Au Clair De La Lune: A Song History

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"Au Clair de la Lune" is an anonymous French song that the Palazzetto Bru Zane's music database dates to the eighteenth century, and Pierrot, the stock clown of the commedia dell'arte, is one of its characters.[1][2] Part of the tune may be much older: the folk-song editor Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin, writing in 1870, said the first half of the melody is already notated in Chardavoine's Voix de ville of 1576, and he judged the modulating second half to be no earlier than the eighteenth century.[2] The melody has often been credited to Jean-Baptiste Lully, and an 1866 edition of Dumersan's song anthology repeated that credit only as something commonly said.[3] Weckerlin set the Lully attribution aside on the strength of the 1576 notation,[2] yet the Discography of American Historical Recordings still lists Lully as composer of recordings of the song made between 1913 and 1936, among them a 1913 Victor duet by Edmond Clément and Geraldine Farrar.[4] None of the sources consulted here offers evidence for Lully's authorship, so the credit is best treated as tradition rather than fact.[2][3]

Colored cut-out print of Pierrot in a ruffled collar and buttoned costume

Imagerie d’Epinal, Pierrot (Pantin), lithograph colored with pochoir, ca. 1865. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A cut-out puppet of Pierrot, the song’s character; the sheet itself has no connection to the song.

Composers often wrote instrumental variations on the tune, whose regular phrasing suited the form.[1] Boieldieu built a duet in his opéra-comique Les Voitures versées (first staged in St Petersburg in 1808 and given in Paris in 1820) on variations of the melody, and Matteo Carcassi, probably after the Paris production, wrote variations for guitar or lyre that allude to that opera.[1] By 1870 Weckerlin ranked it as the best-known French tune and a staple of children's singing, though he noted that its text was not really a children's song.[2]

The song also has a place in the history of sound recording.[5] On April 9, 1860, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville captured a short performance of it on his phonautograph, a device that traced sound vibrations onto paper blackened with soot but could not reproduce them.[5][6] Researchers from the First Sounds group located the tracing in the archives of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, and scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory turned it into audible sound, first heard in March 2008.[7][5][6] That first playback assumed a woman or adolescent was singing; in early 2009 the team concluded that Scott's reference tuning fork ran at 250 Hz rather than 500 Hz, slowed the recording to match, and now think the singer was probably Scott himself.[8][6]

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Sources

  1. Palazzetto Bru Zane, Bru Zane Mediabase: "Au clair de la lune chanté dans 'Les Voitures versées' varié pour guitare ou lyre op. 7 (Matteo Carcassi)".
  2. Wikisource (J.-B. Weckerlin, Chansons et rondes enfantines, Garnier, 1870): "Au clair de la lune".
  3. Internet Archive (Dumersan and Ségur, 1866): "Chansons nationales et populaires de France".
  4. UC Santa Barbara, Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Jean Baptiste Lully".
  5. Smithsonian Magazine: "From the Collections, Sound Recordings Heard for the First Time".
  6. FirstSounds.org: "FAQ".
  7. NPR: "Sound Recording Predates Edison Phonograph".
  8. FirstSounds.org: "Earlier Playback".