Jan Herman

Les Pierrot Lunaire d'Albert Giraud, O.E. Hartleben et Arnold Schönberg : Pour une analyse des transferts interculturels et intersémiotiques

This article develops some of the major issues and questions raised by the interdisciplinary study of Arnold Schönbergs Pierrot Lunaire (in itself an occurrence of exchange between text and music), and its earlier poetic counterparts. Indeed, Schönbergs creation of Pierrot Lunaire in Berlin (1912), comes at the end of a very complex path, whose starting point is a collection of poems by the French-speaking Belgian poet Albert Giraud, published in Paris in 1884; the poems were translated in German by the poet and translator O. E. Hartleben, in Leipzig and Berlin (1887–1893). It is through the articulation of three research perspectives (the systemic position of authors and texts, the principles of text composition, and the intercultural and intersemiotic transpositions), that this complex path is to be reconstructed. Attention will be paid to the following aspects: the generic inscription of the texts, the significance and transformation of the Pierrot-figure, the transfer conditions, the periodization problems from Décadence to Modernism, the translational norms and intersemiotic relations (concerning Schoenberg as well as the pictural and theatrical references in Giraud). These aspects will receive further consideration in a long term research project launched at the University of Leuven.