And, of course, if the occasion warrants it, he will kick a lady in the rear—but only in extreme anger![121]. Prior to that century, however, it was in this, the eighteenth, that Pierrot began to be naturalized in other countries. [21] Sometimes he spoke gibberish (in the so-called pièces à la muette); sometimes the audience itself sang his lines, inscribed on placards held aloft by hovering Cupids (in the pièces à écriteau). In fact, what documentation does exist links Pierrot, not with Pedrolino, but with, He appears in forty-nine of the fifty scenarios in Flaminio Scala's, "Indeed, Pierrot appears in comparative isolation from his fellow masks, with few exceptions, in all the plays of, This was its second such contribution, the first being. When Gustave Courbet drew a pencil illustration for The Black Arm (1856), a pantomime by Fernand Desnoyers written for another mime, Paul Legrand (see next section), the Pierrot who quakes with fear as a black arm snakes up from the ground before him is clearly a child of the Pierrot in The Ol’ Clo's Man. Pierrot/Commedia Dell'Arte/Italian Clown Costume Handmade by me in the 1980's. It was a generally buffoonish Pierrot that held the European stage for the first two centuries of his history. [84] (Monti would go on to acquire his own fame by celebrating another spiritual outsider much akin to Pierrot—the Gypsy. Like Harlequin the trickster, Pierrot the sensitive, and Columbina the unattainable beauty. Watteau représente les personnages-types de la commedia dell'arte, en particulier Gilles ou Pierrot, amoureux naïf et sensible, ridiculisé car toujours éconduit. Much of that mythic quality ("I'm Pierrot," said David Bowie: "I'm Everyman")[4] still adheres to the "sad clown" of the postmodern era. One of his earliest appearances was in Alexander Blok's The Puppet Show (1906), called by one theater-historian "the greatest example of the harlequinade in Russia". La Commedia dell’arte est restée ancrée dans la culture italienne et nous a laissé un pittoresque héritage de personnages. In the main, Pierrot's inaugural years at the Foires were rather degenerate ones. A pantomime produced at the Funambules in 1828, The Gold Dream, or Harlequin and the Miser, was widely thought to be the work of Nodier, and both Gautier and Banville wrote Pierrot playlets that were eventually produced on other stages—Posthumous Pierrot (1847) and The Kiss (1887), respectively.[48]. He generally assumes one of three avatars: the sweet and innocent child (as in the children's books), the poignantly lovelorn and ineffectual being (as, notably, in the Jerry Cornelius novels of Michael Moorcock), or the somewhat sinister and depraved outsider (as in David Bowie's various experiments, or Rachel Caine's vampire novels, or the S&M lyrics of the English rock group Placebo). But in the 1720s, Pierrot at last came into his own. It ended by occupying the entire piece, and, be it said with all the respect due to the memory of the most perfect actor who ever lived, by departing entirely from its origin and being denaturalized. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree.... Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. Allant d’Arlequin à Colombine en passant par Pierrot ou Scaramouche, nous retrouvons ces personnages de comédie de nos jours dans les corsos de plusieurs Carnavals connus. In that same year, 1800, a troupe of Italian players led by Pasquale Casorti began giving performances in Dyrehavsbakken, then a well-known site for entertainers, hawkers, and inn-keepers. These developments occurred in 1707 and 1708, respectively; see Bonnassies. The photos on my screen look a bit red. For a full account of the struggle of the fair theaters to survive despite official opposition, see Bonnassies. But most frequently, since his reincarnation under Jean-Gaspard Deburau, he wears neither collar nor hat, only a black skullcap. Most importantly, the character of his Pierrot, as it evolved gradually through the 1820s, eventually parted company almost completely with the crude Pierrots—timid, sexless, lazy, and greedy—of the earlier pantomime. Il ne porte pas de masque et a le visage enfariné. But Pierrot's most prominent place in the late twentieth century, as well as in the early twenty-first, has been in popular, not High Modernist, art. The cuffs have a few small spots, not really noticeable. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Pierrot continued to appear in the art of the Modernists—or at least of the long-lived among them: Chagall, Ernst, Goleminov, Hopper, Miró, Picasso—as well as in the work of their younger followers, such as Gerard Dillon, Indrek Hirv, and Roger Redgate. "[60] Marcel Marceau's Bip seems a natural, if deliberate, outgrowth of these developments, walking, as he does, a concessionary line between the early fantastic domain of Deburau's Pierrot and the so-called realistic world. Pierrot de Antoine Watteau, v. 1718-19. Pierrot, on the other hand, as a "second" zanni, is a static character in his earliest incarnations, standing on th… Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). It also contains a short tale of Pierrot by Paul Leclercq, "A Story in White". Commedia dell’Arte’s enduring characters and the magic of improvised theatre sparked my imagination, offering a world of possibilities that I explore in Harlequin’s Riddle. ), In 1895, the playwright and future Nobel laureate Jacinto Benavente wrote rapturously in his journal of a performance of the Hanlon-Lees,[85] and three years later he published his only pantomime: ‘’The Whiteness of Pierrot’’. Ring in the new year with a Britannica Membership. The Italian Comedy by Pierre Louis Ducharte. A cette époque, des comédiens italiens improvisaient des saynètes satyriques à Paris. In a similarly (and paradoxically) revealing spirit, the painter Paul Hoecker put cheeky young men into Pierrot costumes to ape their complacent burgher elders, smoking their pipes (Pierrots with Pipes [c. 1900]) and swilling their champagne (Waiting Woman [c. 1895]). Pierrot ou Pedrolino, est un personnage de l’ancienne comédie italienne, l’un des zanni ou valets bouffons de la comédie italienne. It foreshadows the work of such Spanish successors as Picasso and Fernand Pelez, both of whom also showed strong sympathy with the lives of traveling saltimbancos. "[36] So conceived, Pierrot was easily and naturally displaced by the native English Clown when the latter found a suitably brilliant interpreter. . In not a few of the early Foire plays, Pierrot's character is therefore "quite badly defined. The accomplished comic actor Jean-Baptiste Hamoche, who had worked at the Foires from 1712 to 1718,[30] reappeared in Pierrot's role in 1721, and from that year until 1732 he "obtained, thanks to the naturalness and truth of his acting, great applause and became the favorite actor of the public. Such a figure was Stuart Merrill, who consorted with the French Symbolists and who compiled and translated the pieces in Pastels in Prose. The French version of the character was fashioned by Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796-1846). [96] Not until the first decade of the next century, when the great (and popular) fantasist Maxfield Parrish worked his magic on the figure, would Pierrot be comfortably naturalized in America. Fox")[80] a short story, "The Last of the Pierrots",[81] which is a shaming attack upon the modern commercialization of Carnival. The first date certainly associated with an Italian commedia dell’arte troupe is 1545. Their countryman the poet Albert Giraud also identified intensely with the zanni: the fifty rondels of his Pierrot lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot [1884]) would inspire several generations of composers (see Pierrot lunaire below), and his verse-play Pierrot-Narcissus (1887) offered a definitive portrait of the solipsistic poet-dreamer. A variant of the poem is entitled "To a Pierrette with Her Arm Around a Brass Vase as Tall as Herself." His Csárdás [c. 1904], like Pagliacci, has found a secure place in the standard musical repertoire. [45], Deburau seems to have had a predilection for "realistic" pantomime[46]—a predilection that, as will later become evident here, led eventually to calls for Pierrot's expulsion from it. For 20 years at the Théâtre des Funambules, the great French mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796–1846) played Pierrot as the pathetic, white-robed lover eternally mooning over the beautiful Columbine. 1882). [187] Pierrot Grenade, on the other hand, whose name suggests descent from the humble island of Grenada (and who seems to have evolved as a hick cousin of his namesake), dresses in ragged strips of colored cloth, sometimes adorned with cheap trinkets; he has little truck with English culture, but displays his talents (when not singing and dancing) in speechifying upon issues of the day and spelling long words in ingenious ways. Pierrot is probably based off the classic character Pierrot from Commedia dell'Arte, given his name, and his close relation with the symbolism of human suffering, despair, and sadness. [78] Craig's involvement with the figure was incremental. He, along with his fellow commedia masks,[33] was beginning to be "poeticized" in the early 1700s: he was being made the subject, not only of poignant folksong ("Au clair de la lune", sometimes attributed to Lully),[34] but also of the more ambitious art of Claude Gillot (Master André's Tomb [c. 1717]), of Gillot's students Watteau (Italian Actors [c. 1719]) and Nicolas Lancret (Italian Actors near a Fountain [c. 1719]), of Jean-Baptiste Oudry (Italian Actors in a Park [c. 1725]), and of Jean-Honoré Fragonard (A Boy as Pierrot [1776–1780]). The Saltimbanques [1888]), Pablo Picasso (Pierrot and Columbine [1900]), Guillaume Seignac (Pierrot's Embrace [1900]), and Édouard Vuillard (The Black Pierrot [c. 1890]). Like Legrand, Charles's student, the Marseilles mime Louis Rouffe (1849–1885), rarely performed in Pierrot's costume, earning him the epithet "l'Homme Blanc" ("The White Man"). For a full discussion of the connection of all these writers with Deburau's Pierrot, see Storey. Pierrot (pengucapan bahasa Prancis: ) adalah sebuah karakter stok pantonim dan Commedia dell'Arte yang bermula dari kelompok para pemain akhir abad ketujuh belas yang tampil di Paris dan dikenal sebagai Comédie-Italienne; nama tersebut adalah sebuah hipokorisme dari … [183] A passionately sinister Pierrot Lunaire has even shadowed DC Comics' Batman. (From the mouth of Pierrot loquitur: "Although this pantomime of life is passing fine,/Who would be happy must not marry Columbine". O Pierrot (ou Pierrô) é uma personagem da Commedia dell'Arte, uma variação francesa do Pedrolino italiano. Like the earlier masks of commedia dell'arte, Pierrot now knew no national boundaries. Voir : Au clair de la lune, chanson populaire française dont il est le héros. Thereafter, until the end of the century, Pierrot appeared fairly regularly in English pantomimes (which were originally mute harlequinades but later evolved into the Christmas pantomimes of today; in the nineteenth century, the harlequinade was presented as a "play within a play" during the pantomime), finding his most notable interpreter in Carlo Delpini (1740–1828). C’est un personnage é du Pierrot lunaire que l’on connaît. Carman's "The Last Room. (She seems to have been especially endearing to Xavier Privas, hailed in 1899 as the "prince of songwriters": several of his songs ["Pierrette Is Dead", "Pierrette's Christmas"] are devoted to her fortunes.) Commedia dell’arte is a theatrical form characterized by improvised dialogue and a cast of colorful stock characters that emerged in northern Italy in the fifteenth century and rapidly gained popularity throughout Europe. 1984), respectively—by linking his fortunes with those of Goethe's Faust. Personnages. In the realm of song, Claude Debussy set both Verlaine's "Pantomime" and Banville's "Pierrot" (1842) to music in 1881 (not published until 1926)—the only precedents among works by major composers being the "Pierrot" section of Telemann's Burlesque Overture (1717–22), Mozart's 1783 "Masquerade" (in which Mozart himself took the role of Harlequin and his brother-in-law, Joseph Lange, that of Pierrot),[69] and the "Pierrot" section of Robert Schumann's Carnival (1835). The fifty poems that were published by Albert Giraud (born Emile Albert Kayenbergh) as Pierrot lunaire: Rondels bergamasques in 1884 quickly attracted composers to set them to music, especially after they were translated, somewhat freely, into German (1892) by the poet and dramatist Otto Erich Hartleben. However, his most important contribution to the Pierrot canon was not to appear until after the turn of the century (see Plays, playlets, pantomimes, and revues below). The Pierrot bequeathed to the twentieth century had acquired a rich and wide range of personae. The pantomime under "review" was Gautier's own fabrication (though it inspired a hack to turn it into an actual pantomime, The Ol’ Clo's Man [1842], in which Deburau probably appeared[49]—and also inspired Barrault's wonderful recreation of it in Children of Paradise). In this section, with the exception of productions by the Ballets Russes (which will be listed alphabetically by title) and of musical settings of Pierrot lunaire (which will be discussed under a separate heading), all works are identified by artist; all artists are grouped by nationality, then listed alphabetically. It was neither the Aesthetic nor the popular Pierrot that claimed the attention of the great theater innovator Edward Gordon Craig. [39] This will be the home, beginning in 1816, of Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796–1846),[40] the most famous Pierrot in the history of the theater, immortalized by Jean-Louis Barrault in Marcel Carné's film Children of Paradise (1945). Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. There he appeared in the marionette theaters and in the motley entertainments—featuring song, dance, audience participation, and acrobatics—that were calculated to draw a crowd while sidestepping the regulations that ensured the Théâtre-Français a monopoly on "regular" dramas in Paris. Theatrical groups such as the Opera Quotannis have brought Pierrot's Passion to the dramatic stage; dancers such as Glen Tetley have choreographed it; poets such as Wayne Koestenbaum have derived original inspiration from it. )[98], Another pocket of North-American sympathy with the Decadence—one manifestation of what the Latin world called modernismo—could be found in the progressive literary scene of Mexico, its parent country, Spain, having been long conversant with the commedia dell'arte. [54] In this he was abetted by the novelist and journalist Champfleury, who set himself the task, in the 1840s, of writing "realistic" pantomimes. Douglas Clayton examines the tradition of commedia dell'arte as the Russian modernists inherited it, from its origins in Italian street theatre through its various transformations: in Italy (Gozzi and Goldini's plays); in France (the development of Pierrot and the restructuring of the plot); and in Germany (Tieck's and Hoffmann's metatheatre). Antoine Galland's final volume of The Thousand and One Nights had appeared in 1717, and in the plots of these tales Lesage and his collaborators found inspiration, both exotic and (more importantly) coherent, for new plays. )[91] Like most things associated with the Decadence, such exotica discombobulated the mainstream American public, which regarded the little magazines in general as "freak periodicals" and declared, through one of its mouthpieces, Munsey's Magazine, that "each new representative of the species is, if possible, more preposterous than the last. [11] In 1673, probably inspired by Molière's success, the Comédie-Italienne made its own contribution to the Don Juan legend with an Addendum to "The Stone Guest",[12] which included Molière's Pierrot. [8] Pierrot, on the other hand, as a "second" zanni, is a static character in his earliest incarnations, "standing on the periphery of the action",[9] dispensing advice that seems to him sage, and courting—unsuccessfully—his master's young daughter, Columbine, with bashfulness and indecision.[10]. Personabooks 1977. Adopting the stage-name "Baptiste", Deburau, from the year 1825, became the Funambules' sole actor to play Pierrot[41] in several types of comic pantomime—rustic, melodramatic, "realistic", and fantastic. Students of Modernist painting and sculpture are familiar with Pierrot (in many different attitudes, from the ineffably sad to the ebulliently impudent) through the masterworks of his acolytes, including Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Georges Rouault, Salvador Dalí, Max Beckmann, August Macke, Paul Klee, Jacques Lipchitz—the list is very long (see Visual arts below). ... without the least proof": Fournier. Legrand left the Funambules in 1853 for what was to become his chief venue, the Folies-Nouvelles, which attracted the fashionable and artistic set, unlike the Funambules’ working-class children of paradise. He is sometimes said to be a French variant of the sixteenth-century Italian Pedrolino, but the two types have little but their names ("Little Pete") and social stations in common. The Commedia dell'Arte by Winifred Smith, New York, 1912. In Belgium, where the Decadents and Symbolists were as numerous as their French counterparts, Félicien Rops depicted a grinning Pierrot who is witness to an unromantic backstage scene (Blowing Cupid's Nose [1881]) and James Ensor painted Pierrots (and other masks) obsessively, sometimes rendering them prostrate in the ghastly light of dawn (The Strange Masks [1892]), sometimes isolating Pierrot in their midst, his head drooping in despondency (Pierrot's Despair [1892]), sometimes augmenting his company with a smiling, stein-hefting skeleton (Pierrot and Skeleton in Yellow [1893]). Švehla, Jaroslav (1977). The title of choreographer Joseph Hansen's 1884 ballet, Macabre Pierrot, created in collaboration with the poet Théo Hannon, summed up one of the chief strands of the character's persona for many artists of the era. [16] Columbine laughs at his advances;[17] his masters who are in pursuit of pretty young wives brush off his warnings to act their age. Charles himself eventually capitulated: it was he who played the Pierrot of Champfleury's Pantomime of the Attorney. Image HD sur GOOGLE ARTS & CULTURE. See Lawner; Kellein; also the plates in Palacio, and the plates and tailpieces in Storey's two books. Pierrot—as "Pjerrot", with his boat-like hat and scarlet grin—remains one of the parks’ chief attractions. Il joue sans masque, la figure enfarinée. Pierrot is a stock character of pantomime and commedia dell’arte whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne, the name is a diminutive of Pierre (Peter), via the suffix -ot. "Pierrot: a silent witness of changing times", The World Festival of Clowns in Yekaterinburg, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pierrot&oldid=1001394964, Articles with dead external links from December 2017, Articles with permanently dead external links, Articles containing Japanese-language text, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Pedrolino became tremendously popular in later French pantomimes as the naive and appealing Pierrot. Besides making him a valet, a roasting specialist, a chef, a hash-house cook, an adventurer, [Lesage] just as frequently dresses him up as someone else." Pierrot est candide, badin et a une certaine dose de bon sens. Not only actors but also acrobats and dancers were quick to seize on his role, inadvertently reducing Pierrot to a generic type. Parfaict, François and Claude, and Godin d'Abguerbe (1767). Pierrot, ou Pedrolino, est un personnage de l’ancienne comédie italienne, l’un des zanni ou valets bouffons de la comédie italienne. Marsh, Roger (2007b). "Pierrot was Faulkner's fictional representation of his fragmented state": Sensibar, p. xvii. Pierrot (/ˈpɪəroʊ/, US also /ˌpiːəˈroʊ/; French: [pjɛʁo]) is a stock character of pantomime and commedia dell'arte whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne; the name is a diminutive of Pierre (Peter), via the suffix -ot. For Jules Janin and Théophile Gautier, Pierrot was not a fool but an avatar of the post-Revolutionary People, struggling, sometimes tragically, to secure a place in the bourgeois world. Marsh, Roger (2007a). Pedrolino, French Pierrot, stock character of the Italian commedia dell’arte, a simpleminded and honest servant, usually a young and personable valet. "Wherever we look in the history of its reception, whether in general histories of the modern period, in more ephemeral press response, in the comments of musical leaders like, For direct access to these works, go to the footnotes following their titles in, Hughes’ "A Black Pierrot" was set to voice and piano by. [28] It was also in the 1720s that Alexis Piron loaned his talents to the Foires, and in plays like Trophonius's Cave (1722) and The Golden Ass (1725),[29] one meets the same engaging Pierrot of Giaratone's creation.