Chapter 6 presents Pierrot lunaire as autobiographical. It portrays Schoenberg being led astray into atonality by the moonlight, suffering the consequences (alienation from his audience, excoriation by the critics), and attempting to return to his older style but falling short. These different stages of Pierrot/Schoenberg’s journey are depicted by “basic images” that control the pitch and rhythmic organization. I explain three of them in detail: in “Mondestrunken,” the image of moonlight streaming down towards the composer in waves gives rise to chains of tetrachords linked by common pitch classes, that is, weak and strong Rp relations, and in “Die Kreuze” the image of musical works as crosses on which the composer is crucified is depicted by horizontally and vertically symmetrical pitch and pitch-class configurations that move around to various axes of symmetry, before locking in with finality to a single axis. In “O alter Duft” the journey homeward that becomes only a fairytale at the last minute provides an opportunity for Schoenberg to use specters of tonal function as text-painting devices, by repeatedly setting up for tonal cadences and then thwarting them at the last minute.

The introductory chapter begins by offering a rebuttal to Ethan Haimo’s claim in Schoenberg's Transformation of Musical Language (Cambridge, 2006) that “atonal” is an inappropriate term for Schoenberg's middle-period music. It does so by presenting Schenkerian analyses of “Jesus bettelt,” Op. 2, No. 2, and the first Piano Piece, Op. 11, demonstrating that the traditional contrapuntal structures of tonal music are present in the first piece, though often harmonized with unusual chords, but are incomplete or non-existent in the second piece. The chapter then proceeds to show how features originally characteristic of tonal music, other than typical Schenkerian middlegrounds, play crucial roles in organizing Op. 11, No. 1 – traditional tonal form, as well as motivic and harmonic processes that manifest and elaborate the “musical idea,” a conflict-elaboration-solution narrative.