A Narrative Walk through Granville Bantock's The Pierrot of the Minute Overture (1908)

Granville Bantock’s comedy overture The Pierrot of the Minute (1908), based on Ernest Dowson’s verse drama of 1892, offers an intriguing example of how we might understand narrative in relation to a musical refiguring of a literary text. Although the composer initially claimed that the overture had “no sequence of ideas” and simply created an “atmosphere” for Dowson’s work, he went on to identify some connections between the overture and aspects of Dowson’s plot; the situation was further complicated by a more detailed overview of Dowson’s narrative that was included in the published full score of 1909. After noting how literary scholarship has highlighted core themes in Dowson’s poetry and prose, this paper demonstrates how specific elements of Dowson’s text correspond to the succession of musical events in the overture. In the wider context of Bantock’s response to a wide range of literature in his orchestral works of 1890-1911 (with their distinctive approaches to structure, key relationships, and representation of character), Bantock’s The Pierrot of the Minute can therefore be identified as a more detailed musical refiguring than might first be imagined.