Pierrot lunaire: the white mask in love with the Moon

The floured face, the loose white costume, the melancholy gaze turned to the sky: Pierrot is the mask more closely bound to the Moon than any other. His journey, from the squares of the Italian theatre to the Parisian cabarets and the concert halls of the twentieth century, shows how a comic character could turn into a symbol of the modern artist, a misfit and a dreamer who confides his sorrows to the night star.

From Pedrolino to Pierrot

The origins go back to the commedia dell'arte, where at the end of the sixteenth century Pedrolino appears, a naive and honest servant, often the victim of other people's pranks. In France, with the Comédie-Italienne active in Paris in the seventeenth century, the character became Pierrot, dressed in white and pale of face. In the eighteenth century Antoine Watteau devoted a famous painting to him, now in the Louvre and long known as Gilles, in which the figure stands still and thoughtful before the viewer.

During the eighteenth century a French folk song, Au clair de la lune, also became popular, in which Pierrot is named alongside the moonlight. The link between the mask and the star may have arisen from the resemblance between the character's white face and the lunar disc, but it grew stronger above all in the nineteenth century, when Pierrot changed character.

Deburau and the Romantic Pierrot

Between the 1820s and the 1840s the mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau made Pierrot famous at the Théâtre des Funambules on the boulevard du Temple in Paris. Without words, with measured gestures and subtle expressiveness, Deburau turned him into a poetic and ambiguous figure, able to make audiences laugh and to move them. Writers such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Nodier admired him, and cinema remembered him in the film Les Enfants du paradis.

From then on Pierrot became the melancholic par excellence: hopelessly in love with Columbine, shut out from the world, given to dreaming. His pallor made him kin to the Moon, which became his natural confidante and at times his double. In the second half of the century the Decadent and Symbolist poets seized on him as an alter ego.

Giraud, Laforgue and Schoenberg

In 1884 the Belgian poet Albert Giraud published Pierrot lunaire. Rondels bergamasques, a collection of fifty rondels in which the mask lives through hallucinatory experiences under the moonlight. Two years later Jules Laforgue brought out L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune, where the Moon is ironically venerated as a cold, sterile madonna by a crowd of disenchanted Pierrots.

Giraud's verses, translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben in 1892, attracted the actress Albertine Zehme, who commissioned from Arnold Schoenberg a cycle of melodramas. Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, performed in Berlin on 16 October 1912, comprises twenty-one poems divided into three groups of seven, for reciting voice and five instrumentalists. The voice uses Sprechgesang, a speech-song poised between word and melody, and the first piece evokes the wine that the eyes drink from the Moon.

With Schoenberg, Pierrot's journey reaches the heart of the musical avant-garde. The Moon that accompanies him is no longer the gentle one of the Romantics but a disquieting star, at once a source of inspiration and of madness. That is precisely why the white mask has become an enduring image of the artist's condition, suspended between laughter and tears beneath a light that fascinates and torments him.