Erwartung
Music by Arnold Schoenberg · libretto by Marie Pappenheim · premiered 1924 · at State Opera Prague
Erwartung (Expectation), Op. 17, is a one-act monodrama in four scenes by Arnold Schönberg to a libretto by Marie Pappenheim. Composed in 1909, it was not premiered until 6 June 1924 in Prague conducted by Alexander Zemlinsky with Marie Gutheil-Schoder as the soprano. The opera takes the unusual form of a monologue for solo soprano accompanied by a large orchestra. In performance, it lasts for about half an hour. Schönberg described Erwartung, saying "the aim is to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour." Philip Friedheim has described Erwartung as Schönberg's "only lengthy work in an athematic style", where no musical material returns once stated over the course of 426 measures. In his analysis of the structure, one indication of the complexity of the music is that the first scene of over 30 bars contains 9 metre changes and 16 tempo changes. Herbert Buchanan has countered this description of the work as "athematic", and the general impression of it as "atonal", in his own analysis. The musicologist Charles Rosen has said that Erwartung, along with Berg's Wozzeck and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, is among the "impregnable" "great monuments of modernism." According to Christopher Small, "Schoenberg's intuitive understanding of the integrative process of dreams is revealed especially in the marvellous closing pages, filled as they are with tenderness and longing. At the end we can almost see the sleeper awake as with a scurry of chromatic scales the music vanished from our hearing and the dream recedes from her waking mind."
Text from the Wikipedia article "Erwartung", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
About the Composer
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian and American modernist composer, music theorist, teacher, and writer who propounded developing variation and the emancipation of the dissonance. He worked in Vienna and Berlin, and taught at the Prussian Academy of Arts (1925–1933). Facing Nazi Germany's civil-service restrictions, he resigned and defiantly reaffirmed his Judaism, then immigrated to the United States, teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles (1936–1944), where facilities bear his name. His early works like Verklärte Nacht (1899) and Gurre-Lieder (1900–1903, orch. 1910–1911) represented a synthesis of Johannes Brahms and Richard…
Text from the Wikipedia article "Arnold Schoenberg", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Other Operas by Arnold Schoenberg
- Die glückliche Hand (1909)