Pierrot lunaire: Albert Giraud Otto Erich Hartleben Arnold Schoenberg. Ed. by Mark Delaere and Jan Herman.

Abstract

The twelve papers collected in this volume are the edited proceedings of a conference held at the Catholic University of Louvain in October 2002 that formed the culmination of a four-year project on the subject of Pierrot lunaire. As described in the editors’ introductory chapter, ‘the main research objectives of this project were … an in-depth music-analytical study of Schoenberg's entire Pierrot lunaire-cycle … an in-depth literary analysis of Giraud's poetic collection … and an equally thorough study of Hartleben's translation/transformation, research into the contexts in which the original poetic cycle and its later transformations emerged, [and] finally, a thorough study of the text–music relationships’ (p. 5). Two of the contributors to this collection, Lieven Tack and Stephan Weytjens, were participants in the project, and their papers present in abbreviated form some of its findings. The papers are grouped in four sections covering cultural-historical background, composition and analysis, the cyclic aspect, and reception history. As might be expected, not all of them are of equal interest to Schoenberg scholars; indeed, three of them—those of François Moureau (‘Naissance du type de Pierrot en France’), Jean de Palacio (‘Le Recueil comme scène, ou La confusion des genres’), and Jean-Michel Gouvard (‘Métrique comparée de l’octosyllabe français et allemand. Du Pierrot lunaire d’Albert Giraud à sa traduction par Otto Erich Hartleben’)—are on historical or literary topics which have little or no bearing on Schoenberg's work and are therefore not considered here.