It’s the 100th anniversary of Schoenberg’s Erwartung (Expectation) lauded as groundbreaking, pioneeringly atonal and athematic. It’s a monodrama based on a libretto by Marie Pappenheim.
The story: a woman wanders into the woods in search of her lover whom she has been waiting for for three days. Eventually she seems to have found him. Dead. Then she sees a house where she probably isn’t welcome. And then she mentions another woman…
What really happened here. Who killed him? Did she really find his body? Did she kill him?
WHAT DO YOU THINK??
Watch the video to read and hear some more (the sounds are from performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, on the Sony / Boulez CD, but you can listen to the whole piece here: http://www.schoenberg.at/9_webradio/jukebox/Operas_e.htm).
Very different ways of staging (and singing) this piece.
and some psychoanalytical approaches
http://www.discourses.ca/v3n2a1.html
via facebook:
after listening, reading for the first time it appears to me, some what obvious, that she has killed him. a little too obvious for my taste…
and more from the same person (on facebook)in response to my question ‘why is she looking for him then?’:
top of my head? it’s not linear the way we hear/ read it. she follows her fear of being cheated, goes looking for him (symbolism of woods?), finds him with another woman (not welcomed house), and than somwhere kills him in an affect; than running away, haunted by own shadows/ fear? whaddaya think?