Pierrot Through the Arts

Pierrot, the sad clown in white face and loose blouse, expressing slowly and subtly in the liminal space beyond words, emerged in the nineteenth century from his roots in stock comedies and pantomimes to become the embodiment of a certain strain of artistic sentiment: sensitive, melancholy, and intrinsically alone, playful and daring through the subversion of language while suggesting the fraught and facile nature of gender.

As a stock character, Pierrot can be traced back to Molière and Don Juan or The Feast of the Stone, which was first performed in February 1660 at the Palais-Royal theatre in Paris, with Molière himself playing the role of Sganarelle. Pierrot is the name of a peasant character who appears in the second act of the play, as the fiancé of Charlotte.

The Palais-Royal theatre had been established by Cardinal Richelieu, in the east wing of the Palais-Royal in 1637. By 1662, Molière’s acting troupe was sharing the venue with a troupe of Italian commedia dell’arte performers. They included Domenicio Biancolelli, already famous for his performances as the chequered comic Harlequin.

From Italy the commedia dell’arte flourished across seventeenth-century France, and in fact the character of Sganarelle already drew much from the Italian comedians. With Molière and Biancolelli working in such close proximity, the interplay and cross-pollination between the troupes soon led the commedia dell’arte to incorporate Pierrot into their repertoire. Pierrot was well established in the Italian comic theatre by the time of their expulsion from France, by Royal decree, in 1697.

Pierrot therefore took on a second life in Italy, and returned to France anew when the Italian troupes were permitted to return to the country over the following decade. Through the eighteenth century the character began to appear on stage in European centres beyond Italy and France, though often in minor and fairly disparate roles. The essence of the character – his unrequited love for Columbine, who prefers Harlequin – was sometimes lost, and he was frequently portrayed for purely comic purposes, foolish and bumbling. It was the 1800s before Pierrot grew in stature and began to reach out across the arts, emerging as an emblem and muse for writers and painters.

Jean-Gaspard Deburau, a mime from Kolín in Bohemia which is now part of the Czech Republic, lies at the heart of modern conceptions of Pierrot. Born in 1796, Deburau began appearing in Paris at the Théâtre des Funambules some time around 1819, having adopted the stage name Baptiste. The Funambules had opened in 1816 on the Boulevard du Temple, known locally as the Boulevard du Crime owing to the number of crime dramas which were shown nightly in the boulevard’s numerous theatres. Only the Théâtre Déjazet would remain following Baron Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris, during which most of the theatres were demolished to make space for an enlarged Place de la République.

The Funambules originally hosted only acrobats and mimes. Assuming the role of Pierrot as a young man, Deburau would continue to play the part until his death in 1846. His self-restraint and nuanced style deepened the sense of tragedy and longing which had sometimes lain dormant in Pierrot, replacing the tendency towards broad gesticulating comedy. Gaining recognition towards the end of the 1820s, Deburau’s take on Pierrot even drew comparisons with the works of Shakespeare, when in 1842 the modern man-of-letters Théophile Gautier wrote a fictionalised review entitled ‘Shakespeare at the Funambules’.

Other mimes continued to score success in the role of Pierrot following Deburau’s death. These included his son, Jean Charles, and the famous mime Paul Legrand, who ramped up the tearful sentiment. Still it was Deburau who enshrined Pierrot within the culture of France, elaborating the sense of the character as a heartsick and tortured artist.

It was this conception of Pierrot which was celebrated, explored, and entrenched for modern audiences by Marcel Carné in 1945. Les Enfants du Paradis, now regarded as one of the greatest films of all time, suffered plenty of its own anguishes. Completed amid the damaged sets and short supplies of occupied France, the cast and crew also lacked food and comprised several Jews who were forced to work secretly or face the shutdown of production.

The fictionalised story of Les Enfants du Paradis draws upon real-life figures from early nineteenth century France. Deburau is portrayed in the film as Baptiste, a lovelorn mime who achieves success in the Funambules, in a magnificent performance by Jean-Louis Barrault.

‘Shakespeare at the Funambules’ by Gautier was but the first entwinement of Pierrot with literature. Writers including Verlaine and Huysmens incorporated Pierrot into their works, as did Flaubert, who early in his career wrote an unperformed pantomime entitled Pierrot au sérail. More elaborate was his role in the poetry of Jules Laforgue, where he served as both muse and emblem of the artist.

Laforgue was a French symbolist poet whose career was precariously brief. He published his first collection Les Complaintes in 1885, then followed it up with L’Imitation de Notre Dame de la Lune in 1886, before dying in 1887 at the tender age of 27 years old. Three of the ‘complaints’ in his first selection of poems were written in the voice of Pierrot, but L’Imitation de Notre Dame de la Lune is devoted entirely to the mime and his moonlit world, influenced by the poetry cycle Pierrot lunaire: rondels bergamasques which the Belgian poet Albert Giraud had published a couple of years previously.

In The Symbolist Movement in Literature – which was published in 1899, intended to introduce French symbolism to an English readership – Arthur Symons devoted a chapter to Laforgue. Symons describes Laforgue’s verse and prose as:

‘alike a kind of travesty, making subtle use of colloquialism, slang, neologism, technical terms, for their allusive, their factitious, their reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously. The verse is alert, troubled, swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhetoric so piously that it prefers, and finds its piquancy in, the ridiculously obvious […] It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue, and it is what all art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all their journeys.’

He goes on to define Laforgue’s peculiar strain of laughter:

‘His laughter, which Maeterlinck has defined so admirably as ‘the laughter of the soul’, is the laughter of Pierrot, more than half a sob, and shaken out of him with a deplorable gesture of the thin arms, thrown wide. He is a metaphysical Pierrot, Pierrot Lunaire, and it is of abstract notions, the whole science of the unconscious, that he makes his showman’s patter.’

Laforgue in turn proved a major influence upon a young T. S. Eliot. Later in life, Eliot would write that ‘Of Jules Laforgue I can say that he was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech’, and ‘I have written […] nothing about Jules Laforgue, to whom I owe more than to any poet in any language’.

In this way the figure of Pierrot stretched beyond his native influence on the French romantics and symbolists, casting his moonlit pallor over the works of early Anglophone modernism. He also appeared in canvases by the post-Impressionist and early modern painters: in Pierrot with a White Pipe by Seurat (1883), in Pierrot and Harlequin by Cézanne (1888), while Pierrot and Columbine in 1900 was the first of several dalliances between Pierrot and Pablo Picasso.

Pierrot entered into the canon of twentieth-century classical music courtesy of Arnold Schoenberg, whose Pierrot Lunaire, Op.21, is a setting of 21 texts from a German translation of Albert Giraud’s poetry cycle. His Pierrot Lunaire premiered in Berlin on 16 October 1912, with Albertine Zehme as the solo vocalist.

The philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno wrote some of his earliest pieces on Schoenberg. In a 1922 review of a performance of Pierrot Lunaire in Frankfurt, Adorno wrote that Schoenberg’s melodrama encapsulated ‘the homelessness of our souls’.

The popular theme and the free atonality of Schoenberg’s composition have exerted a lasting influence upon popular music. David Bowie, who studied mime and the commedia dell’arte under the dancer and choreographer Lindsay Kemp, made his theatrical debut at the Oxford New Theatre in 1967 with a part in the production Pierrot in Turquoise. Bowie would later appear as Pierrot in the video to his 1980 song ‘Ashes to ‘Ashes’. Björk, a fervent admirer of Schoenberg, sang Pierrot Lunaire in a one-off performance at the Verbier Festival in 1996, with Kent Nagano conducting.

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Jean-Louis Barrault as Pierrot in Les Enfants du Paradis

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Scene from the ‘Boulevard du Crime’ segment of Les Enfants du Paradis

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‘Autre Complaint de Lord Pierrot’ by Jules Laforgue

Celle qui doit me mettre au courant de la Femme!
Nous lui dirons d’abord, de mon air le moins froid:
“La somme des angles d’un triangle, chère âme,
Est égale à deux droits.”
Et si ce cri lui part: “Dieu de Dieu! que je t’aime!”
— “Dieu reconnaîtra les siens.” Ou piquée au vif:
— “Mes claviers ont du coeur, tu seras mon seul thème.”
Moi: “Tout est relatif.”
De tous ses yeux, alors! se sentant trop banale:
“Ah! tu ne m’aimes pas; tant d’autres sont jaloux!”
Et moi, d’un oeil qui vers l’inconscient s’emballe:
“Merci, pas mal; et vous?”
— “Jouons au plus fidèle!” – “à quoi bon, ô Nature!
Autant à qui perd gagne!” Alors, autre couplet:
— “Ah! tu te lasseras le premier, j’en suis sûre…”
— “Après vous, s’il vous plaît.”
Enfin, si, par un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres,
Douce; feignant de n’en pas croire encor mes yeux,
J’aurai un: “Ah! ça, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre!
C’était donc sérieux?”

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‘Another Complaint of Lord Pierrot’ by Jules Laforgue
(Translation courtesy of Paul Staniforth)

The one who’ll give an update on her sex!
We’ll tell her first in our least frigid air
“The sum of a triangle’s angles makes
exactly two right angles, dear.”
And should she peal “O God! how I love you!”,
‘God’ll know his own’ – or, cut to the quick:
“My heart knows love’s keys; I’ll play but of you!”,
then I: ‘All’s relativistic.’
Then, with all eyes, feeling too commonplace
“You don’t love me whom men crave with each muscle?”
And I, with an eye on Unconsciousness,
‘Oh, not so bad, ta, and yousel’?’
“Let’s vie in fidelity!” – ‘Might as well play
(Nature!) loser wins.’ And after those, these:
“Oh, you’ll tire of me first, you’ll go away…”
‘Oh no: ladies first, if you please.’
Last, if one night she die in my ‘Divan’,
soft … with fake disbelief in my closet
I’ll go ‘Well, now, we’d something to live on –
it was serious then, was it?’

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Pierrot with a White Pipe by Georges Seurat

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Pierrot and Harlequin by Paul Cézanne

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Pierrot and Columbine by Pablo Picasso

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Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, by Arnold Schoenberg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsIATAaR-X0

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David Bowie as Pierrot

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Björk photographed by Juergen Teller