Schoenberg/Berg

on the one hand, evoking "objective" natural settings usually through quiet, sustained and beautifully evocative chords and bright coloristic flourishes;

...and, on the other hand, intensely “subjective” and usually irrational feelings through extreme dynamics, extreme instrumental and vocal ranges, angular melodies and aggressive musical gestures.

The one is cool and static, and only subtly changing;

the other is burning hot, passionate and wildly dynamic.

Though Schoenberg and Berg are identified as atonal expressionists, they employ both approaches to create musical dramas that ebb and flow in emotional intensity.

WOZZECK (1922)

Act III, scene 2

To structure each scene of the final act, Berg writes an invention on a specific musical idea. The single pitch class “B” is the focal point of Wozzeck and Marie’s fateful final meeting in scene 2. Repeating high B’s sound like a calling bird; the timpani hammers out low B’s as Wozzeck’s murderous impulse erupts; Marie’s scream for “Help!” falls two octaves from high B to low B. Most indelible are the orchestra’s two sustained crescendos on single B’s — Wozzeck’s intensifying obsession — that comprise the following interlude.

Act I, scene 3

March and Lullaby

EXPRESSIONISM

Though I wouldn't term it impressionistic, Berg here carefully distinguishes the public outer world of the street and social interaction from Marie's intimate inner world of personal feelings and family. This contrast is especially clear

at the moment Marie slams the window in Margaret's face (at 1:40),

signaled by a sighing leitmotif in the strings ("Ach, mein Bub"). Marie's

lullaby to her child is the most — in truth, the only — intimate music

sung in the opera. Berg "pure" perfect fifths in the strings return at

crucial moments in the drama: Marie's death and the chilling

final measures of the opera.

Buchner based his play "Woyceck" (unfinished at his death) on a real incident, where a Polish army officer murdered his wife whom he suspected of adultery. The case was famous for being the first time the "insanity defense" was evoked in a trial. It failed to exonerate him and he was executed. Büchner's play is also especially noteworthy. Büchner transformed the real-life officer into a common soldier, making him the first working

class tragic protagonist.

Psychoanalysis and

the Unconscious Mind

Georg Büchner

1813-37

Giving voice to inner feelings virtually defines operatic singing, hence opera composers have always been especially attuned to the psychic lives of their characters. (That helps explain why opera was the ideal media for the mad scene well before madness was understood in a clinical sense.) During the 19th-century composers became increasingly aware of the unconscious nature of our feelings. Wagner even explicitly sought to express this hidden world in Tristan und Isolde.

Act I, scene 1

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

To earn extra money Wozzeck shaves the officious Captain, who dominates this scene — each scene in Act I is a character study of someone in Wozzeck's life. "Langsam, Wozzeck! Eins nach dem ander" ("Slowly, Wozzeck! One thing at a time") is the Captain's motto. He exemplifies the oppressive bureaucraticization of modern life. Though one can scarcely tell it, Berg scrupulously structured the music of scene 1 after a baroque dance suite. Every scene in the opera follows some conventional musical model, some of which are clearly audible, others not.

Influenced by his teacher

Freud's writings, like The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), helped explain to a broad readership the hidden, seemingly irrational motivations that drive our emotions and behavior. Richard Strauss's librettist and collaborator, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, applied this understanding of the growing field of psychology to his operatic characters. Freud's disciple and later rival, Carl Jung, studied the psychic roots of recurring narrative patterns and archetypes, like the femme fatale, that had long been prevalent in opera. The poet W. H. Auden, an avid follower of both Freud and Jung, dramatized Jung's idea of the archetypal shadow, anima and the process of individuation in his libretto for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951).

Alban Berg

1885-1935

Berg employs leitmotifs for most of the characters and certain important ideas. Wozzeck's entrances and exits are always marked by a bassoon flourish. Reticent for most of this scene, the anti-hero delivers the most coherent statement of the opera in his culminating "Wir arme leut" ("We poor people"), sung to a melody that will return in the orchestral epilogue.

Berg carefully analyzed Schoenberg’s score for Erwartung, marking passages that were coolly impressionistic in red and expressionistic outbursts in blue. Predictably, his music for Wozzeck features a similar polarity. In natural settings, like the field in Act I, scene 2 and the pond in Act 3, scenes 2 & 4, Berg emulates the subtle vibrancy of Schoenberg’s moonlit forest. Unlike Erwartung, though, Wozzeck tells a story in a realistic setting — more like the gritty realism of Italian verismo than the symbolist dreamscapes of Schoenberg or Debussy. Berg distorts popular musical styles — marching band, bar room piano — for the distinctly social settings. For the troubled inner life of his characters, though, he plunges into the intense expressionist style his teacher had pioneered.

Carl Jung (1875-1961)

ERWARTUNG (1909)

The composer Arnold Schoenberg called Expressionism "the art of the representation of inner processes."

Marie Pappenheim

1882-1966

Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung explores the irrational subconscious.

Librettist Marie Pappenheim, an

amateur poet, studied neurology

with Sigmund Freud, and sought

to explore the deep-seated,

largely unconscious feelings

that express themselves in

shadowy, symbolic images

and irrational fears

and impulses.

This monodrama (meaning a sung drama

for one character) has no story or linear

narrative; correspondingly, Schoenberg’s music

follows no recognizable musical structure. It is atonal (that is, without a stable tonal center or tonic) and athematic (no recurring leitmotifs).

For Schoenberg the dichotomy between Expressionism and Impressionism means...

Act III, scene iii

Berg's distorted imitation of an out-of-tune piano abruptly breaks the tension of the orchestral crescendo and thrusts us into the seedy tavern filled with lusty, but uncaring townsfolk. Here the composer structures the music around an obsessively-repeating rhythm. Wozzeck's paranoid delusions multiply as he, in fact, does have blood

on his hands.

Act III, scene iv: Wozzeck's Mad Scene

Scene 1. The edge of a wood. Roads and fields are visible in

the moonlight. The wood is tall and dark; only the first tree

trunks and the beginning of the path are lit.

(A woman arrives; her dress is covered with red roses,

which are starting to lose their petals. She is wearing jewelry.)

In here? You can't see the path...

How silvery the trunks are gleaming... like birches!

Oh, our garden. The flowers for him will have withered.

It is so warm tonight.

I’m afraid…

(She listens anxiously toward the wood.)

how heavy the air is that comes out of there…

It’s like a storm, motionless…

It’s so horribly quiet and empty…

But at least it’s bright here…

The moon was so bright before…

(She crouches down, listening and looking in front of her.)

Oh, it’s still the cricket, with its lovesong…

Don’t speak, it’s so lovely beside you…

The moon is going down…

Are you a coward, won’t you look for him?

Then die here.

This quiet is so threatening…

The moon is horrified… can it see in there?

All alone, into the stifling shadows.

(She gathers her courage and runs into the wood.)

I shall sing, so that he can hear me.

But you didn’t come…

Who’s weeping?

Is there someone here?

Is there someone here? Nothing…

But surely that was…

Now there’s rustling above me…

It’s beating through the branches …

Coming towards me…

(She runs off to the side in horror.

A night-bird screeches.)

Don’t come here! Leave me alone!

God, help me…

It was nothing…

(She starts running)

Quickly, quickly…

(She falls down.)

Oh, what’s that?

A body…

No, only a trunk.

Once again, Berg shifts abruptly, first back to the stillness of the pond, and then to the tempestuous inner world of Wozzeck's increasingly tortured mind. A single 6-note chord becomes the focal point of Berg's musical invention. Repeated at the static opening of the scene, this chord is transformed into a wash of sounds that engulf the listener, like the water rushing up around the drowning madman.

Scene 2

(Pitch dark; a broad path and tall trees close together.

She gropes forward.)

Is this still the path? It’s smooth here.

What’s that? Let go!

(Trembling, she tries to withdraw her hand.)

Is it caught? No something crawled…

(She clutches her face wildly.)

And here as well… Who is touching me?

Away — further… for God’s sake…

(She moves with her arms held out in front of her.)

Yes, the path is broad…

It was so quiet behind the garden wall…

No more scything… no shouting, no movement…

And the town in the pale mist…

I looked over longingly…

And the sky so vast above the path,

that you always take to come to me…

more distant and transparent… the colors of the evening…

Anja Silja, soprano

Vienna Philharmonic

Arnold Schoenberg

1874-1951

(self-portrait)

Scene 3

(A broad band of light runs next to the path.

The moon lights up a clearing in the wood. )

There is light from there!

Oh, it’s only the moon… that’s all right

Something black is dancing there…

A hundred hands…

Don’t be silly… it’s the shadow.

Oh, your shadow on the white walls…

But you always had to leave so soon…

(Rustling. She stops and listens)

Are you calling?

And it’s so long until the evening…

But the shadow is crawling!

Wide yellow eyes, sticking out, as if on stalks…

Staring…

It’s not an animal, my God, not an animal…

I’m so frightened…

Darling, my darling, help me…

He’s not here either…

Nothing living on the white long road…

No noise…

Those broad pale fields are unbreathing,

as if they were dead…

Not a blade of grass is moving.

There’s the town… and the pale moon…

No clouds, no shadow of a night-bird’s

wing in the sky…

A boundless deathly pallor…

I can hardly go on…

And there they won’t let me in…

That woman, the stranger, she will chase me away!

What if he’s ill?

A bench… I have to rest.

But it’s so long since I saw him.

(As she comes under the trees she touches

something with her foot.)

No, that’s not the shadow from the bench!

It’s a person…

It’s not breathing…

It’s wet… something is dripping…

(She moves from the shadows into the moonlight.)

It’s a red gleam…

Oh, my hands: they are sore and scratched…

No, it’s still wet, it’s coming from there.

(With great effort and distaste she tries to pick up the object.)

I can’t do it.

It’s him!

The moonlight…

No, there…

It’s that ghastly head… the ghost…

If only it would disappear… like the one in the wood…

The shadow of a tree… a silly branch…

The moon is malicious…

Because it has no blood… it paints red blood…

But it will dissolve immediately…

Don’t look at it… pay no attention…

It’s bound to dissolve… like the one in the wood…

(She turns back to the road, with forced calm.)

I must go… I have to find him.

It must already be late.

(She half turns round.)

It’s gone… I knew it would.

Scene 4

(A broad road, lit by the moon. Fields and meadows.

On the far left the road is visible again, and there

is joined by a path that leads to a house, the windows

of which are shuttered. There’s a white stone balcony.

The woman appears, exhausted, her dress ripped, her

hair a mess. She has red scratches on her face and hands.)

Sprechstimme

a cross between speaking and singing in which the tone quality of speech is heightened and lowered in pitch along melodic contours indicated in the musical notation. Arnold Schoenberg was the first to use sprechstimme extensively in his cycle Pierrot Lunaire (1912), which he composed after Erwartung. Berg adopts sprechstimme when he wants a character essentially to speak, but in an emotionally-wrought manner, as in Wozzeck's drowning scene in Act III. Many modernist composers use sprechstimme to create a range of gradations between natural speech and fully-sung lyric melody.

Act III, scene 5

Berg's final interlude in D minor — the most overtly tonal music in the opera — stands as a heart-breaking epilogue. Here the composer invites the listener to mourn the tragic anti-hero. Another abrupt transition to the final scene again thrusts us into the callous

social world where seemingly innocent children sing

"Ring around the Rosey"; only now Wozzeck and

Marie's orphan child is the victim

of their cruelty.

FOREST & MOON at NIGHT

Carefully note the richly evocative and symbolic setting of Erwartung: the edge of a dark forest on a moonlit night. Think of other forest settings from German opera and fairy tales — the Wolf’s Glen, Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel, Red Riding Hood, even Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Consider, too, the Night and Moon imagery in previous operas — the Queen of the Night, Norma’s Hymn to the Moon Goddess (Casta Diva), Tristan and Isolde’s Love-Duet, the changing moon imagery in Salomé. Because they embody the unknown, both the dark Forest and the Night symbolize our unconscious. The frightening animals she imagines are our base impulses: sexual, violent, shameful. The Moon invariably symbolizes woman and all she is associated with: being intuitive and wise; but also irrational and emotional.

From later in Scene 4

In an expressionist rage, the Woman interrogates her dead lover about his suspected affair. Think back over the course of all the female characters who have been abandoned by their lovers: Ariadne, Ottavia, Dido, the Countess, Norma, Gilda. Think of Pappenheim’s psychological exploration of the waiting Woman as exposing the raw emotions deep within all of these women — fear, jealousy, rage, loneliness.

(She stares at him.)

But your eyes are so strange…

Where are you looking?

What are you looking for?

(She looks toward the balcony)

Is someone there? (She turns back)

Now how was it that last time?

Didn’t your eyes look like that then too?

No, it’s just that you mind was somewhere else…

or… and suddenly you controlled yourself…

And you didn’t come to me for three days…

You had no time…

These last months you’ve so often had no time…

No, that just isn’t possible…

That’s just… Oh, now I remember…

That sigh, half asleep… like a name…

You kissed the question away from my lips…

But why did he promise to come to me today?

I don’t want that… no, I won’t…

(jumping up and turning around.)

Why have you been killed?

In front of the house here…

Did someone discover you?

No, no…

My one and only love… not that…

Oh the moon is swaying… I can’t see…

Look at me…

Are you looking over there again?

Impression, by the same token, would therefore be "the art of representing outer surfaces — or impressions."

IMPRESSIONISM