Pierrot

For other uses, see Pierrot (disambiguation).
Paul Legrand as Pierrot circa 1855. Photograph by Nadar.

Pierrot (French pronunciation: ​[pjɛʁo]) is a stock character of pantomime and Commedia dell'Arte whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne; the name is a hypocorism of Pierre (Peter), via the suffix -ot. His character in contemporary popular culture—in poetry, fiction, the visual arts, as well as works for the stage, screen, and concert hall—is that of the sad clown, pining for love of Columbine, who usually breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin. Performing unmasked, with a whitened face, he wears a loose white blouse with large buttons and wide white pantaloons. Sometimes he appears with a frilled collaret and a hat, usually with a close-fitting crown and wide round brim, more rarely with a conical shape like a dunce's cap. But most frequently, since his reincarnation under Jean-Gaspard Deburau, he wears neither collar nor hat, only a black skullcap. The defining characteristic of Pierrot is his naïveté: he is seen as a fool, often the butt of pranks, yet nonetheless trusting.

It was a generally buffoonish Pierrot that held the European stage for the first two centuries of his history. And yet early signs of a respectful, even sympathetic attitude toward the character appeared in the plays of Jean-François Regnard and in the paintings of Antoine Watteau, an attitude that would deepen in the nineteenth century, after the Romantics claimed the figure as their own. For Jules Janin and Théophile Gautier, Pierrot was not a fool but an avatar of the post-Revolutionary People, struggling, sometimes tragically, to secure a place in the bourgeois world.[1] And subsequent artistic/cultural movements found him equally amenable to their cause: the Decadents turned him, like themselves, into a disillusioned disciple of Schopenhauer, a foe of Woman and of callow idealism; the Symbolists saw him as a lonely fellow-sufferer, crucified upon the rood of soulful sensitivity, his only friend the distant moon; the Modernists converted him into a Whistlerian subject for canvases devoted to form and color and line.[2] In short, Pierrot became an alter-ego of the artist, specifically of the famously alienated artist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[3] His physical insularity; his poignant lapses into mutism, the legacy of the great mime Deburau; his white face and costume, suggesting not only innocence but the pallor of the dead; his often frustrated pursuit of Columbine, coupled with his never-to-be vanquished unworldly naïveté—all conspired to lift him out of the circumscribed world of the Commedia dell'Arte and into the larger realm of myth. Much of that mythic quality still adheres to the "sad clown" of the postmodern era.

Origins: seventeenth century

Antoine Watteau: Italian Actors, c. 1719. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

He is sometimes said to be a French variant of the sixteenth-century Italian Pedrolino,[4] but the two types have little but their names ("Little Pete") and social stations in common.[5] Both are comic servants, but Pedrolino, as a so-called first zanni, often acts with cunning and daring,[6] an engine of the plot in the scenarios where he appears.[7] Pierrot, on the other hand, as a "second" zanni, is a static character in his earliest incarnations, "standing on the periphery of the action",[8] dispensing advice that seems to him sage, and courting—unsuccessfully—his master's young daughter, Columbine, with bashfulness and indecision.[9]

His origins among the Italian players in France are most unambiguously traced to Molière's character, the lovelorn peasant Pierrot, in Don Juan, or The Stone Guest (1665).[10] In 1673, probably inspired by Molière's success, the Comédie-Italienne gave a performance of its addendum to the Don Juan legend, Sequel to "The Stone Guest", which included Molière's Pierrot. Thereafter the character—sometimes a peasant,[11] but more often now an Italianate "second" zanni—appeared fairly regularly in the Italians’ offerings, his role always taken by one Giuseppe Giaratone (or Geratoni), until the troupe was banished by royal decree in 1697.

Among the French dramatists who wrote for the Italians and who gave Pierrot life on their stage were Jean Palaprat, Claude-Ignace Brugière de Barante, Antoine Houdar de la Motte, and the most sensitive of his early interpreters, Jean-François Regnard.[12] He acquires there a very distinctive personality. He seems an anomaly among the busy social creatures that surround him; he is isolated, out of touch.[13] Columbine laughs at his advances;[14] his masters who are in pursuit of pretty young wives brush off his warnings to act their age.[15] His is a solitary voice, and his estrangement, however comic, bears the pathos of the portraits—Watteau's chief among them—that we will encounter in the centuries to come.

Eighteenth century

France

Antoine Watteau: Gilles (or Pierrot) and Four Other Characters of the Commedia dell'arte, c. 1718. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

An Italian company was called back to Paris in 1716, and Pierrot was reincarnated by the actors Pierre-François Biancolelli (son of the Harlequin of the banished troupe of players) and, after Biancolelli abandoned the role, the celebrated Fabio Sticotti (1676–1741) and his son Antoine-Jean (1715–1772).[16] But the character seems to have been regarded as unimportant by this company, since he appears infrequently in its new plays.[17]

His real life in the theater in the eighteenth century is to be found on the lesser stages of the capital, at its two great fairs, the Foires Saint-Germain and Saint-Laurent. There he appeared in the marionette theaters and in the motley entertainments—featuring song, dance, audience participation, and acrobatics—that were calculated to draw a crowd while sidestepping the regulations that ensured the Théâtre-Français a monopoly on "regular" dramas in Paris.[18] Sometimes he spoke gibberish (in the so-called pièces à la muette); sometimes the audience itself sang his lines, inscribed on placards held aloft by hovering Cupids (in the pièces à écriteau).[19] The result, far from "regular" drama, tended to put a strain on his character, and, as a consequence, the Pierrot of the fairgrounds is a much less nuanced and rounded type than we find in the older repertoire. This holds true even when sophisticated playwrights, such as Alain-René Lesage and his collaborators, Dorneval and Fuzelier, began (around 1712) to contribute more "regular" plays to the Foires.[20]

The broad satirical streak in Lesage often rendered him indifferent to Pierrot's character altogether, and consequently, as the critic Vincent Barberet observes, "Pierrot is assigned the most diverse roles . . . and sometimes the most opposed to his personality. Besides making him a valet, a roasting specialist, a chef, a hash-house cook, an adventurer, [Lesage] just as frequently dresses him up as someone else." In not a few of the early Foire plays, Pierrot's character is therefore "quite badly defined."[21] (For a typical farce by Lesage, see his Harlequin, King of Serendib of 1713.) In the main, Pierrot's years at the Foires were rather degenerate ones.[22]

An important factor that probably hastened this degeneration was the multiplicity of his fairground interpreters. One was the talented actor Jean-Baptiste Hamoche (active 1712–1718, 1721–1732), but there were also acrobats and dancers who appropriated the role, inadvertently reducing Pierrot to a generic type.[23] The extent of that degeneration may be gauged by the fact that Pierrot came to be confused, apparently because of his manner and costume, with that much coarser character Gilles,[24] as a famous portrait by Antoine Watteau attests (see inset).

But the mention of Watteau should also alert us to the fact that Pierrot, along with his fellow Commedia masks,[25] was beginning to be "poeticized" in this century—that he was beginning to be the subject, not only of poignant folksong ("Au clair de la lune", sometimes attributed to Lully), but also of the more ambitious art of Claude Gillot (Master André's Tomb [c. 1717]), of Gillot's students Watteau (Italian Actors [c. 1719]) and Nicolas Lancret (Italian Actors near a Fountain [c. 1719]), of Jean-Baptiste Oudry (Italian Actors in a Park [c. 1725]), and of Jean-Honoré Fragonard (A Boy as Pierrot [1776–1780]). This development will accelerate in the next century.

England

Before turning to that century, however, we should note that it was in this, the eighteenth, that Pierrot began to be naturalized in other countries. As early as 1673, just months after Pierrot had made his debut in the Sequel to "The Stone Guest", Scaramouche Tiberio Fiorilli and a troupe assembled from the Comédie-Italienne entertained Londoners with selections from their Parisian repertoire.[26] And in 1717, Pierrot's name first appears in an English entertainment: a pantomime by John Rich entitled The Jealous Doctor; or, The Intriguing Dame, in which the role was undertaken by a certain Mr. Griffin. Thereafter, until the end of the century, Pierrot appeared fairly regularly in English pantomimes (which were originally mute harlequinades but later evolved into the Christmas pantomimes of today; in the nineteenth century, the harlequinade was presented as a "play within a play" during the pantomime), finding his most notable interpreter in Carlo Delpini (1740–1828). His role was uncomplicated: Delpini, according to the popular theater historian, M. Willson Disher, "kept strictly to the idea of a creature so stupid as to think that if he raised his leg level with his shoulder he could use it as a gun."[27] So conceived, Pierrot was easily and naturally displaced by the native English Clown when the latter found a suitably brilliant interpreter. It did so in 1800, when "Joey" Grimaldi made his celebrated debut in the role.[28]

Francisco de Goya: Itinerant Actors (1793). Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Denmark

A more long-lasting development occurred in Denmark. In that same year, 1800, a troupe of Italian players led by Pasquale Casorti began giving performances in Dyrehavsbakken, then a well-known site for entertainers, hawkers, and inn-keepers. Casorti's son, Giuseppe (1749–1826), had undoubtedly been impressed by the Pierrots they had seen while touring France in the late eighteenth century, for he assumed the role and began appearing as Pierrot in his own pantomimes, which now had a formulaic structure (Cassander, father of Columbine, and Pierrot, his dim-witted servant, undertake a mad pursuit of Columbine and her rogue lover, Harlequin).[29] The formula has proven enduring: Pierrot is still a fixture at Bakken, the oldest amusement park in the world, where he plays the nitwit talking to and entertaining children, and at nearby Tivoli Gardens, the second oldest, where the Harlequin and Columbine act is performed as a pantomime and ballet. Pierrot—as "Pjerrot", with his boat-like hat and scarlet grin—remains one of the parks’ chief attractions.

Germany

Ludwig Tieck's The Topsy-Turvy World (1798) is an early—and highly successful—example of the introduction of the Commedia dell'Arte characters into parodic metatheater. (Pierrot is a member of the audience watching the play.)

Spain

The penetration of Pierrot and his companions of the Commedia into Spain is documented in a painting by Goya, Itinerant Actors (1793). It foreshadows the work of such Spanish successors as Picasso and Fernand Pelez, who also showed strong sympathy with the lives of traveling saltimbancos.

Nineteenth century

Pantomime of Deburau at the Théâtre des Funambules

Auguste Bouquet: Jean-Gaspard Deburau, c. 1830.

When, in 1762, a great fire destroyed the Foire Saint-Germain and the new Comédie-Italienne claimed the fairs’ stage-offerings (now known collectively as the Opéra-Comique) as their own, new enterprises began to attract the Parisian public, as little theaters—all but one now defunct— sprang up along the Boulevard du Temple. One of these was the Théâtre des Funambules, licensed in its early years to present only mimed and acrobatic acts.[30] This will be the home, beginning in 1816, of Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796–1846),[31] the most famous Pierrot in the history of the theater, immortalized by Jean-Louis Barrault in Marcel Carné's film Children of Paradise (1945).

Adopting the stage-name "Baptiste", Deburau played Pierrot, from about 1819, as the servant of the heavy father (usually Cassander), his mute acting a compound of placid grace and cunning malice. His style, according to Louis Péricaud, the chronicler of the Funambules, formed "an enormous contrast with the exhuberance, the superabundance of gestures, of leaps, that ... his predecessors had employed."[32] He altered the costume: freeing his long neck for comic effects, he dispensed with the frilled collaret; he substituted a skullcap for a hat, thereby keeping his expressive face unshadowed; and he greatly increased the amplitude of both blouse and trousers. Most importantly, the character of his Pierrot, as it evolved gradually through the 1820s, eventually parted company almost completely with the crude Pierrots—timid, sexless, lazy, and greedy—of the earlier pantomime.[33]

With him [wrote the poet and journalist Théophile Gautier after Deburau's death], the role of Pierrot was widened, enlarged. It ended by occupying the entire piece, and, be it said with all the respect due to the memory of the most perfect actor who ever lived, by departing entirely from its origin and being denaturalized. Pierrot, under the flour and blouse of the illustrious Bohemian, assumed the airs of a master and an aplomb unsuited to his character; he gave kicks and no longer received them; Harlequin now scarcely dared brush his shoulders with his bat; Cassander would think twice before boxing his ears.[34]

Deburau seems to have had a predilection for "realistic" pantomime[35]—a predilection that, as we will see, led eventually to calls for Pierrot's expulsion from it. But the pantomime that had the greatest appeal to his public was the "pantomime-arlequinade-féerie", sometimes "in the English style" (i.e., with a prologue in which characters were transformed into the Commedia types). The action unfolded in fairy-land, peopled with good and bad spirits who both advanced and impeded the plot, which was interlarded with comically violent (and often scabrous) mayhem. As in the Bakken pantomimes, that plot hinged upon Cassander's pursuit of Harlequin and Columbine—but it was complicated, in Baptiste's interpretation, by a clever and ambiguous Pierrot. Baptiste's Pierrot was both a fool and no fool; he was Cassandre's valet but no one's servant. He was an embodiment of comic contrasts, showing

imperturbable sang-froid [again the words are Gautier's], artful foolishness and foolish finesse, brazen and naïve gluttony, blustering cowardice, skeptical credulity, scornful servility, preoccupied insouciance, indolent activity, and all those surprising contrasts that must be expressed by a wink of the eye, by a puckering of the mouth, by a knitting of the brow, by a fleeting gesture.[36]

As the Gautier citations suggest, Deburau early—about 1828—caught the attention of the Romantics, and soon he was being celebrated in the reviews of Charles Nodier (Gautier's praise would follow), in an article by Charles Baudelaire on "The Essence of Laughter" (1855), and in the poetry of Théodore de Banville. A pantomime produced at the Funambules in 1828, The Gold Dream, or Harlequin and the Miser, was widely thought to be the work of Nodier, and both Gautier and Banville wrote Pierrot playlets that were eventually produced on other stages—Posthumous Pierrot (1847) and The Kiss (1887), respectively.[37]

"Shakespeare at the Funambules" and aftermath

In 1842, Deburau was inadvertently responsible for translating Pierrot into the realm of tragic myth, heralding the isolated and doomed figure—often the fin-de-siècle artist's alter-ego—of Decadent, Symbolist, and early Modernist art and literature. In that year, Gautier, drawing upon Deburau's newly acquired audacity as a Pierrot, as well as upon the Romantics’ store of Shakespearean plots and of Don-Juanesque legend, published a "review" of a pantomime he claimed to have seen at the Funambules.

Pierrot tickles Columbine to death. Drawing by Adolphe Willette in Le Pierrot, December 7, 1888, inspired by Paul Margueritte's Pierrot, Murderer of His Wife, 1881.

He entitled it "Shakespeare at the Funambules", and in it he summarized and analyzed an unnamed pantomime of unusually somber events: Pierrot murders an old-clothes man for garments to court a duchess, then is skewered in turn by the sword with which he stabbed the peddler when the latter's ghost lures him into a dance at his wedding. The pantomime under "review" was a fabrication (though it inspired a hack to turn it into an actual pantomime, The Ol’ Clo's Man [1842], in which Deburau probably appeared[38]—and also inspired Barrault's wonderful recreation of it in Children of Paradise). But it importantly marked a turning-point in Pierrot's career: henceforth Pierrot could bear comparisons with the serious over-reachers of high literature, like Don Juan or Macbeth; he could be a victim—even unto death—of his own cruelty and daring.

When Gustave Courbet drew a crayon illustration for The Black Arm (1856), a pantomime by Fernand Desnoyers written for another mime, Paul Legrand (see next section), the Pierrot who quakes with fear as a black arm snakes up from the ground before him is clearly a child of the Pierrot in The Ol’ Clo's Man. So, too, are Honoré Daumier's Pierrots: creatures often suffering a harrowing anguish.[39] In 1860, Deburau was directly credited with inspiring such anguish, when, in a novella called Pierrot by Henri Rivière, the mime-protagonist blames his real-life murder of a treacherous Harlequin on Baptiste's "sinister" cruelties. Among the most celebrated of pantomimes in the latter part of the century would appear sensitive moon-mad souls duped into criminality—usually by love of a fickle Columbine—and so inevitably marked for destruction (Paul Margueritte's Pierrot, Murderer of His Wife [1881]; the mime Séverin's Poor Pierrot [1891]; Catulle Mendès’ Ol’ Clo's Man [1896], modeled on Gautier's "review").[40]

Pantomime after Baptiste: Charles Deburau, Paul Legrand, and their successors

Nadar: Charles Deburau as Pierrot, 1854.

Deburau's son, Jean-Charles (or, as he preferred, "Charles" [1829–1873]), assumed Pierrot's blouse the year after his father's death, and he was praised for bringing Baptiste's agility to the role.[41] (Nadar's photographs of him in various poses are some of the best to come out of his studio—if not some of the best of the era.)[42]

But the most important Pierrot of mid-century was Charles-Dominique-Martin Legrand, known as Paul Legrand (1816–1898; see photo at top of page). In 1839, Legrand made his debut at the Funambules as the lover Leander in the pantomimes, and when he began appearing as Pierrot, in 1845, he brought a new sensibility to the character. A mime whose talents were dramatic rather than acrobatic, Legrand helped steer the pantomime away from the old fabulous and knockabout world of fairy-land and into the realm of sentimental—often tearful—realism.[43] In this he was abetted by the novelist and journalist Champfleury, who set himself the task, in the 1840s, of writing "realistic" pantomimes.[44] Among the works he produced were Marquis Pierrot (1847), which offers a plausible explanation for Pierrot's powdered face (he begins working-life as a miller's assistant), and the Pantomime of the Attorney (1865), which casts Pierrot in the prosaic role of an attorney's clerk.

Georges Wague in one of the cantomimes (pantomimes performed to off-stage songs) of Xavier Privas. Poster by Charles Léandre, 1899.

Legrand left the Funambules in 1853 for what was to become his chief venue, the Folies-Nouvelles, which attracted the fashionable and artistic set, unlike the Funambules’ working-class children of paradise. Such an audience was not averse to pantomimic experiment, and at mid-century "experiment" very often meant Realism. (The pre-Bovary Gustave Flaubert wrote a pantomime for the Folies-Nouvelles, Pierrot in the Seraglio [1855], which was never produced.)[45] Legrand often appeared in realistic costume, his chalky face his only concession to tradition, leading some advocates of pantomime, like Gautier, to lament that he was betraying the character of the type.[46]

But it was the Pierrot as conceived by Legrand that had the greatest influence on future mimes. Charles himself eventually capitulated: it was he who played the Pierrot of Champfleury's Pantomime of the Attorney. Like Legrand, Charles's student, the Marseilles mime Louis Rouffe (1849–1885), rarely performed in Pierrot's costume, earning him the epithet "l'Homme Blanc" ("The White Man").[47] His successor Séverin (1863–1930) played Pierrot sentimentally, as a doom-laden soul, a figure far removed from the conception of Deburau père.[48] And one of the last great mimes of the century, Georges Wague (1875–1965), though he began his career in Pierrot's costume, ultimately dismissed Baptiste's work as puerile and embryonic, averring that it was time for Pierrot's demise in order to make way for "characters less conventional, more human."[49] Marcel Marceau's Bip seems a natural, if deliberate, outgrowth of these developments, walking, as he does, a concessionary line between the early fantastic domain of Deburau's Pierrot and the so-called realistic world.

Pantomime and late nineteenth-century art

France

Popular and literary pantomime
Atelier Nadar: Sarah Bernhardt in Jean Richepin's Pierrot the Murderer, 1883. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
Jules Chéret: Title-page of Hennique and Huysmans' Pierrot the Skeptic, 1881.
Paul Cézanne: Pierrot and Harlequin, 1888. Pushkin Museum, Moscow.

In the 1880s and 1890s, the pantomime reached a kind of apogee, and Pierrot became ubiquitous.[50] Moreover, he acquired a counterpart, Pierrette, who rivaled Columbine for his affections. (She seems to have been especially endearing to Xavier Privas, hailed in 1899 as the "prince of songwriters": several of his songs ["Pierrette Is Dead", "Pierrette's Christmas"] are devoted to her fortunes.) A Cercle Funambulesque was founded in 1888, and Pierrot (sometimes played by female mimes, such as Félicia Mallet) dominated its productions until its demise in 1898.[51] Sarah Bernhardt even donned Pierrot's blouse for Jean Richepin's Pierrot the Murderer (1883).

But French mimes and actors were not the only figures responsible for Pierrot's ubiquity: the English Hanlon brothers (sometimes called the Hanlon-Lees), gymnasts and acrobats who had been schooled in the 1860s in pantomimes from Baptiste's repertoire, traveled (and dazzled) the world well into the twentieth century with their pantomimic sketches and extravaganzas featuring riotously nightmarish Pierrots. The Naturalists—Émile Zola especially, who wrote glowingly of them—were captivated by their art.[52] Edmond de Goncourt modeled his acrobat-mimes in his The Zemganno Brothers (1879) upon them; J.-K. Huysmans (whose Against Nature [1884] would become Dorian Gray's bible) and his friend Léon Hennique wrote their pantomime Pierrot the Skeptic (1881) after seeing them perform at the Folies Bergère. (And, in turn, Jules Laforgue wrote his pantomime Pierrot the Cut-Up [Pierrot fumiste, 1882] after reading the scenario by Huysmans and Hennique.)[53] It was in part through the enthusiasm that they excited, coupled with the Impressionists’ taste for popular entertainment, like the circus and the music-hall, as well as the new bohemianism that then reigned in artistic quarters like Montmartre (and which was celebrated by such denizens as Adolphe Willette, whose cartoons and canvases are crowded with Pierrots)—it was through all this that Pierrot achieved almost unprecedented currency and visibility towards the end of the century.

Visual arts, fiction, poetry, music, and film

He invaded the visual arts[54]—not only in the work of Willette, but also in the illustrations and posters of Jules Chéret;[55] in the engravings of Odilon Redon (The Swamp Flower: A Sad Human Head [1885]); and in the canvases of Georges Seurat (Pierrot with a White Pipe [Aman-Jean] [1883]; The Painter Aman-Jean as Pierrot [1883]), Léon Comerre (Pierrot [1884]), Henri Rousseau (A Carnival Night [1886]), Paul Cézanne (Pierrot and Harlequin [1888]), Fernand Pelez (Grimaces and Miseries a.k.a. The Saltimbanques [1888]), Pablo Picasso (Pierrot and Columbine [1900]), Guillaume Seignac (Pierrot's Embrace [1900]), and Édouard Vuillard (The Black Pierrot [c. 1890]). The mime "Tombre" of Jean Richepin's novel Nice People (Braves Gens [1886]) turned him into a pathetic and alcoholic "phantom"; Paul Verlaine imagined him as a gormandizing naïf in "Pantomime" (1869), then, like Tombre, as a lightning-lit specter in "Pierrot" (1868, pub. 1882).[56] Laforgue put three of the "complaints" of his first published volume of poems (1885) into "Lord" Pierrot's mouth—and dedicated his next book, The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon (1886), completely to Pierrot and his world. (Pierrots were legion among the minor, now-forgotten poets: for samples, see Willette's journal The Pierrot, which appeared between 1888 and 1889, then again in 1891.) In the realm of song, Claude Debussy set both Verlaine's "Pantomime" and Banville's "Pierrot" (1842) to music in 1881 (not published until 1926)—the only precedents among works by major composers being the "Pierrot" section of Telemann's Burlesque Overture (1717–22), Mozart's 1783 "Masquerade" (in which Mozart himself took the role of Harlequin and his brother-in-law, Joseph Lange, that of Pierrot),[57] and the "Pierrot" section of Robert Schumann's Carnival (1835).[58] Even the embryonic art of the motion picture turned to Pierrot before the century was out: he appeared, not only in early celluloid shorts (Georges Méliès's The Nightmare [1896], The Magician [1898]; Alice Guy's Arrival of Pierrette and Pierrot [1900], Pierrette's Amorous Adventures [1900]; Ambroise-François Parnaland's Pierrot's Big Head/Pierrot's Tongue [1900], Pierrot-Drinker [1900]), but also in Emile Reynaud's Praxinoscope production of Poor Pierrot (1892), the first animated movie and the first hand-colored one. (View Poor Pierrot.)

Belgium

Thus far the discussion has focused on the French pierrotistes, but Pierrot's popularity was by no means confined to France. Wherever "decadence" had taken hold, there he could be found.

Aubrey Beardsley: "The Death of Pierrot", The Savoy, August 1896.
Paul Hoecker: Pierrots with Pipes, c. 1900. Location unknown.

In Belgium, where the Decadents and Symbolists were as numerous as their French counterparts, Félicien Rops depicted a grinning Pierrot who is witness to an unromantic backstage scene (Blowing Cupid's Nose [1881]) and James Ensor painted Pierrots (and other masks) obsessively, sometimes rendering them prostrate in the ghastly light of dawn (The Strange Masks [1892]), sometimes isolating Pierrot in their midst, his head drooping in despondency (Pierrot's Despair [1892]), sometimes augmenting his company with a smiling, stein-hefting skeleton (Pierrot and Skeleton in Yellow [1893]). Their countryman the poet Albert Giraud also identified intensely with the zanni: the fifty rondels of his Pierrot lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot [1884]) would inspire several generations of composers (see Pierrot lunaire below), and his verse-play Pierrot-Narcissus (1887) offered a definitive portrait of the solipsistic poet-dreamer. The title of choreographer Joseph Hansen's 1884 ballet, Macabre Pierrot, created in collaboration with the poet Théo Hannon, summed up one of the chief strands of the character's persona for many artists of the era.

England

In the England of the Aesthetic Movement, Aubrey Beardsley's drawings attested profound kinship with the figure; Olive Custance (who would marry Oscar Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas) published the poem "Pierrot" in 1897; and Ernest Dowson wrote the verse-play Pierrot of the Minute (1897, illustrated by Beardsley), to which the composer Sir Granville Bantock would later contribute an orchestral prologue (1908). One of the gadflies of Aestheticism, W. S. Gilbert, introduced Harlequin and Pierrot as love-struck twin brothers into Eyes and No Eyes, or The Art of Seeing (1875), for which Thomas German Reed wrote the music. And he ensured that neither character, contrary to many an Aesthetic Pierrot, would be amorously disappointed.

In a more bourgeois vein, Ethel Wright painted Bonjour, Pierrot! (a greeting to a dour clown sitting disconsolate with his dog) in 1893. And the Pierrot of popular taste also spawned a uniquely English entertainment. In 1891, the singer and banjoist Clifford Essex returned from France enamored of the Pierrots he had seen there and resolved to create a troupe of English Pierrot entertainers. Thus were born the seaside Pierrots (in conical hats and sometimes black or colored costume) who, as late as the 1950s, sang, danced, juggled, and joked on the piers of Brighton and Margate and Blackpool.[59] Obviously inspired by these troupes were the Will Morris Pierrots, named after their Birmingham founder. They originated in the Smethwick area in the late 1890s and played to large audiences in many parks, theaters, and pubs in the Midlands. It was doubtless these popular entertainers who inspired the academic Walter Westley Russell to commit The Pierrots (c. 1900) to canvas.

Pierrot and Pierrette (1896) was a specimen of early English film from the director Birt Acres. For an account of the English mime troupe The Hanlon Brothers, see France above.

Germany

In Germany, Frank Wedekind introduced the femme-fatale of his first "Lulu" play, Earth Spirit (1895), in a Pierrot costume; and when the Austrian composer Alban Berg drew upon the play for his opera Lulu (unfinished; first perf. 1937), he retained the scene of Lulu's meretricious pierroting. In a similarly (and paradoxically) revealing spirit, the painter Paul Hoecker put cheeky young men into Pierrot costumes to ape their complacent burgher elders, smoking their pipes (Pierrots with Pipes [c. 1900]) and swilling their champagne (Waiting Woman [c. 1895]). (See also Pierrot lunaire below.)

Italy

Canio's Pagliaccio in the famous opera (1892) by Leoncavallo is close enough to a Pierrot to deserve a mention here. Much less well-known is the musical "mimodrama" of Vittorio Monti, Noël de Pierrot a.k.a. A Clown's Christmas (1900), its score set to a pantomime by Fernand Beissier, one of the founders of the Cercle Funambulesque.[60] (Monti would go on to claim his rightful fame by celebrating another spiritual outsider, much akin to Pierrot—the Gypsy. His Csárdás [c. 1904], like Pagliacci, has found a secure place in the standard musical repertoire.)

North America

Pierrot and his fellow masks were late in coming to America, which, unlike England, Russia, and the countries of continental Europe, had had no early exposure to Commedia dell'Arte. The Hanlon-Lees made their first U.S. appearance in 1858, and their subsequent tours, well into the twentieth century, of scores of cities throughout the country accustomed its audiences to their fantastic, acrobatic Pierrots.[61] But the Pierrot that would leave the deepest imprint upon the American imagination was that of the French and English Decadents, a creature who quickly found his home in the so-called little magazines of the 1890s (as well as in the poster-art that they spawned). The earliest and most influential of these, The Chap-Book (1894–98), which featured a story about Pierrot by the aesthete Percival Pollard in its second number,[62] was soon host to Beardsley-inspired Pierrots drawn by E.B. Bird and Frank Hazenplug.[63] (The Canadian poet Bliss Carman should also be mentioned for his contribution to Pierrot's dissemination in mass-market publications like Harper's.)[64] Like most things associated with the Decadence, such exotica discombobulated the mainstream American public, who regarded the little magazines in general as "freak periodicals" and declared, through one of their mouthpieces, Munsey's Magazine, that "each new representative of the species is, if possible, more preposterous than the last."[65]

The fin-de-siècle world in which this Pierrot resided was clearly at odds with the reigning American Realist and Naturalist aesthetic (though such figures as Ambrose Bierce and John LaFarge were mounting serious challenges to it). It is in fact jarring to find the champion of American prose Realism, William Dean Howells, introducing Pastels in Prose (1890), a volume of French prose-poems translated by Stuart Merrill and containing a Paul Margueritte pantomime, The Death of Pierrot, with words of warm praise (and even congratulations to each poet for failing “to saddle his reader with a moral”).[66] So uncustomary was the French Aesthetic viewpoint that, when Pierrot made an appearance in an eponymous pantomime (1893) by Alfred Thompson, set to music by the American composer Laura Sedgwick Collins, The New York Times covered it as an event, even though it was only a student production. It was found to be “pleasing” because, in part, it was “odd”.[67] Not until the first decade of the next century, when the great (and popular) fantasist Maxfield Parrish worked his magic on the figure, would Pierrot be comfortably naturalized in America.

Central and South America

Inspired by the French Symbolists, especially Verlaine, Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan poet widely acknowledged as the founder of Spanish-American literary Modernism (modernismo), placed Pierrot ("sad poet and dreamer") in opposition to Columbine ("fatal woman", the arch-materialistic "lover of rich silk garments, golden jewelry, pearls and diamonds")[68] in his 1898 prose-poem The Eternal Adventure of Pierrot and Columbine.

Russia

In the last year of the century, Pierrot appeared in a Russian ballet, Harlequin's Millions a.k.a. Harlequinade (1900), its libretto and choreography by Marius Petipa, its music by Riccardo Drigo, its dancers the members of St. Petersburg's Imperial Ballet. It would set the stage for the later and greater triumphs of Pierrot in the productions of the Ballets Russes.

Early twentieth century (1901-1950)

The Pierrot bequeathed to the twentieth century had acquired a rich and wide range of personae. He was the naïve butt of practical jokes and amorous scheming (Gautier); the prankish but innocent waif (Banville, Verlaine, Willette); the narcissistic dreamer clutching at the moon, which could symbolize many things, from spiritual perfection to death (Giraud, Laforgue, Willette, Dowson); the frail, neurasthenic, often doom-ridden soul (Richepin, Beardsley); the clumsy, though ardent, lover, who wins Columbine's heart,[69] or murders her in frustration (Margueritte); the cynical and misogynous dandy, sometimes dressed in black (Huysmans/Hennique, Laforgue); the Christ-like victim of the martyrdom that is Art (Giraud, Willette, Ensor); the androgynous and unholy creature of corruption (Richepin, Wedekind); the madcap master of chaos (the Hanlon-Lees); the purveyor of hearty and wholesome fun (the English pier Pierrots)—and various combinations of these. Like the earlier masks of Commedia dell’Arte, Pierrot now knew no national boundaries. Thanks to the international gregariousness of Modernism, he would soon be found everywhere.[70]

In this section, with the exception of productions by the Ballets Russes (which will be listed alphabetically by title) and of musical settings of Pierrot lunaire (which will be discussed under a separate heading), all works are identified by artist; all artists are grouped by nationality, then listed alphabetically. Multiple works by artists are listed chronologically.

Non-operatic works for stage and screen

Plays, playlets, pantomimes, and revues

Vsevolod Meyerhold dressing as Pierrot for his own production of Alexander Blok's Fairground Booth, 1906.

Ballet, cabaret, and Pierrot troupes

Alexander Vertinsky as Pierrot. Poster by pre-revolutionary unknown artist.
Asta Nielsen as Pierrot in Urban Gad's Behind Comedy's Mask (1913). Poster by Ernst Deutsch-Dryden.

Films

Visual arts

Works on canvas, paper, and board

Maxfield Parrish: The Lantern-Bearers, 1908. Appeared as frontispiece of Collier's Weekly, December 10, 1910.
Konstantin Somov: Lady and Pierrot, 1910. The Picture Gallery, Odessa, Ukraine.
Vasilij Suhaev and Alexandre Yakovlev: Harlequin and Pierrot (Self-Portraits of and by Suhaev and A. Yakovlev), 1914. Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg.
Juan Gris: Pierrot, 1919. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Gris: Pierrot, 1921. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

Sculptures and constructions

Literature

Poetry

Fiction

Music

Songs and song-cycles

Instrumental works (solo and ensemble)

Works for orchestra

Operas, operettas, and zarzuelas

Late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries (1951- )

In the latter half of the twentieth century, Pierrot continued to appear in the art of the Modernists—or at least of the long-lived among them: Chagall, Ernst, Goleminov, Hopper, Miró, Picasso—as well as in the work of their younger followers, such as Gerard Dillon, Indrek Hirv, and Roger Redgate. And when film arrived at a pinnacle of auteurism in the 1950s and '60s, aligning it with the earlier Modernist aesthetic, some of its most celebrated directors—Bergman, Fellini, Godard—turned naturally to Pierrot.

But Pierrot's most prominent place in the late twentieth century, as well as in the early twenty-first, has been in popular, not High Modernist, art. As the entries below tend to testify, Pierrot is most visible (as in the eighteenth century) in unapologetically popular genres—in circus acts and street-mime sketches, TV programs and Japanese anime, comic books and graphic novels, children's books and "young adult" fiction (especially fantasy and, in particular, vampire fiction), Hollywood films, and pop and rock music. He generally assumes one of three avatars: the sweet and innocent child (as in the children's books), the poignantly lovelorn and ineffectual being (as, notably, in the Jerry Cornelius novels of Michael Moorcock), or the somewhat sinister and depraved outsider (as in David Bowie's various experiments, or Rachel Caine's vampire novels, or the S&M lyrics of the English rock group Placebo).

The format of the lists that follow is the same as that of the previous section, except for the Western pop-music singers and groups. These are listed alphabetically by first name, not last (e.g., "Stevie Wonder", not "Wonder, Stevie").

Non-operatic works for stage and screen

Plays, pantomimes, variety shows, circus, and dance

Films, television, and anime

David Bowie as Pierrot on cover of "Ashes to Ashes" single, 1980

Visual arts

Literature

Poetry

Fiction

Comic books

Music

Western classical

Vocal
Instrumental
Opera

Rock/pop

Group names and costumes
Songs, albums, and rock musicals

Pierrot lunaire

The fifty poems that were published by Albert Giraud (born Emile Albert Kayenbergh) as Pierrot lunaire: Rondels bergamasques in 1884 quickly attracted composers to set them to music, especially after they were translated, somewhat freely, into German (1892) by the poet and dramatist Otto Erich Hartleben. (Hartleben later went on to write his own Pierrot poems—"The Harp"[78] and five rondels titled Pierrot, Married Man.) The best known of these settings is the atonal song-cycle derived from twenty-one of the poems (in Hartleben's translation) by Arnold Schoenberg in 1912: Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds Pierrot lunaire (Thrice-Seven Poems from Albert Giraud's Pierrot lunaire—Schoenberg was numerologically superstitious). But the poems have dense histories as songs and sets of songs both before and after Schoenberg's landmark Opus 21. The bullet-point that follows lists early twentieth-century musical settings chronologically and notes how many poems were set by each composer (all, except Prohaska's, are in the Hartleben translations) and for which instruments.

As an homage to Schoenberg, the English composers Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle founded The Pierrot Players in 1967; they performed under that name until 1970. 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. 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.)[81]

Schoenberg's Pierrot has kindled inspiration not only among fellow composers but also among choreographers and singer-performers. Dancers who have staged Pierrot lunaire have included the Russian-born American Adolph Bolm (1926), the American Glen Tetley (1962), the German Marco Goecke (2010) and the French Kader Belarbi (2011). Also, the avant-garde Triadic Ballet (1923) by Oskar Schlemmer and Paul Hindemith was inspired by Schoenberg’s song-cycle. 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 was toured in 2012 to mark the centennial of Schoenberg's composition of Pierrot lunaire, was conceived, directed, and choreographed by Mark DeChiazza. (View preview.)

Schoenberg has also attracted at least one parodist: in 1924, Hans Eisler published Palmström (Studies on 12-tone Rows), in which a Sprechstimme vocalist, singing texts by Christian Morgenstern, parodies the musical lines of Pierrot to the accompaniment of flute (or piccolo), clarinet, violin (or viola), and violincello.

How inextricable the Giraud and Hartleben poems had become by the late twentieth century is suggested by two works. The first, Pierrot Lunaire of 1982, is a retranslation of the Hartleben versions back into French by the poets Michel Butor and Michel Launay, who conclude the volume with poems of their own inspired by Giraud. The second, Variations: Beyond Pierrot (1995), is a work by the American composer Larry Austin. Each of its three ten-minute sections features a Sprechstimme soprano who sings fragments of Schoenberg's twenty-one selections accompanied by flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. She sometimes renders those fragments in Giraud's original French, sometimes in Hartleben's German, at other times in English and Japanese. Drawing upon live computer-processed sound and computer-processed prerecorded tape, the composition attempts (in Austin's words) to go "beyond Schoenberg's musical melodrama" to create a "multi-lingual dream of the essences of the poems".[82]

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, chimes, and beatbox. The English texts were derived from literal translations of Giraud's poems by Kay Bourlier.[83]

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. The seven poems she selected—"The Clouds", "Decor", "Absinthe", "Suicide", "The Church", "Sunset", and "The Harp",[78] none used by Schoenberg—were merely "points of departure" for her suite for mixed ensemble.[84]

In 2013, the Arab-American composer Mohammed Fairouz set the poet Wayne Koestenbaum's ten Pierrot Lunaire poems (2006)[85]—all original in content, though retaining titles from the Giraud/Schoenberg cycles—to a theatrical score for tenor and the Pierrot ensemble. 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, Diana Vreeland. ..."[86]

The painters Paul Klee, Theodor Werner, Marc Chagall, Markus Lüpertz, and Fernando Botero have all produced a Pierrot Lunaire (in 1924, 1942, 1969, 1984, and 2007, respectively). The British writer Helen Stevenson published a Chinese-box-like, postmodern set of variations on Giraud's poems in her 1995 novel Pierrot Lunaire,[87] and Bruce LaBruce released his Canadian/German film Pierrot Lunaire, a gender-bending interpretation of the Schoenberg cycle, in 2014. Pierrot Lunaire is also a very familiar figure in postmodern popular art: Brazilian, Italian, and Russian rock groups have called themselves Pierrot Lunaire.[88] The Soft Machine, a British group, included the song "Thank You Pierrot Lunaire" in its 1969 album Volume Two. 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.: Midnight in the House of Hurt (2008), Batman acquired a new nemesis, who shadowed him for eight more issues: his name was Pierrot Lunaire.

Carnival and Pierrot Grenade

Pierrot, usually in the company of Pierrette or Columbine, appears among the revelers at many carnivals of the world, most notably at the festivities of Uruguay. His name suggests kinship with the Pierrot Grenade of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, but the latter seems to have no connection with the French clown. Pierrot Grenade is apparently descended from an earlier creature indeed called "Pierrot"—but this name seems to be an outsider's "correction" of the regional "Pay-wo" or "Pié-wo", probably a corruption of "Pay-roi" or "country king," which describes the stature to which the figure aspired.[89] This "Pierrot"—extinct by the mid-twentieth century—was richly garbed, proud of his mastery of English history and literature (Shakespeare especially), and fiercely pugnacious when encountering his likes.[90] Pierrot Grenade, on the other hand, whose name suggests descent from the humble island of Grenada (and who seems to have evolved as a hick cousin of his namesake), dresses in ragged strips of colored cloth, sometimes adorned with cheap trinkets; he has little truck with English culture, but displays his talents (when not singing and dancing) in speechifying upon issues of the day and spelling long words in ingenious ways.[91] A feeble fighter, he spars mainly with his tongue—formerly in Creole or French Patois, when those dialects were common currency—as he circulates through the crowds. Around the mid-twentieth century, he traveled about in pairs or larger groups, contending for supremacy among his companions,[92] but by the dawn of the twenty-first century, he had become rather solitary, a vestige of his former gregarious self. (View a dancing Pierrot Grenade.)

Notes

  1. ↑ Janin called Deburau's Pierrot "the people among the people" (pp. 156-57); Gautier identified him as "the modern proletarian, the pariah, the passive and disinherited being" (V, 24).
  2. ↑ On Pierrot in the art of the Decadents and Symbolists, see Pantomime and late nineteenth-century art; for his image in the art of the Modernists, see, for example, the Juan Gris canvases reproduced in Works on canvas, paper, and board.
  3. ↑ For studies of the relationship between modern artists and clowns in general, see Régnier, Ritter, and Starobinski. On the modern artist specifically as a Pierrot, see Storey, Pierrot: a critical history, pp. 93–193, and all of his Pierrots on the stage; also Green and Swan, Kellein, Palacio, Sensibar.
  4. ↑ Sand, Duchartre, and Oreglia see a close family resemblance between—if not an interchangeability of—both characters. Mic claims that an historical connection between Pedrolino and "the celebrated Pierrots of [Adolphe] Willette" is "absolutely evident" (p. 211). Nicoll writes that Pedrolino is the "Italian equivalent" of Pierrot (World, p. 88). As late as 1994, Rudlin (pp. 137-38) renames Pierrot "Pedrolino" in a translation of a scene from Nolant de Fatouville's Harlequin, Emperor of the Moon (1684): see Gherardi, I, 179.
  5. ↑ There is no documentation from the seventeenth century that links the two figures. In fact, what documentation does exist links Pierrot, not with Pedrolino, but with Pulcinella. "Dominique" Biancolelli, Harlequin of the first Comédie-Italienne in which Pierrot appeared by name, noted that "The nature of the rôle is that of a Neapolitan Pulcinella a little altered. In point of fact, the Neapolitan scenarii, in place of Arlecchino and Scapino, admit two Pulcinellas, the one an intriguing rogue and the other a stupid fool. The latter is Pierot's [sic] rôle: MS 13736, Bibliothèque de l'Opéra, Paris, I, 113; cited and tr. Nicoll, Masks, p. 294.
  6. ↑
    Pedrolino scuffles with the Doctor, 1621.
    In one of the few extant contemporary illustrations involving Pedrolino—i.e., the frontispiece of Giulio Cesare Croce's Pedrolino's Great Victory against the Doctor Gratiano Scatolone, for Love of the Beautiful Franceschina (1621)—the zanni is shown thrashing the Doctor rather savagely (and, as the title indicates, victoriously). Such aggressive ferocity is nowhere to be seen, early or late, in the behavioral repertoire of Pierrot.
  7. ↑ He appears in forty-nine of the fifty scenarios in Flaminio Scala's Il teatro delle favole rappresentative (1611) and in three of the scenarios in the unpublished "Corsini" collection. Salerno has translated the Scala scenarios; Pandolfi (V, 252–276) has summarized the plots of the "Corsini" pieces.
  8. ↑ "Indeed, Pierrot appears in comparative isolation from his fellow masks, with few exceptions, in all the plays of Le Théâtre Italien, standing on the periphery of the action, commenting, advising, chiding, but rarely taking part in the movement around him": Storey, Pierrot: a critical history, pp. 27-28.
  9. ↑ See the discussion in Storey, Pierrot: a critical history, pp. 22–28.
  10. ↑ Fournier, p. 113, provides the information for this paragraph.
  11. ↑ See, e.g., Act III, scene iii of Eustache le Noble's Harlequin-Aesop (1691) in the Gherardi collection.
  12. ↑ See especially Regnard's Happy-Go-Lucky Harlequin (1690), The Wayward Girls (1690), and The Coquette (1691); Palaprat's The Level-headed Girl (1692); Houdar de la Motte's The Eccentrics (Les Originaux [1693]) ; and Brugière de Barante's The False Coquette (1694). All appear in the Gherardi collection.
  13. ↑ See, e.g., the Scene des remontrances of Regnard's Wayward Girls in the Gherardi collection.
  14. ↑ See Act I, scene v of Regnard's La Coquette and Act III, scene i of Houdar de la Motte's The Eccentrics (Les Originaux), both in the Gherardi collection.
  15. ↑ See, e.g., Act I, scene ii of Palaprat's Level-Headed Girl in the Gherardi collection.
  16. ↑ Courville, II, 104; Campardon, Comédiens du roi, II, 145; Meldolesi.
  17. ↑ In the last (1753) edition of the Nouveau Théâtre Italien, he appears only once—in Delisle de la Drévetière's The Falcon and the Eggs of Boccaccio (1725). The new company still produced pieces from the first Comédie-Italienne; they were added to the repertoire in 1718: Gueullette, pp. 87ff.
  18. ↑ For a full account of the struggle of the fair theaters to survive despite official opposition, see Bonnassies.
  19. ↑ These developments occurred in 1707 and 1708, respectively; see Bonnassies.
  20. ↑ See Lesage and Dorneval. The plays of Alexis Piron, with their Pierrots reminiscent of Giaratone's creation, are exceptions to this generalization. See Trophonius's Cave (1722) and The Golden Ass (1725) in Piron. For a full discussion, see Storey, Pierrot: a critical history, pp. 37–58.
  21. ↑ Barberet, p. 154; tr. Storey, Pierrot: a critical history, pp. 52, 53.
  22. ↑ The situation enjoyed some improvement in the 1720s and '30s, when Lesage and his collaborators began drawing upon the plots of the Thousand and One Nights, recently translated into French by Antoine Galland, for their plays. See Storey, Pierrot: a critical history, pp. 54-56.
  23. ↑ On Hamoche and other Pierrot interpreters at the fairs, see Parfait, I, 33–38, 42, and Campardon, Spectacles, I, 391-93.
  24. ↑ On Gilles and his confusion with Pierrot, see Storey, Pierrot: a critical history, pp. 74–81.
  25. ↑ Both masked and unmasked characters of the Commedia were known as "masks": see Andrews, p. xix.
  26. ↑ On the French players in England, and particularly on Pierrot in early English entertainments, see Storey, Pierrot: a critical history, pp. 82–89.
  27. ↑ Disher, p. 135.
  28. ↑ Findlater, p. 79.
  29. ↑ "Casorti", Gyldendals encyklopædi.
  30. ↑ The chief historian of the Funambules is Péricaud.
  31. ↑ On Deburau's life, see Rémy, Jean-Gaspard Deburau; on his pantomime, see Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 7–35.
  32. ↑ Péricaud, p. 28; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 31–32.
  33. ↑ On the early Pierrots, see Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 12–13.
  34. ↑ In La Presse, January 25, 1847; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p 111.
  35. ↑ See Švehla, pp. 26–32.
  36. ↑ In La Presse, August 31, 1846; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 30.
  37. ↑ For a full discussion of the connection of all these writers with Deburau's Pierrot, see Storey, Pierrot: a critical history, pp. 104, 110–112, and Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 7, 74–151.
  38. ↑ Gautier's "review" appeared in the Revue de Paris on September 4, 1842, but the manuscript of The Ol’ Clo's Man that was submitted for approval to the censor's office before production of the pantomime bears the date October 17, 1842. Many passages in the manuscript were obviously plagiarized from Gautier's "review." The MS survives in the Archives Nationales de France as document F18 1087, manuscript #4426. For details, as well as the argument that Deburau appeared in the pantomime, see Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 41–44.
  39. ↑
    Jean-Léon Gérôme: Duel after a Masked Ball, 1857. Condé Museum, Chantilly.
    Thomas Couture: The Supper after the Masked Ball, c. 1855. The Art Institute of Chicago.
    See Lawner, pp. 161–163. Of course not all mid-century painters were afflicted with the Romantics’ mal du siècle. Jean-Léon Gérôme seems to have painted his Duel after a Masked Ball (1857) solely for the sake of the drama inherent in Pierrot's slumped and dying body, his blood slowly staining the snow as Harlequin, his assassin, walks calmly away. Thomas Couture's Pierrot paintings—especially The Supper after the Masked Ball (c. 1855), with its Pierrot enthroned on a banquet table, gazing down ruefully at his passed-out fellow-revelers—have sometimes a frankly vulgar (which is to say, a solidly commercial) appeal.
  40. ↑ On these pantomimes and on late nineteenth-century French pantomime in general, see Storey, Pierrot: a critical history, pp. 115-33, and Pierrots on the stage, pp. 253-315.
  41. ↑ See, e.g., Gautier in Le Moniteur Universel, August 30, 1858; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 59.
  42. ↑ For a gallery of these photographs, see "Pierrots". Google Images.
  43. ↑ Many reviewers of his pantomimes make note of this tendency: see, e.g., Gautier, Le Moniteur Universel, October 15, 1855; July 28, 1856; August 30, 1858; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 66–68.
  44. ↑ Champfleury, p. 6.
  45. ↑ The pantomime is summarized and analyzed by Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 152–179.
  46. ↑ On the Folies-Nouvelles, Legrand's pantomime, and Champfleury's relationship to both, see Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 36–73.
  47. ↑ Séverin, p. 47.
  48. ↑ Séverin, p. 179.
  49. ↑ Wague, pp. 8–11, 17; Rémy, George Wague, p. 27.
  50. ↑ On late nineteenth-century French pantomime, see Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 253-315.
  51. ↑ See Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 284–294.
  52. ↑ See Cosdon.
  53. ↑ On the influence of the Hanlons on Goncourt and Huysmans and Hennique, see Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 182–188, 217–222; on the influence of Huysmans/Hennique on Laforgue's pantomime, see Storey, Pierrot: a critical history, p. 145, 154.
  54. ↑ See Lawner; Kellein; also the plates in Palacio, and the plates and tailpieces in Storey's two books.
  55. ↑ For posters by Willette, Chéret, and many other late nineteenth-century artists, see Maindron.
  56. ↑ For a full discussion of Verlaine's many versions of Pierrot, see Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 230-52.
  57. ↑ Deutsch, p. 213. The score, which is fragmentary, exists as K. 446.
  58. ↑ Debussy may have added the operetta Mon ami Pierrot (1862) by Léo Delibes, whom he admired, to this list. He probably would have excluded Jacques Offenbach's Pierrot Clown, a theater score of 1855.
  59. ↑ See Pertwee.
  60. ↑ Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 286.
  61. ↑ For an exhaustive account of the Hanlons' appearances in America (and elsewhere), see Mark Cosdon, "A Chronological Outline of the Hanlon Brothers, 1833 - 1931."
  62. ↑ "For a Jest's Sake" (1894).
  63. ↑ See reproductions (in poster form) in Margolin, pp. 110, 111.
  64. ↑ See Carman's "The Last Room. From the Departure of Pierrot" (1899).
  65. ↑ Summer issue, 1896; cited in Margolin, p. 37.
  66. ↑ Merrill, p. vii.
  67. ↑ “Pierrot at Berkeley Lyceum”, New York Times, December 8, 1893.
  68. ↑ Sarabia, p. 78.
  69. ↑ This is the case in many works by minor writers of the fin-de-siècle—e.g., Léo Rouanet, The Belly and Heart of Pierrot (1888), summarized in Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 299–300.
  70. ↑ See Green and Swan.
  71. ↑ See Clayton, p. 137.
  72. ↑ Charlie Chaplin remarked in his Autobiography that his Little Tramp was "a sort of Pierrot" (p. 224).
  73. ↑ A variant of the poem is entitled "To a Pierrette with Her Arm Around a Brass Vase as Tall as Herself." It appears in an appendix in Moore, pp. 401–402.
  74. ↑ 74.0 74.1 Hughes’ "A Black Pierrot" was set to voice and piano by William Grant Still as part of Still's Songs of Separation (1945); Hughes’ "Pierrot" was set to voice and piano by Howard Swanson in 1950. Hughes' "Heart" was set to voice and piano (as "Pierrot [Heart]") by Michael Schachter in 2011. Teasdale's "Pierrot" was set to voice and piano by Jesse Johnston (1911), Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1912), Josephine McGill (1912), Walter Meyrowitz (1912), Helen Livingstone (1913), Ernst R. Kroeger (1914), Harold Vincent Milligan (1917), Mark Andrews (1919; also a version for chorus and piano, 1929), Jessie L. Gaynor (1919), Wintter Watts (1919), Dagmar de Corval Rybner (1921), Homer Samuels (1922), Gardner Read (1943), and Robert F. Baksa (2002; #4 of Teasdale Songs entitled "Portrait of Pierrot"). As "Pierrot Stands in the Garden", it was set to voice and piano by Eugene M. Bonner in 1914; and as the opening song of the cycle First Person Feminine, it was set to chorus and piano by Seymour Barab in 1970.
  75. ↑ See Palacio, pp. 40-50, for a discussion of the relationship between Lulu, "la Clownesse androgyne" of both Champsaur and Wedekind, and Pierrot.
  76. ↑ See, e.g., Bordet.
  77. ↑ [[♪]] Berryz Koubou - Kokuhaku no Funsui Hiroba, PROJECThello.com, retrieved 2 September 2013
  78. ↑ 78.0 78.1 The composer Otto Vrieslander indicated in his score to "Die Harfe" (1908) that the text is a translation of a poem by Giraud. Richter notes, however, that he has "been unable to locate the original" (p. xxiii), making it likely that Vrieslander's German version is an original poem by Hartleben. Such is Marsh's conclusion: Marsh, "A multicoloured alphabet", p. 107, n. 30.
  79. ↑ Although Hartleben's translations did not appear in print until 1892, they were familiar earlier to the literary community through his readings: Marsh, "A multicoloured alphabet", p. 107.
  80. ↑ "Appendix: Musical Pierrots around 1900" in Brinkmann, pp. 163ff.
  81. ↑ Daniel Cariaga, "First eight premieres of 'Pierrot Project'", Los Angeles Times, February 5, 1988; Martin Bernheimer, "'Pierrot' sequels via Schoenberg Institute", Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1988; Gregg Wager, "Nine premieres in third 'Pierrot Project' concert", Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1989; Timothy Mangan, "Final installment of Pierrot Project at USC", Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1990.
  82. ↑ Quoted in Richter, p. xxix.
  83. ↑ See Marsh, "The Translations", p. 18, as well as the notes on the individual tracks, pp. 3–5, in the booklet accompanying the CDs.
  84. ↑ Helen Grime, Programme Note.
  85. ↑ From Koestenbaum's collection Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films (New York: Turtle Point Press, 2006).
  86. ↑ Wayne Koestenbaum, "Premise".
  87. ↑ The would-be artist of that novel, Talbot Hardy, muses at one point that there must be "an original Pierrot Lunaire somewhere, of which they were making more and more perfect copies all the time" (p. 203). The student of postmodernism will rightly be suspicious of that "perfect".
  88. ↑ The Russian group is always referred to in English as The Moon Pierrot, but the Russian name (Лунный Пъеро) is translated more accurately as "Pierrot Lunaire".
  89. ↑ Carr, p. 283.
  90. ↑ Carr, pp. 281-82.
  91. ↑ Carr, pp. 283-84.
  92. ↑ Carr, pp. 284-85.

References

Further reading

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