Erwartung

Schoenberg’s monodrama, Erwartung ("Expectation"), is a 30-minute, one-act opera of an unusual kind: its cast consists of a single singer, a soprano portraying an unnamed woman wandering disoriented in a nocturnal forest, obsessed that her lover has betrayed her. Erwartung was composed in just under three weeks in 1909, and the music’s frenetic intensity probably relates to Schoenberg’s emotional situation several months earlier. His wife Mathilde had had an affair with Richard Gerstl, a young painter with a studio in the same apartment block in Vienna; when Mathilde decided to return to Schoenberg, Gerstl hanged himself. This was also the year in which Schoenberg’s music stepped decisively into a new harmonic world, generally described as “atonality", where traditional tonal harmony and its techniques of construction had fallen away; in their place was now a hyperintense, stream-of-consciousness instability, loosely held together by dense thematic working and, in Erwartung’s case, the storyline presented in Marie Pappenheim’s libretto. The unnamed woman, apparently searching for her lover and becoming ever more disturbed, discovers his corpse; furiously denouncing his unfaithfulness, she wanders off into the darkness. It is left unclear whether reality or a nightmare dreamworld is being depicted, or whether or not the woman herself has killed the man. The music’s technical difficulty prevented its performance for many years, but the score was known in Schoenberg’s circle; its phantasmagoric orchestral sonorities clearly influenced Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck, although this was completed two years before Erwartung’s premiere, in 1924 in Prague.