Pierrot Lunaire
Summary:
Pierrot a poet and dandy from Bergamo, is "moondrunk", and intends to present his beloved Columbine with blossoms of moonlight. He daubs his face with moonlight, and the moon washes clothes made of moonbeams. A 'Valse de Chopin' evokes a drop of blood on to the lips of a consumptive. Perrot presents his verses to the Madonna "of all sorrows", and the poet is crucified on his verses. The moon is pale with lovesickness. Part two, are morbid and violent. Night descends when the wings of a giant moth eclipses the sun. Pierrot becomes a blasphemer and a grave-robber whose life will end on the gallows, though between-times he sees the moon as a scimitar that will decapitate him. Last part, is homesickness. The nostalgia for the 'Italian Pantomine of cold', and eventual homecoming to Bergamo from, it seems, Venice, since the penultimate piece is a barcarolle, and since a moonbeam is the rudder of Pierrot's water-lily conveyance. Enacting bygone grotesquence and rogueries, he drills a pipe bowl through the gleaming skull of Cassander, fills it with Turkish tobacco, inserts a cherry pipe stem in the polished surface, and puffs away. He interrupts his midnight serenade to scrape the instrument's bow across Cassander's bald pate. Then, discovering a white spot in the collar of his black jacket, he tries to rub it out, thinking it a fleck plaster, only to discover, in the light of dawn that it was the moon. In the final piece, the poet invoking the fragance of a world long past attains