Seven
Whose Idea Was Erwartung?

Bryan R. Simms

Schoenberg's Erwartung is a paradigm of modernism. Its conception, both of musical language and of dramatic form, has no direct or immediate antecedent. Its text anticipates by several years the style of German expressionist drama, and its music is experimental to a degree that Schoenberg never surpassed. Yet despite an originality that has long attracted the attention of specialists in twentieth-century music, Erwartung continues to guard its secrets. One of these prompts the title of this article. Did the dramatic content of Erwartung originate with Schoenberg, which he then asked Marie Pappenheim to flesh out? Or was Pappenheim responsible for the libretto's initial concept as well as its execution? These questions presuppose others. Is there one essential idea underlying the work, and did the librettist and composer proceed from a common starting point? And, finally, does Schoenberg's music conform to the objectives of Pappenheim's text, or does it carry the listener along a fundamentally different path?

Schoenberg believed that the basic idea for the opera was his. Shortly after beginning to compose the music on 27 August 1909 he wrote to Ferruccio Busoni:

I have started on a new composition; something for the theater; something quite new. The librettist (a lady), acting on my suggestions, has conceived and formulated everything just as I envisaged it. More news shortly; for at present I am head over heels in work and hope to be finished in 14 days.^[1]

Schoenberg's view of the origins of the opera was transmitted by Egon Wellesz in his 1921 biography of the composer, and it has been accepted by most later writers. What is known about the temporary rupture in Schoenberg's marriage and the circumstances leading to the suicide of Richard Gerstl — events that transpired shortly before the opera was writ-

ten — seems to support the assumption that the tale of infidelity and violent death was based on an outline that originated with the composer and reflected his own experiences and innermost feelings. Also identifying Schoenberg with the text is the line near the end of Erwartung that reads "tausend Menschen ziehen vorüber"; this is virtually identical to the first line of John Henry Mackay's poem "Am Wegrand," which Schoenberg had set to music in 1905 and later included in his Eight Songs, op. 6.

But Marie Pappenheim told a very different story about the origins of the opera. In an interview with Dika Newlin in 1951 she flatly denied having received any suggestions regarding the opera's subject or content,^[2] and she reiterated this in a letter to Helmut Kirchmeyer in 1963, three years before her death:

I received neither directions nor hints about what I should write (I would not have accepted them anyway). When Zemlinsky or Schoenberg spoke about libretti, it was about Schreker's, about Pelléas et Mélisande, etc.^[3]

Before addressing the contradictions between these two accounts, it will be useful to review the history of the work. Erwartung was composed during Schoenberg's vacation retreat in Steinakirchen, in lower Austria, during the summer of 1909, when the composer joined Alexander Zemlinsky, Erwin Stein, Marie Pappenheim, and others for a customary summer period of work, discussion, and relaxation. It was a productive time, for in addition to composing all of Erwartung Schoenberg completed the Five Orchestra Pieces, op. 16, and the last of the Three Piano Pieces, op. 11. Pappenheim, an acquaintance and possibly distant relative of the Zemlinskys, joined the gathering in Steinakirchen after completing her medical studies at the University of Vienna in June.^[4] Although her arrival in Steinakirchen marked her first meeting with Schoenberg, she may already have been known to him by reputation, since four of her poems had been published in 1906 in Karl Kraus's journal Die Fackel.^[5]

Pappenheim told Kirchmeyer in 1963 that Schoenberg asked her to write an opera text for him. She had agreed and then left to visit other friends in Traunkirchen, where within three weeks she drafted a "lyric poem" for what she termed a monodrama. Fully anticipating that Schoenberg would demand many changes, she was surprised to find that he asked for very few revisions and had indeed begun to compose the music virtually upon receipt of the first draft. Apparently there was no further personal contact between them before Schoenberg completed the score on 12 September 1909.^[6]

Pappenheim's previous literary efforts were closely related to her profession as a physician. In two of the poems published in Die Fackel, "Seziersaal" and "Prima graviditas," she wrote from the perspective of a clinician who probes the emotional as well as the physical constitution of her patients. In

"Seziersaal" (autopsy room), the lifeless features of a corpse still betray emotions, which the narrator sympathetically describes:

His mouth is pale and his eyes weary,
as one who stares nightly into the darkness.

. . . . . . . . . .

How sadly his desire wafts about me,
so much that my own heart betrays its torture.^[7]

In "Prima graviditas," too, the subject is the emotions, now associated with pregnancy. In these poems a clinical or pathological condition stimulates an outburst of feelings both from the patient and from the observer, a point of view to which Pappenheim would return in Erwartung.

Pappenheim later specialized in dermatology, but like her intellectual and artistic Viennese contemporaries she was aware of the emerging study of psychoanalysis.^[8] The writings of Sigmund Freud and his associates projected a scientific model for a deeper understanding of the workings not only of the mind but also of the emotions, a special interest of Pappenheim's. She had yet another reason to be interested in psychology: her kinswoman Bertha Pappenheim, who had suffered from hysteria in the 1880s, was the subject of the first celebrated case history of psychoanalysis.^[9] Bertha's physician, Josef Breuer, gave her the pseudonym "Anna O." in the 1895 Studien über Hysterie, which he wrote in collaboration with Sigmund Freud.^[10]

According to Breuer and Freud, hysteria can result when an individual responds to a traumatic event by channeling its memory into the unconscious mind. The trauma can persist in the form of physical ailments — among them amnesia, hallucinations, and disorders of vision and speech — for which there is no pathological basis. In the case of Anna O., hysteria was brought on by the illness and subsequent death of her father. Her symptoms were especially severe and, in addition to anorexia and paralysis of the limbs, included hallucinatory visions of snakes, periodic loss of recent memory, and a speech defect. Breuer's treatment was ingenious. During periods of self-induced hypnosis — states that Breuer termed conditions secondes — he led her through a "talking cure." She was coaxed to relive the painful memories and emotions associated with her father's death, thus exposing them to her rational mind, where they could be coped with, dispelled, or worn away. Following this cathartic process her abnormal symptoms disappeared.

The Woman in Erwartung exhibits classical symptoms of hysteria as they were defined by Breuer and Freud in the Studien über Hysterie. Her ailments stem from the loss of her beloved to another woman, a disturbance all the more unbalancing because she had become totally dependent upon him. In a jealous rage she murders him in the vicinity of the house of her rival.

Like Anna O. she thereupon experiences amnesia, partially banishing the murder from her conscious mind while beset at the same time by a speech impediment and hallucinations involving imaginary slithering or crawling animal forms.

The Woman's wistful recollections of her lover indicate that her hysteria is also associated with a frustrated sexual relationship. In this Pappenheim followed Freud's distinctive analysis of the disease rather than Breuer's. Breuer had determined that Bertha Pappenheim's hysteria had no sexual origin; according to him "sexuality was astonishingly undeveloped in her."^[11] But for Freud hysteria almost always stemmed from sexual causes; in the Studien he wrote: "In so far as one can speak of determining causes which lead to the acquisition of neuroses, their aetiology is to be looked for in sexual factors."^[12]

The clinical model that underlies Erwartung would have been plain to the many readers of the Studien über Hysterie around the year 1909. But Pappenheim's underlying message in Erwartung goes beyond scientific models or case studies of neurotic disease. Eva Weissweiler has argued persuasively that Pappenheim's Erwartung is essentially an attack upon the Viennese upper class, of which she sees the Woman as representative.^[13] According to this interpretation, the crucial message in Pappenheim's text is to be found not in the details of the Woman's hysteria or in her jumbled emotions but in the circumstances that led to the acquisition of her symptoms. And here Breuer's analysis is again influential.

Breuer concluded his study of Anna O. by speculating that her hysteria resulted ultimately from her upbringing, one typical of upper-class Viennese girls. She had been assiduously protected from life, kept in a monotonous, sheltered family routine. But her intellect and curiosity about the world could not be suppressed, and her only outlet was through daydreaming, which became a regular and prolonged habit with her. This daydreaming, according to Breuer, began to dissociate her conscious from her unconscious faculties, inviting traumatic events and emotions in her life to be repressed into the unconscious.

Susceptibility to neurosis is the central subtext in Pappenheim's libretto. The Woman's predisposition to hysteria, Pappenheim tells us through the Woman's words, was caused by an excessive reliance upon her partner, by having yielded her independence: "My one and only love. . . . How much, oh how much I loved you. . . . What am I to do here alone? . . . My boundary was where you were. . . . I lived isolated from everything. . . . All I knew was you."^[14]

It is very unlikely that Schoenberg interpreted the text of Erwartung as Pappenheim had intended, as a realistic study of hysteria with feminist overtones. Instead his own reading of the poem focused directly on the jumble of emotions that the Woman experiences. In his comments on the opera

Schoenberg stated explicitly that the subject of Erwartung was the emotions in a heightened state of intensity. His viewpoint was first made public in a 1920 article by Egon Wellesz, who no doubt drew on information received from the composer when he wrote:

The poem of the monodrama Erwartung sets out to give a dramatic portrayal of the problem of what transpires in a person in a moment of greatest tension and intensity of feeling. Marie Pappenheim, to whom Schoenberg communicated this idea, attempted to solve the problem in such a way as to disperse the tension throughout a succession of scenes.^[15]

Schoenberg restated this interpretation himself in a marginal annotation to a 1924 review by Paul Bekker, in which Bekker postulated a close relationship between Erwartung and Wagner's operas, especially their concluding love scenes. Common to all, Bekker had written, is

the idea of a music of womankind, of sounds representing erotic feelings, of a music that forces its way out of the conscious over into the unconscious, of a music of liberation, transfiguration, and redemption.^[16]

In his copy of Bekker's review Schoenberg dismissed this interpretation:

Not at all. It [the opera] is, as I have often explained, the slow representation of things that go through the mind in a moment of great anxiety. What does Erwartung have to do with redemption? The Woman may have been wrong in her fearful states of mind, or not (this is not clear, but, all the same, these are only fearful imaginings and they become manifest). She is not at all redeemed by them.^[17]

Schoenberg asserts, in other words, that the basic subject of the opera is the nature of an individual's mental condition when the emotions are heightened, in this case by fear. Whereas the physician Pappenheim was concerned with the Woman in Erwartung as an individual, a "patient" whose tortured emotions are symptoms of an illness she could have avoided by taking possession of her emotional life, the musician Schoenberg dealt in Erwartung with the emotions per se; for him, the Woman's individuality and psychology were secondary, even arbitrary.

Schoenberg's intention to paint an operatic portrait of the emotions rather than to create a work with psychological or sociological implications is apparent in the changes that he made in Pappenheim's original text.^[18] Relatively few in number, they are limited almost entirely to deletions. But in addition to deleting minor redundancies and references to sounds, Schoenberg made a significant change in Pappenheim's text by deleting the disjointed references that the Woman makes to the murder of her beloved. In one passage, for instance, the Woman, lying beside the corpse, in

the original version utters these lines, all subsequently removed by the composer:

What are they [your eyes] staring at in the trees. . . The moon is consumed, as from horror . . . open as though crying for help. . . What have they done to you. . . Oh you . . . you . . . I wasn't here. . . The evening was so peaceful . . . The leaves trembling against the sky . . . your hair is bloody . . . your soft brown hair. . . And blood on my hands . . . and blood on the ground . . . Who did this. . . Who did this to you?. . . You are the only thing here, you must know. . . You spiteful face of stone. . . How your lips are pressed together . . . Don't you smirk. . . The shadowy hollows . . . the den of thieves . . . Here he backed against the tree trunk . . . And then the shot . . .^[19]

In this passage Pappenheim reveals clearly enough that the Woman murdered her beloved, although she blurts out memories of the crime in a disjointed manner amid denials and a tangle of other memories and conflicting emotions. Schoenberg's elimination of the passage, so crucial for the coherence of Pappenheim's narrative, indicates that he did not wish the poem to be construed as a realistic or objective study but instead as a hallucination. "The whole drama can be understood as a nightmare," Schoenberg remarked later.^[20] Pappenheim was of course well aware that such deletions changed the emphasis of her text, and she later confided to Kirchmeyer:

One of these changes was for a long time very disagreeable to me — namely, deletions in the scene where she sees the dead body. With these deletions, which I have long forgotten, the mystical or, as it were, the hallucinatory quality became strengthened, while I was by no means sure that it was not a realistic occurrence. But perhaps the change made the overall effect more powerful after all.^[21]

Schoenberg's focus in Erwartung upon the emotions is symptomatic of his broader interest in the human psyche as the source of artistic creativity and of his own atonal musical language. His writings from 1909 and 1910 return repeatedly to the role of intuition and unconscious mental activity in the creative process. In a letter to Ferruccio Busoni, written only days before beginning to compose Erwartung, Schoenberg spoke of emotions as the gateway to the unconscious mind and the very basis of expressivity in his new music:

And the [musical] results I wish for:

no stylized and sterile protracted emotion.

People are not like that:

it is impossible for a person to have only one sensation at a time.

One has thousands simultaneously. And these thousands can no more readily be added together than an apple and a pear. They go their own ways.

And this variegation, this multifariousness, this illogicality which our senses demonstrate, the illogicality presented by their interactions, set forth by some mounting rush of blood, by some reaction of the senses or the nerves, this I should like to have in my music.

It should be an expression of feeling, as our feelings, which bring us in contact with our unconscious, really are, and no false child of feelings and "conscious logic."^[22]

Despite Schoenberg's use of concepts that were shared with psychoanalysis, his understanding of emotions and their role in the psyche is only partly true to Freudian theory. Freud and Breuer had described the unconscious as a turbulent realm of painful, repressed memories and emotions that spoke to an individual through dreams and neurotic symptoms. But for Schoenberg it was the source of creativity, communicating to an artist through emotion and instinct rather than reason: "It is only unconscious creative strength that has creative power," he wrote to Busoni.^[23]

Schoenberg was closer to the Freudian model in his statements concerning the compulsive nature of artistic instincts. A great composer, he believed, was compulsively driven to adopt a certain musical language. "The artist must," he wrote in 1911 in "Problems in Teaching Art." "He has no say in the matter, it is nothing to do with what he wants."^[24] This often repeated statement seems to suggest Schoenberg's belief in a predetermined mode of development for music, a course through which music must progress. But in light of his statements about the origins of creativity in the unconscious mind, his dictum takes on an entirely different meaning. If music must express the feelings and thus "bring us in contact with our unconscious" rather than with our rational faculties, then the artist can no more control the musical outcome than the hysterical patient can control the symptoms of her ailment.

Schoenberg's theory of emotions that erupt incoherently and irrationally from the unconscious mind and provoke a composer's work must surely have been discussed at the gathering in Steinakirchen in 1909, and in all likelihood it is at the heart of what he thought he had communicated to Pappenheim at that time. Schoenberg had good reason to assume that Pappenheim had taken his meaning; after all, the emotions of the Woman in Erwartung conform exactly to Schoenberg's prescription for what the feelings "really are": irrational, highly divergent, and jumbled one upon the other. Schoenberg's theory of emotion is also a key to understanding the highly experimental musical language of Erwartung, which deviates so strikingly from his music prior to 1909. The opera was composed rapidly, with virtually no sketching, no conventional motivic work, and no use of traditional formal archetypes. It is concise, free in expression, and highly diversified in its motivic content — indeed, an embodiment of just those qualities that he told Busoni he wanted in his music.

Schoenberg's study of the emotions in Erwartung is carried to a more universal level by its conjunction with its companion work, Die glückliche Hand. Although he never insisted that the two one-act operas be performed as a pair, he conceived of them as such and hoped to see them staged together: "It is my burning desire to have [Die glückliche Hand ] performed with the monodrama," he wrote to Albertine Zehme.^[25]

Schoenberg began to conceive Die glückliche Hand even before the monodrama was completed. In an undated letter from Pappenheim to Schoenberg, probably written in early September 1909, in which Pappenheim asks about revisions, she also self-effacingly comments upon the second opera:

In Vienna it is rumored that you are writing an opera with Kokoschka. Maybe he would have been better after all. I don't like my monodrama much.^[26]

She must have been more than a touch bemused to hear that the companion opera to Erwartung might use a text by Kokoschka, in whose writings female characters were often drawn as distorted types. In his play Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, for example, which had been performed publicly in Vienna in July 1909, women are violent, sex-crazed warriors who plunge into a life-and-death battle with any men who happen by. Although his collaboration with Kokoschka never came to pass, Schoenberg's own text for Die glückliche Hand was decisively influenced by Kokoschka's use of gender types as dramatic symbols.

The Man in Die glückliche Hand symbolizes the creative individual, whose other attributes include generosity, naïveté, and persistence in the face of mundane failure and the antagonism of society. The Woman is his opposite: she possesses no trace of intellect or creativity, and she is also faithless, weak, and cunning. Her character is derived from the unflattering female image that was common in such turn-of-the-century German literature as Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter and writings by Frank Wedekind, Karl Kraus, and August Strindberg, all of which Schoenberg admired.

But Die glückliche Hand is ultimately a drama about the Man alone: the other characters are mere projections and personifications of his inner aspirations and destiny. This is the interpretation Erwin Stein expressed in a 1928 article whose content was probably received directly from the composer, in which Stein asserts that all the constituent elements of the opera — text, music, and staging — contribute directly to an "inner experience" that embodies the idea of the work. "And this experience," he concludes, "is precisely the experience of a single person, the Man. It is his drama, which is projected outward by the staging."^[27]

Die glückliche Hand forms the complement to Erwartung. One is the opera of a man whose nature it is to be creative; the other is the opera of a woman who suffers from an emotional condition then thought common among women. Given Schoenberg's view of emotion and creativity as both oppo-

sites and complementary, it is not surprising that he should have turned to a significantly contrasting musical language for his second opera. The music of Die glückliche Hand represents a far more structured and systematic approach to composition than is evident in Erwartung. Die glückliche Hand contains examples of themes shaped according to classical forms, motivic and sectional recurrences, counterpoint, and regular rhythm and meter, all formulated through extensive sketching.^[28] The image of a systematically composed music reinforces and symbolizes the drama of the creative man, just as a music that rises "in a stream of unconscious sensations" — Schoenberg's description to Busoni of his music at the time of Erwartung — symbolizes the drama of emotions beyond rational control.

Following Die glückliche Hand Schoenberg did not return to a music of the emotions as it existed in Erwartung. His future direction was steadily on the path of an ever more systematic approach to composition, a course that led him eventually to the twelve-tone method. Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand were destined to stand on opposite sides of a peak in his lifelong quest for new musical resources. On one side the peak was approached through ever greater freedom from existing formal principles; on the other side was a return to a classical conception of music reformulated for the twentieth century.