenkissen ...
("Enthauptung")
Die triefend rote Hostie:
Sein Herz-in blutgen Fingern-
("Rote Messe")
Dran die Dichter stumm verbluten, .. .
Prunkend in des Blutes Scharlach! .. .
Eine rote Konigskrone.
("Die Kreuze")
The blood-red rubies in the tombs are "like eyes," recalling the Madon-
na's wounded breasts, "wie Augen, rotund offen"-in each, a bloodshot
accusatory stare mutely confronts the guilty plunderer and anarchist.
The earlier poem also foreshadows Pierrot's and the poets' wounds
shortly after in the central section, when the blasphemer of religion
becomes himself a martyr. The blood and violence escalate in a terrifying
crescendo throughout the cycle, beginning with a monstrous nightfall
and Colombine's bitter prayer.
The thirteenth and fourteenth poems, "Enthauptung" (no. 24 in
the complete collection) and "Die Kreuze" (no. 39), exemplify Schoen-
berg's perception of close relationships between rondels separated in the
complete Giraud-Hartleben volume. The metaphor of poems as holy
crosses upon which mute, Christ-like poets bleed, their bodies pierced
by sword strokes and their heads crowned with the setting sun's blood-
red glow, is preceded in Op. 21 by a poem in which Pierrot paces in terror
before an eerie, hallucinatory vision of a sickle moon, metamorphosed
into a Turkish scimitar on a black silk cushion. If the moon is the fans
et origo of poetry in Pierro! lunaire, then perhaps the scimitar represents
the immense power of incipient poetry-the exotic weapon rests, not
yet in use, on the black cushion of an otherwise unilluminated night
sky-, its death-dealing potential and the poet's terror at such a dread
realization. "Die Kreuze" is the consequence of "Enthauptung": the
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112 SUSAN YOUENS
"schwelgten Schwerter" of "Die Kreuze" are multiples of the single
Turkish scimitar of number thirteen, and the feared decapitation in "Ent-
hauptung" is followed by "Tot das Haupt" at the close of the second
cycle. Mind and intellection (the head) are "dead," killed by rebellion
and the martyrdom that ensues.
When night falls ("Nacht"), a Pandora's Box of ills descends with
the darkness, the host of evils analogous to the flood of "Geliiste" in
the waves of moonlight at the beginning of the first cycle. Throughout
the second cycle, Pierro! is besieged by woes incurred in the first seven
poems: "Gebet an Pierro!," the second poem of the central segment, is
the response to the second poem of the first cycle, the consequences of
his desire in "Colombine." In "Raub," he and his companions (the
contemporaneous radical poets who have similarly swept tradition off
their dressing tables?) attempt to plunder the past of its jewels, tom
from their context, but without success; in "Rote Messe," he tears off
the garments of one priestly order and dedicates himself to another as
celebrant and Host alike; in "Galgenlied," he sings of the special inti-
macy between poets and death and in both "Enthauptung" and "Die
Kreuze" of the agony of poetic creation. Here, Pierrot reaps the con-
sequences of three actions in the first group: the draught of moonlight
so greedily imbibed in "Mondestrunken," the seduction so desperately
desired in "Colombine," and the disguise assumed in "Der Dandy"
when he rejects the past.
With the beginning of the third cycle, the tone of the poetry changes.
Pierro! hears a crystalline chiming sigh ... the word "crystalline" is an
indication that the sound comes from the past ... and, hearing it, for-
gets his sorrow: "Da vergisst Pierro! die Trauermienen! "-Hartle ben
emphasizes the infusion of new hope and meaning with an exuberance
not found in the more restrained Giraud. The floods of moonlight-
"eine Springflut" in number one and "lichtmeers Fluten" in number
fifteen-banished from the second cycle reappear, and the time of artistic
rebellion and sterility ("durch seines Herzens WU.ste"-the heart, the
seat of the emotions, not the head) is over. Hartleben obviously under-
stood the artist's relationship to the past in Giraud's volume and under-
scores it with a significant change of wording in his translation:
Comme un doux soupir de crista!
L 'arne des vieilles comedies
Se plaint des allures raidies
Du lent Pierrot sentimental.
Lieblich klagend-ein kristallnes Seufzen
Aus Italiens alter Pantomime,
Klingts heriiber: wie Pierro! so holzern,
So modern sentimental geworden.
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THE TEXTS OF PlERROT L U!,iAlRE 113
The note of mingled lamentation and accusation ("klagend")-the "old
pantomime" has missed the clown and mourned his absence-is placed
first, and the recurring "k" consonants lend a "klingendes" quality
lacking in the original French. It is the identification of Pierrot's spiritual
and poetic maladies with modernism, however, that distinguishes Hart-
leben's diamond from Giraud's duller ore and brings the allegory into
sharper focus at this, the turning point of the work.
In the final group of songs, the poet-Pierrot, no longer cowering
beneath the moon in fear, masters poetry and uses it to affect others.
In "Gemeinheit! ", he drills open Cassander's bourgeois skull, despite the
Philistine's piercing screams of protest, stuffs Turkish tobacco into the
grisly opening, and calmly smokes away. Just as the moon, the source
of poetry, is an intoxicant in the first poem of Op. 21, so Pierrot's
tobacco ... exotic and Turkish, like the scimitar in "Enthauptung" ...
acts on the reluctant Cassander like an intoxicant, filling the brain with
fumes of poetry. Again in "Serenade," Pierro! plays upon the outraged
and unwilling Cassander, the insensitive buffoon his favorite target once
more. The Picasso-esque clown's sadness and awkwardness, the mien of
a stork standing on one leg, are in contrast to the delicacy and sureness
with which he plays the viola. The grotesque and gigantic bow-Giraud's
shocking, violent imagery?-is necessary because ordinary instruments
cannot move such as Cassander; only the exaggeration of grotesquerie
can force them to take notice and react.
After Pierrot hears the voice of the past and remembers his origins
in "Heimweh," number fifteen, there follows a group of poems in which
he must accept, however sadly or resentfully at times, his identity as a
poet. Only then can he begin the journey to his homeland in "Heim-
fahrt," the next-to-last lied in Op. 21. In number eighteen, "Der Mond-
fleck," he sets out to seek that which others who are not poets seek,
fortune and adventure, but he discovers that his black garb (black again)
is indelibly stained with moonlight. Try though he might to rid himself
of the spot, he cannot ... he is marked as a poet. Significantly, the spot
is on the back of his garment, where he can only see it with difficulty,
but others can easily see it. He does not, one notices, attempt to remove
the garment itself.
Once Pierrot arrives back home in the last poem, "0 alter Duft
aus Marchenzeit," the "Geliiste, schauerlich und suss" of number one
become "Ein narrisch Heer von Schelmerein" that vanishes in the breeze,
and the "Duft, Errinrung mordend" of number eight is replaced by the
"alter Duft aus Marchenzeit." The dawn of "Heimfahrt" turns to day,
and the poet's "Unmut" disappears through a sunlit window, the oppo-
site of the "Geliiste" that descend with the rays of moonlight at the
114
SUSAN YOUENS
beginning of the tale. The fairy-tale props of the journey home to Ber-
gamo-a ray of moonlight as a rudder and a waterlily as a boat-belong
to a "Mlirchenzeit," an enchanted past that Pierrot reclaims. "Ein Mond-
strahl"-poetry-is the rudder or guide by which he returns to "die Iiebe
Welt" and to happiness; for the first time, the real world, sunlit and
beautiful, shines forth in all its glory, no longer hideously transformed
by moonlight misused.
In conclusion, Op. 21 is, at its core, the narration of an artist's
rejection of and reconciliation with his past, of the spiritual violence
that comes from the attempt to obliterate tradition and therefore to
deny who and what one is. Looking back at the time when Schoenberg
was working on the composition of Pierrot lunaire, the significance seems
both personal and historical, an exemplum of the artistic rebellion against
tradition before World War I and a foreshadowing of the chaos of the
war itself and the longing for order that followed. For Schoenberg, whe
told his students "Bach is the father of us all," who set "Nacht"-the
beginning of the nightfall of anarchy-as a passacaglia, awareness of the
past and its synthesis with the newer musical vocabularies of a changing
world were seemingly always present, but, for all the perils of biographi-
cal fallacy, there might have been a more personal meaning to the alle-
gorical journey of Pierrot Poet-Artist-Composer as well. Giraud's pil-
grimage apparently ended with the acceptance of the Parnassian creed,
but Schoenberg's journey "nach Bergamo, zur Heimat" was far more
intensive, ending only with his death.
Notes
'Albert Giraud, Pierrot lunaire, trans. by Otto Erich Hartleben (Berlin: Der Verlag
Deutscher Phantasten, 1893).
2
''BOhmischer Krystall''
Ein Strahl des Mondes, wohl verschlossen
Im Glass von bOhmischem Krystall,
Ein Kleinod, wundersam und selten,
1st dieses versetoUe Buch.
Ich hab mich als Pierro! verkleidet-
Ihr, die ich Iiebe, bring ich dar
Den Strahl des Mondes, wohl verschlossen
Im Glas von bOhmischem Krystall.
In diesem schimmemden Symbole
Liegt Alles, was ich hab und bin.
Gleichwie Pierrot im bleichen Schadel,
Trag ich in Herz und Sinnen nur
Den Strahl des Mondes-wohl verschlossen.
'See Allardyce Nicoll, The World of Harlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia
dell' Arte (Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 87.
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THE TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNAIRE 115
'See Robert F. Storey, Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask (Princeton University
Press, 1980).
'Nicoll, op. cit., p. 93. For a brief period during the first decade of the eighteenth
century, Watteau was the apprentice of the Parisian painter Claude Gillot, a member
of the Royal Academy. After Gillot introduced Watteau to the theatrical world, the Italian
troupe in Paris was thereafter one of his most frequent subjects, including the Arlequin
galant, Sous un habit de Mezzetin (1717?) in the Wallace Collection, L 'amour au theatre
italien (circa 1714) in Berlin, a painting in the Charlottenburg Castle in Berlin of a group
of Italian comedians at rest on the stone terrace of a chateau, Le Docteur trouvant sa
fi/le en teste d teste avec son amant of 1706, Les jaloux (17127), depicting Pierro! and
five other mascherate, Le Partie quam!e (1712), and others.
'There is a marked resemblance between the face of Gilles in Gilles and Watteau 's face
in a drawing by Boucher after a lost self-portrait by Watteau.
'Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, French Eighteenth Century Painters (N.Y.: CorneD
University Press, 1981, first ed. Phaidon Books 1948), trans. by Robin Ironside, p. 38.
'See Jules Gabriel Janin, Deburau: Histoire du Theatre a quatre sous (Paris: Librairie
des Bibliophiles, 1881, first edition, 1832). Janin describes the characterization of Pierro!
as Deburau's greatest triumph, and he includes the complete scenario for a highly complex
entertainment in ten scenes entitled "Ma Mere l'Oie ou Arlequin et l'oeuf d'or": Panto-
mime-Arlequinade-Feerie a grand spectacle." See also "Pierro! and Fin-de-Siec/e" by
A. G. Lehmann in Romantic Mythologies, ed. by tan Fletcher (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 209-223, also "The Sad Clown: some notes on a nineteenth-century
myth" by Francis Haskell in French Nineteenth Century Painting and Literature, ed. by
Ulrich Finke (Manchester University Press, 1972), p. 2f.
'Charles Baudelaire, "L'Essence du rire et generalement du comique dans Jes arts
plastiques" from Oeuvres completes: Curiosites estht!tiques, ed. by Jacques Crepe! (Paris:
Louis Conard, 1923), p. 389. Baudelaire contrasts the Pierro! of Deburau with an English
pantomime performance at the Theatre des Yarietes that made a great impression on him.
"1be first of the articles on Baudelaire appeared on 15 September 1881.
"Adolphe Willette, Feu Pierro! 1857-19? (Paris: H. Floury, ed., 1919).
"Theodore de BanviUe, Dans Ia Fournaise: Dernieres Poesies (Paris: Bibliotheque-
Charpentier, 1892), pp. 124-125.
11
Each of Guillemot's three dixains and the envoi, a cinquain, ends with the line,
"lis sautent en rond sous Ia June blanche." The pack of phantom Pierrots in Guillemot's
poem is compared in the second stanza to a flock of swans, and their gathering is caUed
"ce pale sabbat" ... cliches of literary Paris in the Decadence.
14
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 completes, ed. by Y.-G.
Le Dantec, ed. revised by Jacques Borel (Paris: Editions GaUimard, 1962), pp. 320-321.
"Brussels: Veuve Monnom, 1887. Heros et Pierrots was published in a volume that also
contained the earlier Pierrot works, Pierrot lunaire, "Pierrot Narcisse," and Les Demieres
Fetes (Paris: Collection des Poetes a l'etranger, 1898).
"See Lucien Christophe, Albert Giraud: Son Oeuvre et son temps (Brussels: Palais
des Academies, 1960), p. 16.
"Hans Landsberg, "Otto Erich Hartleben" in Moderne Essays, ed. by Landsberg
(Berline: Gose & Tetzlaff, 1905). "Auch in Hartleben wohnen zwei Seelen: die eine zum
Spot! und zur Karikatur ... die andere, von der Ahnung dunkler Tiefen erfilllt .... "
He has almost nothing to say about Pierrot lunaire. Cesar Flaischlen, in Otto Erich Hart-
/eben: Beitrag zu einer Geschichte der modernen Dichtung (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1896), p. 18.
Flaischlen, a friend of Hartleben's, a feUow poet, and the editor of the literary periodical
Pan, obviously could not begin to fathom Pierrot lunaire and says only, "Das Ganze
aber ist ein Buch, nur fiir-Verriickte" (p. 44).
"Otto Erich Hartleben, Briefe an Freunde, ed. by Franz Ferdinand Heitmueller (Berlin:
S. Fischer, 1912), pp. 162-163.
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