Erwartung

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Erwartung
Monodrama by Arnold Schönberg
The composer portrayed in 1907
TranslationExpectation
LibrettistMarie Pappenheim
LanguageGerman
Premiere
6 June 1924 (1924-06-06)
New German Theatre, 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."[1]

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.[2] Herbert Buchanan has countered this description of the work as "athematic", and the general impression of it as "atonal", in his own analysis.[3]

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."[4] 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."[5]

Performance history

Erwartung had its British premiere on 9 January 1931, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer.[6]

It was the first live opera shown on Times Square in New York City in a production by Robin Rhode in November 2015 (2 performances).[7][8]

Roles

Mizzi Pappenheim, the librettist portrayed by Schönberg, 1909
  • The Woman (soprano)

Synopsis

Time: Night
Place: A forest

A woman is in an apprehensive state as she searches for her lover. In the darkness, she comes across what she first thinks is a body, but then realises is a tree-trunk. She is frightened and becomes more anxious as she cannot find the man she is looking for. She then finds a dead body, and sees that it is her lover. She calls out for assistance, but there is no response. She tries to revive him, and addresses him as if he were still alive, angrily charging him with being unfaithful to her. She then asks herself what she is to do with her life, as her lover is now dead. Finally, she wanders off alone into the night.

Instrumentation

Erwartung's score calls for an orchestra with the following instrumentation.

Recordings (selection)

References

  1. Schoenberg, Arnold (1984). Style and Idea. Los Angeles: University of California Press. p. 105. ISBN 0-520-05294-3.
  2. Friedheim, Philip (Spring 1966). "Rhythmic Structure in Schoenberg's Atonal Compositions". Journal of the American Musicological Society. 16 (1): 59–72. doi:10.1525/jams.1966.19.1.03a00040. JSTOR 830871.
  3. Buchanan, Herbert H. (Autumn 1967). "A Key to Schoenberg's Erwartung (Op. 17)" (PDF). Journal of the American Musicological Society. 20 (3): 434–449. doi:10.1525/jams.1967.20.3.03a00040. JSTOR 830319.
  4. Nicolas Wroe (9 April 2011). "Charles Rosen: A life in music". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 May 2011.
  5. Small, Christopher (1977). Schoenberg. Novello. p. 10. ISBN 9780853601050.
  6. Nicholas Chadwick (Spring 1985). "Alban Berg and the BBC" (PDF). The British Library Journal. 11 (1): 46–59. doi:10.23636/672. ISSN 0305-5167. JSTOR 42554213. Archived from the original (PDF) on 20 October 2013. Retrieved 31 January 2013.
  7. "Arnold Schönberg's Erwartung – A Performance by Robin Rhode". Times Square Arts. Retrieved 4 February 2025.
  8. Zachary Woolfe (8 November 2015). "Robin Rhode Takes Schoenberg's Erwartung to the Street (Broadway, No Less)". The New York Times.
  9. Goldman, Richard F. (1952). "Reviews of Records". The Musical Quarterly. XXXVIII (4): 671–673. doi:10.1093/mq/XXXVIII.4.671.
  10. MacDonald, Calum, Review of recordings of Arnold Schoenberg (September 1984). Tempo (New Ser.), 150: pp. 52–56.

Further reading