Erwartung and the scene of psychoanalysis

Description

Traditional analytic approaches to Erwartung are also considered in this study. This survey is revelatory in two respects: firstly, it often provides insight into the motivic, structural and textural details of the monodrama; secondly, it reveals the desire of musical analysis to impute conscious logic where it does not exist and to impute tonality where it does not and cannot function.This study offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of the monodrama that considers the work as Schoenberg's own case history. The influence of other psychological operas are examined, and a chain of interpretation linking these works and a number of Schoenberg's own early songs is constructed, pointing to the monodrama as haunted by the past, as hysterical in its own right. Erwartung and its sole character serve as Schoenberg's analytical surrogates: the monodrama is a Freudian work, a dramatization of the scene of psychoanalysis and the act of psychoanalysis.Arnold Schoenberg's 1909 monodrama Erwartung is regarded as his first major work in a free atonal idiom, written without keys, recurrent themes or functional harmony. The text of the work is the fragmented monologue of an unnamed woman, lost in the woods at night. Given this and the work's milieu, Vienna ca. 1909, Erwartung has come to be seen as a monodrama about hysteria, perhaps even based on a Freudian case history. This study contends that the monodrama, as a surrogate analysis of Schoenberg himself, constitutes a case history in its own right.This study addresses not only the work's genesis and historical context, but also decades of musicological discourse that has often uncritically characterized Erwartung as related to psychoanalysis and hysteria. This characterization, based on the assumption that the monodrama's text was based on a Freudian case history, is examined in detail in this study.

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