EXCAVATING AN ALLEGORY:

THE TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNAIRE

Susan Youens

For

his song cycle Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 of 1912,

Schoenberg selected twenty-one poems from the fifty rondels in Pierrot
Lunaire (1884) by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud, a collection translated
into German in 1891- 1892 by the poet and playwright Otto Erich Hartleben
(1864-1905).' Through his choice and arrangement of those twenty-one
poems, Sehoenberg carved from Giraud's collection of harlequinades the
tripartite tale of a creative artist's rebellion and frenzied "dereglement
des sens," the sterility and des pair that follow, and, finally, the journey
horne. The cycle ends in reconciliation with the past and recognition of a
new artistic order in which those elements of beauty and value from the
past, from tradition and one's cultural homeland, are incorporated.
Nach Bergamo, zur Heimat,
Kehrt nun Pierrot zurck,
Schwach dmmert schon im Osten
Der grne Horizont

--Der Mondstrahl ist das Ruder .

Fron/ispiece by Ado/phe Willelle, one oI /he Iounders oI/he Cha/ Noir in Mon/martre, JOT thejirst issue 0/ the arlts/ic journal Le Pierrot, Ire Annee. no. J, 6 Juillet
1888, with the coption, "La Parisienne: Pierrot blanc. Pierrot noir, je vous lais chevaliers du elair de Lune; allez. boycottez et amusez-moi'"

This allegory of a modern artist is present within Giraud's and Hartleben's Pierrot Lunaire, but scattered throughout the volume and obscured
from view by glimpses into other corners of Pierrot-Poet's often chaotic
inner world. Schoenberg recognized affinities between poems dispersed
throughout the work and rearranged them in order to clarify those relationships, heighten the effect of the recurring images, and trace more
clearly the steps of the Poet's progression from ecstasy to despair and
finally to peace and homecoming. To do so, he pruned away all the
poems from which either Pierrot or the moon is absent: the tale unfolds
by night, and the Moon is the embodiment of Poetry and Pierrot's alter
ego, the very souree of poetry at the beginning of Op. 21.
Schoenberg never, to my knowledge, explained or diseussed the rationale of his choice and ordering of the twenty-one poems in the cycle,
but it is easy to reeognize in Op. 21 a more meaningful order than the

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(deliberately?) jumbled series of fifty poems in the complete GiraudHartleben collection. There, the poet's mind leaps from one image, phantasm, fear, or caprice to another in the seemingly irrational fashion of
an unfettered imagination- behind the inscrutable mask of a clown is
unregulated whimsy. The pairs or even trios of successive poems linked
by a common image or theme always give way in Giraud's and Hartleben's
work 10 a disconcerting change of scene, a leap to another region of a
psychic landscape outside the dictates of Reason and the waking world.
Schoenberg imposed a coherent structure on those poems he chose and, in
so doing, excavated from the targer souree its principal "idea" cr "con-

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 hirnself: in the last poem, "Cristal de Boheme," he writes
that he wears Pierrot's garb and is a Pierrot-" Je suis un Pierrot costume"

or, in Hartleben's translation, with its changed nuances, "Ich hab mich als
Pierrot verkleidet".' Pierrots were endemie everywhere in late nineteenth l
early twentieth century Europe as an archetype of the self-dramatizing
artist, who presents to the world a stylized mask both to symbolize and
veil artistic ferment, to distinguish the creative artist from the human being.
Behind the all-enveloping traditional costume of white blouse, white trousers, and floured face, the Pierrot-character changed with the passage of
time, from uncaring prankster to Romantic malheureux to Dandy, Decadent, and finally, into a brilliant, tormented figure submerged in a bizarre,
airless inner world. The Pierrots of the 1880's had already, before Giraud's
Pierrot Lunaire, assumed a sadistic and sinister guise, so to find hirn
thieving and torturing was nothing new, but here, he is in turn tortured
and killed, the prey of self-exacerbated agonies of the mind and imagination. 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 overwrought fancy.
Giraud's Pierrot evolved from the zannis, or comic clown-servant figures from Bergamo who were part of the panoply of stock characters in the
commedia deli 'arte. Pierrot's most distant ancestor was Pulcinella, a
character created in Naples who, chameleon-like,
played many roles' and
,
who had a knack for parody, pranks, and playing the imposter. The French
Pierrot became a distinct figure, differentiated from the Italian Pulcinella
or Pedrolino, during the early days of the commedia dell'arte in France
during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pierrot and another

A sketch 01 Albert Giraud (born Albert Kayenbergh in Louvain, 1860-1929) Irom

Camille Hantet, Les Ecrivains Belges Contemporains de langue fran~aise 1800-1946,
val. 1 (Liege: H. Dessain, 1946), p. /45. Giraud initially hoped 10 become a concer!
pianist.

Photograph 0/ Quo Erich Hart/eben fram the jrontispiece 10 Otto Erich Hartleben .
Briefe an Freunde. vo/. 2, ed. by Franz Ferdinand Heilmue/ler (Eer/in: S. Fische;
Verlag, 1912).

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of the zannis- Harlequin- developed into more fixed and easily identifiable personalities in France, the central characters in such late seventeenthcentury plays as "Arlequin Empereur de la Lune" by a certain Monsieur
Anne de Fatouville (died ca. 17(0), 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 transfigurations of Pierrot into the melancholy artist-prototype:' here, as in Arlequin,
Pierrot et Scapin of 1716, and, most strikingly, in Oilles (another name
far the French Pierrot), Pierrot is the central figure, clearly separate from
the remainder of the troupe. (It is in part this detachment, this aloofness
from the quotidian life around hirn, that appealed so strongly to nineteenthcentury France). In Oilles, he is larger-than-life, larger than the other
comedians dustered in back of his feet and legs, who seem to leer and
gossip and peer in other directions while he looks straight ahead. Tbe fullfrontal pose is expressive of a self-sufficient, lonely pride and of vulnerability, the latter quality heightened by the hands hanging limply at his
sides. The unblinking gaze, resigned and withdrawn, seems to see through
and beyond the viewer, ' and yet, the passivity has a certain air of confrontation as well.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, in their essay on Watteau, later published in L 'Art au dix-huilieme siecle, made of the eighteenth-century
master the precursor " ... of the modern artist in the fine, the disinterested
sense, the modern artist in pursuit of an ideal, despising money, careless
of the morrow, leading a hazardous ... a bohemian . .. existence" 7 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, accarding
to Romantic legend, "lyrical personages, " no longer real. This cf course is

Watteau through nineteenth century eyes that saw in the paintings "a world
beyond" and in the artist hirnself a Romantic befare his time, an inaccurate
conception and thoroughly tainted by the biographical fallacy but powerful
and long-lived: Giraud begins his Pierrot Lunaire by dreaming of a " ...
theatre de chambre/Dont Breughel peindrait les volets (the Breughel of
Dulle Griet, surely?),/ Shakespeare, les pales palais, lEt Watteau, les fonds
couleur d'ambre".

Gille, by Antoine Watteau (1684- 1721), in the Louvre, one 01 the painter's last
works. Same art hislorians, including Donald Posner in Antoine Watteau (London:
Weidenjeld & Nicolson. 1984), p. 270. conjecture that /he painting was intended os
a shopsign Jor the actar Bel/on;, who opened a cole after his retirement Irom the
foires.

Other Pierrot-incarnations after the eighteenth-century playactors in

Watteau's sunlit canvases went into the making of Giraud's moonstruck
poet, induding the "nouveau Pierrot" created by the famous Parisian
pantomime artist Jean-Gaspard, called Baptiste, Deburau (1796-1846) at
the Thetre des Funambules, the Deburau subsequently of Jean-Louis
Barrault in "Les Enfants du Paradis.'" Deburau changed the traditional
costume, leaving off the frilled white ruff and donning instead a black skull-

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eap, and, more important, altered the familiar eharaeterizations of the

prankish buffoon or the melaneholy and lovesiek suitor by adding elements
of perversion, of macabre and violent actions committed by an insouciant,

jaded, detaehed, ironie ereature, no longer naive. Baudelaire wrote of

hirn in his study "De l'Essenee du rire et generalement du eomique dans
les arts plastiques" as a mysterious creature, "pale as the IDoon ... supple
and mute as a serpent. "9 Giraud, who wrote three essays on Baudelaire's
poetry published in the Jeune Revue Litteraire in 1881," would surely have

known both Baudelaire's essay and Deburau. Certainly Baudelaire's influenee is evident in mueh of Giraud's poetry: the spleen, grotesquerie, allegories of the Poet and the World, the fascination with death and vice, entire
borrowed phrases and images, have their souree in Les F1eurs du mal.
Deburau's Pierrot quickly found its way into written theatre, both
lighthearted farees such as "Pierrot Posthume: Arlequinade en un aete
et en vers" by Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), first performed at the
Theatre du Vaudeville on Oetober 4, 1847, and, later, the bizarre mimeeomedies of the Belle Epoque. Despite the suggestively maeabre title,
Gautier's play is an amusing pasquinade, but there are hints of the later
moondrunk ereature: in a monologue in scene iv, Pierrot speaks of Colombine's disquiet when she discovers his true nature after their marriage"Elle s'inquietait de mes ehants la lune, / De mes moyens de vivre et de
chereher fortune." Almost forty years before Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire, the
down has a1ready become a nocturnal prowler. Later, the Parisian artist and
earicaturist Adolphe Willette (1857- 1926)" made of Pierrot an even more
sophisticated deseendant of the earlier dandies-Giraud refers to Willette
in the thirty-eighth poem of Pierrot Lunaire, "Brosseur de lune": "Un
tres pale rayon de lune/Sur le dos de son habit noir,iPierrot-Willette sort
1e soir /Pour aller en bonne fortune" (Hartleben omits the topieal-nationa1istie referenee in his translation). Theodore de Banville (1823-1891) also
sang the newly-transformed Pierrot's praise in his poem" Au Pierrot de
Willette," written in 1884, the same year that Pierrot Lunaire appeared:
Cher Pierrot, qui d'un clin d'oeil
Me mentre tout ce qui m'aime,
J'aime ta joie, et ton dueil

Meme!
Taime ton regard de feu,
Ta bravoure et ton coeur mle,
Bien que tu sembles un peu
Ple. L2

In 1888, Willette founded a short-lived weekly artistie and satirieal journal in Paris ealled 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 LUNA/RE

'0'

a "Pierrot blane" dressed in the traditional white-smoeked eostume and

a "Pierrot nair," who combines the white Tuff, floury make-up, skulleap, and slippers of older Pierrots with blaek evening dress, half Parisian
sophisticate and half eommedia down. For the frontispieee of the first
issue on 6 July 1888, both the "Pierrot blane" and Willette's "Pierrot
noir" are dubbed "chevaliers du Clair de Lune" by a bare-breasted
woman, her scepter ornamented with acrescent moon, who seems a
debased, cafe-concert descendant of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the
People. The journal is filled with poetry, farces, miniature dramas about
the commedia characters, induding works in which Giraud's influence
is apparent ... "La Ballade des Pierrots Morts" by Maurice Guillemot,
a moonlight poem in three dizains and an Invoi (sie) begins with apolar
scene,
Sur les fonds blemis du ciel boreal.
Les nuits de Noel, quand la lune est claire,
Les Pierrots dHunts, fils de l'Ideal.
Montent des tombeaux au pays polaire. I'

reminiscent of the ninth poem, "Pierrot Polaire," in Pierrot Lunaire.

Pierrots like Giraud's wreak havoc in other late nineteenth century
works as weil. Joris-Karl Huysmans eollaborated with the writer Leon
Hennique and an artist named Jules Cheret on a drama, part pantomime
action, part written dialogue, entitled "Pierrot sceptique," printed in
1881, in which Pierrot is utterly unaffected by the death of his wife and
runs off with the "femme de carton" Therese when his tailor's skeleton
is discovered in his doset." Willette in Le Pierrot illustrated an advertisement for a pantomime, Paul Margueritte's "Pierrot assassin de sa
fernrne" in which Sarah Bernhardt played the leading role in 1883 at
the Trocadero. But the dosest kin to Giraud's Pierrot lunaire is Verlaine's
mad, phosphorescent specter of a "Pierrot" (1868, published in 1882),
a figure unlike the better-known Pierrot of "Pantomime" in Fetes galantes (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 windingsheet, a personification of the inmost terrors of the death-obsessed soul.
Avec le bruit d'un vol d'oiseaux de nuit qui passe,
Ses manches blanches font vaguement par l'espace
Des signes fous auxquels personne ne repond.
Ses yeux sont deux grands trous ou rampe du phosphore
Et la farine rend plus effroyable encore
Sa face exsangue aux nez pointu de moribond. 1 S

Giraud's Pierrot is less horrifie of countenance, but his mad gestures

and violent actions fill fifty poems, not one. The hallucinatory mayhem

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is gentled, however, rendered in pastels by a poet seemingly incapable

of a forcefulness of expression to match the content and images of his
poetry.
Pierrot Lunaire was the first of three Pierrot works by the Belgian
poet and literary critic Jean Heurtaut, born in Louvain on 23 June 1860
and died in Brussels on 26 December 1929. The second was "Pierrot
Narcisse" (1887), averse play in alexandrines which Giraud described on
the title page as a "songe d'hiver, comedie fiabesque," and the third and
last, published in 1898, was Heros et Pierrots." In "Pierrot Narcisse,"
the clown, long an egocentric narcissist, falls in love with his own reflection 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 dedication to uPierrot Narcisse/' Giraud writes that Pierrot, a creature "sans
profession," would be his lifelong shadow:
Voici bien trcis ans et demi
Que j'ai rirne "Pierrot Lunaire."
Je suis eneore ton ami:

e'est vraiment extraordinaire.

e'est pourquoi, - puisque e'est mon sort,
Captif de la rime et du nombre,
D'avoir Pierrot jusqu'a la mort
A cte du mai, comme une ombre ...

HeurtautiGiraud's memoirs, published the year he died in 1929, are

entitled Les souvenirs d'un 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 Schumann's troupe of F1orestan, Eusebius, and Magister Raro. Pierrot removes
his mask to reveal Albert Giraud who in turn strips off his mask to reveal
a shadowy figure named Heurtaut about whom we know very little.
We do know, from Giraud's own testimony, that Pierrot Lunaire is
the poetic record of his rebellion against and return to those Parnassian
ideals which he had earlier condemned:
Petits rapsodes impeccables, ennemies de la passion et I'eloquence, cherehant
I'absolue beaute dans la ligne et dans la couleur, pipeurs de rirnes et de metres.
impersonnels par necessite, originaux par imitation, gonfIes d'erudition,
pedante, indechiffrables comme des sphinx. 17

Only a few years after writing this tirade, Giraud was hirnself concerned
with line and meter, the imitation of past masters and forms-fifty rondels
in a row-, and ingenious rhymes. His first volume as a penitent Parnassian
returned to the fold is divided between a smaller number of pastel or beautifully jewelled landscapes, purely Iyrical evocations- the great purpie and

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gold birds of "Decor," the clouds like celestial fish with fins of gold,
pearl, and ivory in "Les Nuages," the fireflies sprinkled across the ladies'
gowns in the fete galante of "Souper sur I'eau"- and the gruesome,
macabre images that predominate. Pierrot drills hole in the screaming
Cassander's skulI, an executioner strides about with a dripping basket
full of decapitated heads, a tubercular moon oozes white blood, the sun
opens up its veins and red blood stains the sky, Pierrot quakes in terror
beneath a giant scimitar-horror piled upon horror in a crescendo throughout the volume, relieved only periodically by images of unalloyed beauty.
And yet, the power of these images is weakened, at times negated entirely
by Giraud's flat, paIlid, remote tone, an unemotionaI narrative manner,
dry and distanced that is often at variance with the subject. 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
Laforgue, was no master of irony.
Hartleben utterly transforms Giraud's poetry for the better-immeasurably better. lt is a rare occurrence when a translation transcends its
source, when literature of less than the first rank is elevated to a considerably higher level through the intermediary of the translator , but
Pierrot lunaire in Hartleben's German is one of those rare instances. It is
as if Giraud's rondels were a draft in one language for Hartleben's "finished" work in another. Hartleben surpassed his own original works by far
with Pierrot lunaire-the erotic comedies, the charming but inconsequential
Iyric verse, the satires, and the single tragedy, famous in its day, are not
nearly its equal." He worked on the translations for six years, and, in a
letter to a friend and fellow writer Otto Julius Bierbaum, said that he
labored so hard on this task that many of the poems existed in three or
four 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, weil sie wirklich nicht
von mir sind. Albert Giraud ist ein lebender Belgier. Seine Sachen sind bei
Lacombeez in Brussel erscheinen.
Allerdings-von diesen bersetzungen gehrt viel mir. Ich habe vielfach
berhaupt nicht "bersetzt," sondern nur ein Motiv aus dem franzsischen
Gedichte genommen und darber meins geschrieben . Ob das "erlaubt" ist oder
nicht, ist mir schnuppe, wenn nur was dabei herauskommt. Ich "arbeite" an
dieser Sammlung seit 1886, also sechs Jahre. Immer wieder bin ich mit zher
Liebe daran gegangen, manches ist drei-, viermal gedichtet. Ich hoffe also,
dass die Verse wirklich nicht den Eindruck von bersetzungen machen. 19

Significantly, Hartleben 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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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 ironie
that poetry with so much blood and violence and pillage should be so
intrinsically bloodless, even when he is depicting a fantastic and horrifying
scene. The slimy, pulpy creatures that grip the poet's ship in the sea of
absinthe and sink it (number twenty-two, "Absinthe"), the vampire-like
and monstrous black butterflies in search of blood to drink (number nineteen, "PapilIons Noir") appear and disappear seemingly without a trace of
surprise, horror, cr strang emotion of any kind on Giraud's cr Pierrot's
part. Hartleben breaks up the even flow of Giraud's flat and preternaturally
calm recitation with fragmented phrases, exclamations, and questions,
much more vivid language expressive of stronger feelings . In order to do
so, he sometimes omits entirely one of Giraud's images and substitutes a
more colorful one of his own invention-in place of the slimy eddy or
backwash into which the poet's ship sinks in the last stanza of "Absinthe,"
Hartleben introduces a giant arm that suddenly appears from nowhere ...
attached to what or whom? ... and knocks the mast off the ship, sinking it:
Giraud
Mais soudain ma barque est etreinte
Par des poulpes visqueux et mous:
Au milieu d'un gluant remous
Je disparais, sans une plainte,
Dans une immense mer d 'absinthe.
Hartleben
Doch wehe! Was umklammert jah
Mein Schiff'?-Polypen, widrig, klebrig!
Ein Riesenarm zerknickt den MastUnd ohne Klagelaut versink ich
Im Ozeane des Absinths .

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105

The change of verb tense from past and imperfect in Giraud to present
tense in Hartleben's translation, along with the breathless, agitated , telegraphie exclamations in the German, make the bizarre scene come alive.
Similarly, in the thirty-eighth poem, "Brosseur de lune," when Pierrot
first discovers the speck of moonlight on the back of his coat, Giraud
writes in his customary flat, narrative tone, "Mais sa toilette l'importune."

which Hartleben in "Der Mondfleck" translates as "Pltzlich- strt ihn

was an seinem Anzug ... ". Later in the same poem, when Giraud in a

matter-of-fact way says, "11 s'imagine que c'est une /Tache de pltre .. . ",
Hartleben, typically for hirn, breaks the line up into jagged fragments .. .
" Warte! denkt er: das ist so ein Gipsfleck! I Wischt und wischt, dochbringt ihn nicht herunter!". Giraud's almost unvarying octosyllabic lines
become in Hartleben a variety of different poetic meters and line lengths,
ranging from the trochaic tetrameters and pentameters of " Rot und
Weiss ," with its masterly use of enjambement , beautifully unlike Giraud's
seemingly random use of the same gesture,
Ernst und schweigend streckt die Gebietenn
Nach Pierrot die geschmeidigen Hnde aus.
Langsam whlt sie die Finger ins lockige
Haar und presst sein fieberndes Haupt an
Kalte, feste starrende Brste.

to the brief, breathless lines of "Gebet an Pierrot " :

Pierrot! Mein Lachen
Hab ich verlernt!
Das Bild des Glanzes
Zerflosst - Zerfloss!

Hartleben often repeats key words or phrases in this emphatic and Expressionistic way, unlike Giraud, who seems to shy away from bold accentuation of any kind. The German translator also transforms Giraud's frequent
similes into metaphors or anthropomorphizing allegorical embodiments:
"the moon is a washerwoman" father than "camme une lavandiere."
With similes, the poet shows his hand, interposing an analogy that comes
from outside, rather than seeming to originate within the poem itself, and
therefore lessens the 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.

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Hartleben 's translation

Schoenberg'sOp.21

1. Ein BOhne
2. Feerie
3. DerDandy
4. Schweres Loos

5. Eine blasse Wscherin

6. Serenade

3. Der Dandy
4. Eine blasse Wscherin
19. Serenade

7. Der Koch

8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

Harlequinade
Nordpolfahrt
Colombine
Harlequin
Die Wolken

2. Colombine

13. Mein Bruder

14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.

Raub
Herbst
Mondestrunken
Galgenlied
Selbstmord
Nacht
Sonnen-Ende

21. Der kranke Mond

22.
23.
24.
25.

Absinth
Kpfe!Kpfe!
Enthauptung
Rot und Weiss

26. VaIse de Chopin

27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.

Die Kirche
Madonna
Rote Messe
Die Kreuze
Gebet an Pierrot
Die Violine

33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.

Abend
Heimweh
0 alter Duft
Heimfahrt
Pantomime
Der Mondfleck
Das Alphabet
Das heilige Weiss
Morgen
Parodie
Moquerie
Die Laterne
Gemeinheit!
Landschaft
Im Spiegel
Souper
Die Estrade
Bhmischer Krystall

10. Raub
I. Mondestrunken
12. Galgenlied
8. Nacht
7. Der kranke Mond

13. Enthauptung
5. Valse de Chopin
6.
11.
14.
9.

Madonna
Rote Messe
Die Kreuze
Gebet an Pierrot

15. Heimweh
21. 0 alter Duft
20. Heimfahrt
18. Der Mondfleck

17. Parodie

16. Gemeinheit!

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107

Sehoenberg ruthlessly pruned and re-arranged his chosen poems in order

to ereate three smalI, interrelated eydes from a non-eydic source. The fact
that Giraud's eolleetion has little apparent strueture or sehematic organization, beyond the existenee of an introduction and eondusion that frame
the fifty poems, is perhaps deliberate, the poetie eoneomitant of an interiar
world that contains all sorts of images and notions jumbled together. The
raw material from whieh poetry, erafted and fashioned and molded,
eventually emerges is not itself logical and ordered, but is instead marked
by the obsessive, disordered repetition of eertain themes and images and
by the diseontinuity eommon in mueh of twentieth eentury art.
Sehoenberg's purpose was different and required a different and
apparent strueture. In the first group of seven poems, Sehoenberg first
presents the poet revelling in the souree of poetry, or moonlight, rejecting
the past-symbolized by erystal-, then growing swiftly more disturbed,
his mind more and more diseased and disordered. In the seeond and eentral
eyde, night deseends, and terror, death, poetie martyrdom and sterility
dose in, and in the final eyde, he beeomes reeonciled with his past, with
poetie tradition, and returns horne.
I. 1. Mondestrunken
11. 8. Nacht
111. 15. Heimweh
2. Colombine

9. Gebet an Pierrot

3. Der Dandy

10. Raub

4. Eine blasse Wscherin

11 . Rote Messe

5. Valse de Chopin
6. Madonna

12. Galgenlied
13. Enthauptung

16. Gemeinheit !

17. Parodie
18. Der Mondfleck
19. Serenade

20. Heimfahrt
7. Der kranke Mond
14. Die Kreuze
21. 0 alter Duft
To create the three smaller eydes, he omitted those poems that were extraneous to his tale. The first two poems, "Eine Bhne" and "Feerie,"
have no mention of Pierrot, the moon, or poetry, and the referenees to
Breughel, Shakespeare, and Watteau in "Eine Bhne" would draw the
foeus away from the hallueinatory inner world, outward into the reader's
historical past. Furthermore, "Feerie" is a daylight poem, while Op. 21
is a work that begins by night, sinks into even blaeker and gloomier realms
in the eentral eyde, and only gradually emerges into the light of dawn in
the last two poems, "Heimfahrt" and "0 alter Duft." The other daylight
poems, such as "Morgen" (no. 41),
Ein rosig blasser. feiner Staub
Tanzt frh am Morgen auf den Grsern.

Leis klingt ein Singen, hell und klar,

Gleich fernem Himmelschor .

and "Feerie" are omitted. In "Morgen," the central figure is Cassander,

5USAN YUENS

108

the plump, boorish bourgeois, who pursues a sweet, young maiden through
the flowers in a beautiful daylit setting, with no mention of Pierrot.
Ein zartes. junges Dirnehen flieht
Scheu vor dem lsternen Cassander.
Die weissen Rckchen streifen leicht
Die Blumen-und es hebt sich duftend
Ein rosig blasser. feiner Staub.

The focus in the complete poems shifts away from the "moonstruck
Pierrot" rather frequently, but not so in the song cyde. Schoenberg thus
omits the three poems in which Harlequin is the central or the only figure:
number eight, "Harlequinade"; number eleven, "Harlequin"; and number
thirty-nine, "Das Alphabet," in which "lieutenant" Harlequin leads the

regiment of the vari-colored alphabet. The two beautifully Iyrical commedia

scenas, without a trace of grotesquerie or terror, are also omitted: number
forty-eight, "Souper," with its moonlit gondola for Pierrot and Colombine, who has fireflies in her hair and withered violets strewn at her feet,
and number thirty-seven, "Pantomime," in which Pierrot sings aserenade
from the bushes with the blue Italian sky shining overhead. Pierrot is simply
an element of the decor in these two static, if delightful, tableaux; he is not
the central figure.
If Pierrot or the moon or poetry are missing, the poem is not induded
in Op. 21. The fourth poem, "Schweres Laos," or "Deconvenue" in
Giraud, is certainly fanciful and grotesque- like a Breughel parable painting on gluttony, The Land oi 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 exduded from the
cyde. Other commedia figures, Cassander and Columbine, only appear
in Schoenberg's Op. 21 when they react to something Pierrot does: Cassander screaming in protest as Pierrot drills a hole in his head and smokes
Turkish tobacco through his human pipe. In "Gebet an Pierrot," someone
in mourning ("Schwarz weht die Flagge /Mir nun vom Mast") pleads with
Pierrot to restore light and laughter: one way to interpret the poem is to
infer that Pierrot, who wished to deflower Colombine in the tenth poem
(the second in Op . 21), has done so, and that she now pleads for an impossible return to innocence and joy, in one sense, to the commedia tradition in which she is courted and pursued but never won.
None of the landscape or nature poems lacking either Pierrot or the
moon are included, among them, number twelve, "Die Wolken" in which
the evening douds, with their tints of ivory, gold, and pearl, are captured
by the Night in nets; number thirty-three, "Abend," with its melancholy

THE TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNAIRE

109

white storks against a black background, the last rays of light shining from
a "hoffnungsleere Sonne"; and number forty-six, "Landschaft," in which

black birds cry out, a "cold, sad light" shines feebly through the grayish
atmosphere, and the sun, "yellow-red like a great egg," sinks. All three
poems have to do with sunset or the approach of night, three of five such
poems in Pierrot Lunaire. The others are number nineteen, "Nacht,"
which Schoenberg set and number twenty, "Sonnen-Ende," in which the
sun's blood flows out over the douds and the land, dyeing both red, as
an exhausted young voluptuary, an unknown, unnamed creature, also
dies. Similarly, in number fifteen, "Herbst," an unnamed and terrified
figure trembles in the midst of an autumn landscape of withered, brown
leaves .... Hartleben transformed Giraud's peculiarly French concept
of "spleen" (the title of the poem) into the peculiarly German "Angst."
Of the sunset poems, Schoenberg chose the most violent and bizarre,
"Nacht," with its swarm of giant, black butterflies that kill the sun's rays
and omits the four other sunset poems. "Nacht" furthermore has significant links with the end of Schoenberg's cyde: in "Nacht," a scent arises
from the depths, killing remembrance and accompanying the fall of utter
darkness,
Aus dem Qualm verlorner Tiefen
Steigt ein Duft, Errinrung mordend!

while in the last poem, a scent from olden times returns to bewitch the
0 alter Duft-aus Mrchenzeit,

senses:

Berauschest wieder meine Sinne!

Poetry, the moon, the poet: those crucial themes in Op. 21 are all
introduced in the first song of Schoenberg's cyde (the sixteenth poem of
Giraud's and Hartleben's complete volume).
Den Wein, den man mit Augen trinkt,
Giesst Nachts der Mond in Wogen nieder,
Und eine Springflut berschwimmt
Den stillen Horizont.
Gelste, schauerlich und sss,
Durchschwimmen ohne Zahl die Fluten!
Den Wein, den man mit Augen trinkt,
Giesst Nachts der Mond in Wogen nieder.
Der Dichter, den die Andacht treibt,
Berauscht sich an dem heilgen Tranke
Gen Himmel wendet er verzckt
Das Haupt und taumelnd saugt und schlrft er
Den Wein, den man mit Augen trinkt.

The moonlight is sacramental wine, an intoxicant that "the Poet" greedily

drinks "mit Augen." Wave after wave of moonlight floods "the still horizon" with numberless desires and emotions until Pierrot/Poet is drunk

SUSAN YUENS

110

and ecstatic. The moonlight is the source of poetry, filled with "Gelste"
that are both dreadful and sweet, and the poet steeps hirnself in that light
until he is dizzied and staggers to and fro, his senses reeling. The Rimbaudesque 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 "Ie poete religieuxlDe l'etrange absinthe
se soille ... ") and poetry a mystical, religious experience ... art as a
religion whose adherents at times imitate, parody or invert the rituals and
symbols of Catholicism and whose "holy figures" - Poetry and the Poetsuffer 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 Communion by ripping the heart out of his breast and offering this new Host,
the sacramental chalice that contains poetry, at the altar. "Madonna" and
"Rote Messe" are paired in the complete Pierrot Lunaire, but separated
in the cycle: "Madonna" is in the first cyc1e, "Rote Messe" in the second.
"Madonna" is linked to the image of the gentle maiden from the heavens
("sanfte Magd des Himmels," an expression that evokes both the Moon
and the Virgin Mary), but the moon-madonna who earlier washed "cloths
woven from light" (poems formed from the source of poetry?) is now
wounded and cradles her dead son. With the second cycle, the moonlight
disappears, and Pierrot becomes poet-priest-martyr.
When a swarm of giant moths extinguish the sun in "Nacht," darkness falls. The entire central cycle is largely devoid of light,
Finstre, schwarze Riesenfalter
Tteten der Sonne Glanz.
("Nacht")

Das Bild des Glanzes

Zerfloss-Zerfloss!
("Gebet an Pierrot")
Durch die Finsterniss(" Raub")
Durch schmerzensdunkle Nacht . . .
("Enthauptung")

THE TEXTS OF PIERROT L UNA/RE

111

and the poems are shot through with references to the colors black and
red and to blood-no longer an analogy, as in "Valse de Chopin."
... schwarze Riesenfalter
("Nacht")

Schwarz weht die Flagge . ..

("Gebet an Pierrot")

Rote, frstliche Rubine

Blutge Tropfen alten Ruhmes . ..

(" Raub")

Auf einem schwarzen Seiden kissen . ..

(" Enthauptung")

Die triefend rote Hostie:

Sein Herz-in blutgen Fingern("Rote Messe")

Dran die Dichter stumm verbluten, .. .

Prunkend in des Blutes Scharlach! .. .
Eine rote Konigskrone.
("Die Kreuze")

The blood-red rubies in the tombs are "Iike eyes," recalling the Madonna's wounded breasts, "wie Augen, rot und offen"-in each, a bloodshot
accusatory stare mutely confronts the guilty plunderer and anarchist.
The earlier poem also foreshadows Pierro!'s and the poets' wounds
shortly after in the central section, when the blasphemer of religion
becomes hirnself a martyr. The blood and violence escalate in a terrifying
crescendo throughout the cycle, beginning with a monstrous nightfall
and Colombine's bitter prayer.
The thirteenth and fourteenth poems, "Enthauptung" (no. 24 in
the complete collection) and "Die Kreuze" (no. 39), exemplify Schoenberg'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 bloodred glow, is preceded in Op. 21 by a poem in which Pierrot paces in terror
before an eerie, hallucinatory vision of a siekle moon, metamorphosed
into a Turkish scimitar on a black silk cushion. If the moon is the fons
et origo of poetry in Pierrot lunaire, then perhaps the scimitar represents
the immense power of incipient poetry-the exotie weapon rests, not
yet in use, on the black cushion of an otherwise unilluminated night
sky- , its death-dealing potential and the poe!'s terror at such a dread
realization. "Die Kreuze" is the consequence of "Enthauptung": the

SCSA:\ YOCE:\S

112

"schwelgten Schwerter" of "Die Kreuze" are multiples cf the single

Turkish seimitar of number rhirteen, and rhe feared deeapitarion in "Enthauptung" is followed by "Tot das Haupt" at the elose of the second
eycle. Mind and intellection (the head) are "dead," killed by rebellion
and the martyrdom that ensues.
When night falls ("Nacht"), a Pandora's Box of il1s descends vvith
the darkness, the host of evils analogous to the flood of "Gelste" in
the waves of moonlight at the beginning of the first cycle. Throughout
the second cyc1e, Pierrot is besieged by woes incurred in the first seven
poems: "Gebet an Pierrot," the second poem of the central segment, is
the response to the seeond poem of the first eycle, the consequences of
his desire in HColombine." In "Raub," he and his companions (the
eonternporaneous radical poets who have similarly swept tradition off
their dressing tables?) attempt to plunder the past of its jewels, tom
from their context, but without success; in ~ 'Rote Messe," he tears off
the garments of one priestly order and dedicates himself to another as
eelebrant and Host alike; in "Galgenlied, " he sings of the special intimaey between poets and death and in both "Enthauptung" and "Die
Kreuze" of the agony of poetic creation. Here, Pierrot reaps the cansequenees of three aetions in the first group: the draught of moonlight
so greedily imbibed in "Mondestrunken," the seduetion so desperately
desired in "Colombine," and the disguise assumed in "'Der Dandy"
when he rejeets the past.
With the beginning of the third eycle, the tone of the poetry changes.
Pierrot hears a crystalline chiming sigh ... the word "crystalline n is an
indieation that the sound comes from the past ... and, hearing it, forgets his sorrow: "Da vergisst Pierrot die Trauermienenl"-Hartleben
emphasizes the infusion of new hope and meaning with an exuberance
not found in the more restrained Giraud. The floods of moonlight"eine Springflut" in number one and "lichtmeers Fluten" in number
fifteen-banished from the second cycle reappear, and the time of artistic
rebellion and sterility ("durch seines Herzens Wste"-the heart, the
seat of the emotions, not the head) is over. Hartleben obviously understood the artist's relationship to the past in Giraud's volume and underscores it with a signifieant change of wording in his translation:
Comme un doux soupir de cristal
L'ame des vieilles comedies
Se plaint des allures raidies
Du lent Pierrot sentimental.
Lieblich klagend-ein kristallnes Seufzen
Aus Italiens alter Pantomime,
Klingts herber: wie Pierrot so holzern,
So modern sentimental geworden.

THE TEXTS OF PIERROT UiSAfRE

113

The note of mingled lamentation and accusation ("klagend")-the "oid

pantomime" has missed the clown and mourned his absence-is placed
first, and the recurring "k" consonants lend a klingendes') quality
lacking in the original Freneh. lt is the identification of Pierrot's spiritual
and poetic maladies with modernism, however, that distinguishes Hartleben's diamond from Giraud's du1ler are and brings the allegory into
sharper foeus at this, the turning point of the work.
In the final group of songs, the poet-Pierrot, no longer co\vering
beneath the moon in fear, masters poetry and uses it to affeet others.
In Gemeinheit!", he drills open Cassander's bourgeois skull, despite the
Philistine's piercing screams of protest, stuffs Turkish tobacco into the
grisly opening, and calmly smokes away. Just as the moon, the souree
of poetry, is an intoxicant in the first poem of Op. 21, so Pierrot's
tobacco ... exotic and Turkish, like the scimitar in HEnthauptung" ...
acts on the reluctant Cassander like an intoxicant, fiHing the brain with
fumes of poetry. Again in ~'Serenade," Pierrot plays upon the outraged
and un\villing Cassander, the insensitive buffoon his favorite target anee
more. The Picasso-esque clown's sadness and awkwardness, the mien of
a stork standing on one leg, are in contrast to the delicacy and sureness
with whieh he plays the viola. The grotesque and gigamic bow-Giraud's
shocking, violent imagery?-is necessary because ordinary instruments
cannot move such as Cassander; only the exaggeration of grotesquerie
can force them to take notice and reaet.
After Pierrot hears the VOlee of the pas! and remembers his origins
in "Heimweh," number flfteen, there follows a group of poems in which
he must accept, however sadly or resentfully at times, his identity as a
poet. Only then can he begin the journey to his homeland in "Heimfahrt," the next-to-Iast lied in Op. 21. In number eighteen, "Der Mondfleck," he sets out to seek that which others wha are not poets seek,
fortune and adventure, but he discovers that his black garb (black again)
is indelibly stained with moonlight. Try though he might to rid himself
of the spot, he cannot ... he is rnarked as a poet. Significantly, the SPOt
is on the back of his garment, where he can only see it with difficulty,
but others can easily see it. He does not, one notices, attempt to remove
the garment itself.
Onee Pierrot arrives back horne in the last poem, "0 alter Duft
aus Mrchenzeit, " the "Gelste, schauerlich und sss" of number one
become "Ein narriseh Heer von Schelmerein" that vanishes in the breeze,
and the "Duft, Errinrung mordend" of number eight is replaced by the
"alter Duft aus Mrchenzeit." The dawn of "Heimfahrt" turns to day,
and the poet's "Unmut" disappears through a sunlit window, the opposire of the "Gelste" that descend with the rays of rnoonlight at the

114

SUSAN YOCE?\S

beginning of the tale. The fairy-tale props of the journey horne to Bergamo-a ray of moonlight as a rudder and a waterlily as a boat-belong
to a ~'Mrchenzeit," an enchanted past that Pierrot reclaims. "Ein Mondstrahl"-poetry-is the rudder or guide by which he returns to "die liebe
Welt" and to happiness; for the first time, the real warId, sunlit and
beautiful, shines forth in all its glory, no longer hideously transformed
by moonlight misused.
In conclusion. Op. 21 is, at its core, the narration of an artist's
rejection of and reconciliation with his past, of the spiritual violence
that comes from the attempt to obliterate tradition and therefore to
deny who and what one iso Looking back at the time when Schoenberg
was working on the composition of Pierrot lunaire~ the significance seerns
both personal and historieal, an exemplum of the artistic rebellion against
tradition before World War land a foreshadowing of the chaos of the
war itself and the longing for order that followed. For Schoenberg, who
told his students "Bach is the father of us all," who set "Nacht" -the
beginning of the nightfall of anarchy-as a passacaglia, awareness of the
past and it5 synthesis with the newer musical vocabularies of achanging
world were seemingly always present, but, for all the perils of biographical fallacy, there might have been a more personal meaning to the allegorical journey of Pierrot Poet-Artist-Composer as weIl. Giraud's pi!grimage apparently ended with the acceptance of the Parnassian creed,
but Schoenberg's journey "nach Bergamo, zur Heimat" was far more
intensive, ending only with his death.1!Il

Notes
'Albert Giraud, Pierrot lunaire, trans. by Otto Erich Hartleben (Beriin: Der Verlag
Deutscher Phantasten, 1893).
"'Bhmischer Krystall"
Ein Strahl des Mondes, wohl verschlossen
Im Glass von bhmischem Krystall,
Ein Kleinod, wundersam und selten,
Ist dieses versetolle Buch.
Ich hab mich als Pierrot verkleidetIhr , die ich liebe, bring ich dar
Den Strahl des Mondes, wohl verschlossen
Im Glas von bhmischem Krystall.
In diesem schimmernden Symbole
Liegt Alles, was ich hab und bin.
Gleichwie Pierrot im bleichen Schade!,
Trag ich in Herz und Sinnen nur
Den Strahl des Mondes-wohl verschlossen.
JSee Allardyce Nicoll, The World 01 Harlequin: A Critica! Study of the Commedia
deli' Arte (Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 87.

THE TEXTS OF PIERROT LUNA!RE

115

"See Robert F. Swrey, Pierrot: A CriricaI HislOry of a Mask (Princeton University

Press, 1980).
'Nicoll, ap. eil., p. 93. For abrief period dming the firs( decade of the eighteenth
century, Watteau was the apprentice of the Parisian painter Claude Gillot, a member
of the Royal Academy. After GHlot introduced Watteau to the theatrical world, the Italian
troupe in Paris was thereafter one of his most frequent subjects, induding the Artequin
galant, Sous un habit de Mezzetin (1717?) in the Wallace Collection, L 'amour au thilitre
italien (circa 1714) in Berlin, a painting in the Charlottenburg Castle in Berlin of a group
of Italian comedians at rest on the stone terrace of achateau, Le Docleur irOuvanl sa
filIe en feste ii teste avec son amant of 1706, Les ja/oux (1712?), depicIing Pierrot and
five mher mascherare, Le Parlie quarree (1712), and others.
'There is a marked resemblance between the face of Gilles in Gil!es and Waneau's face
in a drawing by Fraw;:ois Boucher after a lost self~portrait by Waneau.
7Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, French Eighteenth Century Fainrers (N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1981, first ed. Phaidon Books 1948), trans. by Robin lronside, p. 38.
~See Jules Gabriel Janin, Deburau: Histoire du Thelitre d qualre sous (Paris: Librairie
des Bibliophiles, 1881, firs[ ediEion, 1832). Janin describes the characrerization of Pierrot
as Deburau's greatest triumph, and he indudes the complete scenario for a highly complex
entenainment in ten scenes entitled "Ma Mere ['Oie ou Arlequin et l'oeuf d'or": Pamomirne-Arlequinade-Feerie a grand spectade." See also "Pierrm and Fin-de-Siec!e" bv
A. G. Lehmann in Romantic Mythologies, ed. by lan Fletcher (London: Routledge &.
Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 209-223, also "The Sad Clown: some nates on a nineteenth-cenwry
myth" by Francis Haskeil in French .Nineteenth Century Painting and Literarure, ed. by
Ulrich Finke (Manchester University Press, 1972), p. 2f.
9Charles Baudelaire, "L'Essence du rire et generalemem du comique dans fes arts
plastiques" from Oeuvres completes: Curiosires esthetiques, eG. by Jacques Creper (Paris:
Louis Conard, 1923), p. 389. Baudelaire contrasts the Pierrot of Deburau wirh an EogEsh
pantomime performance at the Theatre des Varietes that made a great impression On hirn.
'VThe first of the articles on Baudelaire appeared on 15 September 1881.
"Adolphe Willette, Feu Pierrot 1857-19? (Paris: H. Floury, ed., 1919).
:~Theodore de Banville, Dans Ja Fournaise: Dernieres Poesies (Paris: BibliothequeCharpentier, 1892), pp. 124-125.
iJEach of Guillemot's three dixains and the envoi, a cinquain, ends with the line,
"Ils sautent en rand sous la lune blanche." The pack of phantom Pierrors in Guillernot's
poem is compared in the second stanza to a fIock of swans, and their gathering is called
"ce pale sabbat" ... cliehes of literary Paris in the Decadence.
Paris: Librairie ancienne et moderne, 1881. Hennique and Huysmans Wrote this
comedie as a mixture of indications for the stage sets, descriptions of the pantomime
action, and actual dialogue.
"In "Sonnets et autres vers" from Jadis in Oeuvres poetiques comp!etes, ed. by Y.-G.
Le Dantec, ed. revised by Jacques Borel (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1962), pp. 320-32l.
'~Brussels: Veuve Monnorn, 1887. Heros et Pierrots was published in a volume that also
contained the earlier Pierrot works, Pierrot lunaire, "Pierrot Narcisse," and Les Dernieres
Feres (Paris: Collection des Poetes frano;ais a l'etranger, 1898).
t 'See Luden Christophe, Albert Giraud: Son
Oeuvre er son remps (Brussels: Palais
des Academies, 1960), p. 16.
'~Hans Landsberg, "Otto Erich Hartieben" in Moderne Essays, ed. by Landsberg
(Berline: Gose & Tetzlaff, 1905). "Auch in Hanleben wohnen zwei Seelen: die eine zum
Spott und zur Karikatur ... die andere, von der Ahnung dunkler Tiefen erfllt ....
He has almost nothing to say about Pierrot lunaire. Cesar Flaischlen, in OUo Erich Hartleben: Beitrag zu einer GeschiChte der modernen Dichwng (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1896), p. 18.
Flaischlen, a friend of Hartleben's, a fellow poet, and the editor of the literary periodical
Pan, obviously could not begin w fathom PierrOl lunaire and says on!y, "Das Ganze
aber ist ein Buch, nur fr-Verrckte" (p. 44).
"Otta Erich Hartleben, Briefe an Freunde, ed. by Franz Ferdinand Heitmueller (BerEn:
S. Fischer, 1912), pp. 162-163.