Each of Arnold Schoenberg's four operas is sui generis. The first two one-acters, Erwartung (1909) and Die glückliche Hand (1910-1913), stem from his most experimental period and break new ground both musically and dramatically. The former is an intense, apparently freely associative psychological drama, the latter an auto-biographical allegory with a more self-evident musical structure. The one-act comedy Von heute auf morgen (1928-1929), the first opera written using the twelve-tone technique, belongs theatrically to the Zeitoper tradition.

The libretto by Gertrude Schoenberg, the composer's second wife (under the pseudonym "Max Bionda"), was, like that of Strauss's Intermezzo, suggested by an incident from contemporary life—in this case, the domestic affairs of Schoenberg's colleague Franz Schreker; formally, it reflects the neoclassical practice characteristic of the contemporaneous instrumental music. Finally, the two-act torso of the incomplete Moses und Aron (1930-1932), a profound and disturbed exploration of the impossibility of communicating great truths, religious and otherwise, presents an equally clearly articulated musical design.

Besides the sheer practical difficulty of these operas, two world wars and the consequences of Nazi racial and artistic policies also militated against frequent productions and inhibited the growth of any continuous performing tradition for Schoenberg's operas. The first two did not reach the stage until 1924 and accumulated relatively few productions in the years remaining before Hitler's advent (most notably, as a double bill at Berlin's Kroll Opera in 1930). Erwartung has acquired some currency since 1950, both in concert form and as part of "contemporary" double and triple bills, while the progress of Die glückliche Hand has been impeded by its obscurer dramatic character and by Schoenberg's elaborately specific staging and lighting conceptions. Von heute auf morgen came before the public more rapidly (Frankfurt, 1930), but has been seen only rarely since; perhaps the current revival of interest in Zeitoper will bring it up for reappraisal, though past verdicts on the stageworthiness of its comedy have been less than encouraging. Moses und Aron, not available for performance as long as Schoenberg lived and hoped to compose music for the brief final act, was first heard in concert form in 1954 and staged in Zurich three years later. Since then it has become established in the international repertory (lately and conspicuously at the Salzburg Festival); the New York stage premiere is promised in 1989 by the New York City Opera.

By the time this article appears in print, Erwartung will have received its New York stage premiere (at the Metropolitan Opera), and, as a favored item in Hildegard Behren's repertory for orchestral-concert engagements in the 1980s, has been heard if not seen in other American cities. Within the context of Schoenberg's compositional development it has long held a special place as the most extended and "athematic" example of his "atonal" style; though recent studies have revealed a multitude of sub-surface motivic and harmonic connections, its uniqueness subsists. Less often has it been viewed in the perspective of general operatic history, in which regard its designation as a "monodrama" is immediately a red herring. The standard music-historical reference books tell us that a "monodrama" was a melodrama—a theatrical work spoken over musical accompaniment—for a single character.

The sketchy historical record indicates that the designation, like the subject matter itself, originated with the text's author, Marie Pappenheim (1882-1966). Some fifty years after the event, the musicologist Helmut Kirchmeyer recorded her account of Erwartung's origins: "On a summer holiday in Steinakirchen in lower Austria, where Stein, Berg, Mopp, and other artists were staying near the Schoenberg and Zemlinsky families, Schoenberg suddenly challenged the young poetess: 'Then write me an opera libretto, young lady.… Write whatever you wish, I need a libretto.' Marie Pappenheim responded: 'I certainly cannot write a libretto, at most I could write a monodrama.'" According to Kirchmeyer, Pappenheim then believed that she had invented the word monodrama (presumably intending it to denote a "one-character drama") and was thus unaware of its music-historical background. Schoenberg may have been similarly ignorant, though he definitely knew the then-still-active tradition of melo drama, exemplified by such recitations with music as Strauss's Enoch Arden (1897) and Max von Schillings's Hexenlied (1904) and, in the theater, by the more specifically notated Sprechgesang in the first version (1897) of Humperdinck's Königskinder, which he emulated in the final part of Gurre-Lieder and would develop to powerful effect in Pierrot lunaire. However, Erwartung is sung throughout.

Here is the rest of what Pappenheim told Kirchmeyer about the opera's origins:

Two days later, Marie Pappenheim went to friends at Traunkirchen, and there wrote the libretto for Erwartung. She had experienced the forest a year earlier in Ischi, where every night around 10:30 she had to go through a stretch of dark forest on her way home; therein she found the plot of the drama.… Lying in the grass, she wrote in pencil on large sheets of paper, and made no copy; she hardly read through what she had written, and expected that Schoenberg, whom she did not yet know very well, would surely make proposals for changes.… Three weeks later, she returned to Steinakirchen, firmly believing that her poem was no opera libretto. But Schoenberg took it from her page by page (she wanted to correct it), and composed it immediately.

In 1909 Pappenheim was a medical student in Vienna, interested in literature and the arts; some of her poems were published in Karl Kraus's Die Fackel. At this point she was not entirely confident of her literary abilities, as her letter of 3 October to Schoenberg at Steinakirchen suggests: "I am writing out the final alterations on a separate piece of paper. Naturally I don't want you to have to work any more. I have shown it to no one, not even Zemlinsky. Certainly it does not please me. I did not write earlier, as I was very agitated. Now I am 50 percent better. That you have already finished gives me new courage." Although her medical degree, conferred the following year, was in skin diseases, Pappenheim's older brother Martin was a psychiatrist, and both must have been well aware of the psychoanalytic movement—indeed, their second cousin Berta Pappenheim had been the pseudonymous "Anna O" of a historically central analysis by Josef Breuer, described in Freud and Breuer's 1895 Studies in Hysteria.

The single character of Erwartung is an unnamed woman; searching in a forest for her lover, she is gripped in rapid alternation by violent apprehension and rapt reminiscence. Progressively, fear gains the upper hand, and after three relatively short scenes in the forest she emerges in a clearing before a house, dress torn, hair in disarray, face and hands bleeding. Here she discovers a body, which turns out to be that of her lover—the only event in the drama that takes place outside of her mind (or does it?). Following this traumatic identification, her mind careens through states of increasing bitterness and suspicion, alighting upon past hints that the lover might have been betraying her with another woman. Her final words may imply that she now denies the reality of his death:

Oh, bist du da…
  Ich suchte…

Oh, are you there…
  I was looking…

In fact, the reality of the entire action is ambiguous, at the least. At the time of the Kroll Opera performances Schoenberg noted that "the whole drama can be understood as a nightmare of anxiety [Angsttraum."] In a roughly contemporaneous essay he wrote: "In Erwartung the aim is to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour." Subsequent writers have speculated that the protagonist herself may have murdered the man out of jealousy, prior to the opera's beginning, and is returning to the scene of the crime. These interpretations are not, of course, incompatible.

The woman's situation in part parallels that of Isolde, but filtered through the distorting mirror of intense psychological stress. At measures 237-42 she retrospectively imagines the reunion she had expected with her absent lover, reminding us of Isolde and Tristan in act 2 of Wagner's opera:

Der Abend war so voll Frieden…
  Ich schaute und wartete…
Über die Gartenmauer dir entgegen…
so niedrig ist sie…
  Und dann winkten wir beide…

The evening was so peaceful…
I looked and waited…
Across the garden wall, toward you…
so low it is…
And then we both waved…

By the time of this fleeting vision, however, she is virtually in the position of Isolde in act 3, who came "to die with Tristan true" but found him at the point of death. Pappenheim's woman accuses her lover of depriving her of "the favor of being allowed to die with you" ("Oh! nicht einmal die Gnade, mit dir sterben zu dürfen"; mm. 351-56). Near the end of Erwartung (mm. 401-09), Tristan's central imagery of night and day, light and darkness, is particularly conspicuous:

Das Licht wird für alle kommen…
aber ich allein in meiner Nacht?…
Der Morgen trennt uns … immer der Morgen …
So schwer küsst du zum Abschied…
Wieder ein ewiger Tag des Wartens…

The light will come for everyone…
but I, alone in my night?…
The morning separates us … always
  the morning…
So heavily you kiss me farewell…
Yet another endless day of waiting…

Moreover, the characterization of the "other woman" as "die Frau mit den weissen Armen" recalls an element of the Tristan legend, albeit one not used by Wagner, the rival Iseult of the White Hands.

This should occasion no surprise, for Wagner's opera—its words as well as its music—was the governing image of sexual passion in the culture that brought forth Erwartung. Even closer than Tristan to the world of abnormal psychology that Pappenheim's libretto inhabits were the then-new one-act operas of Richard Strauss. Especially if she were herself the cause of his death, Erwartung's protagonist apostrophizing her lover's corpse resembles Salome, and their lines once almost converge: "Was soll ich allein hier tun?" (mm. 392-93) echoes Salome's "Was soll ich jetzt tun, Jochanaan?" The moon that literally presides over Salome's action is also on hand at the beginning of Erwartung, vanishing in the second scene and reappearing in the third. Elektra, first performed in Vienna the preceding March, finds further echoes; Hofmannsthal's drama deals more directly with its characters' neurotic concerns than does Salome, in which Wilde's penchant for ornamental verbiage and parallel structure gets in the way of psychological truth.

But the Elektra libretto, too, is structured and "artificial" by comparison to Pappenheim's erratically gushing stream of incomplete sentences and freeassociative phrases, as her protagonist's mind darts between past and present, desire and fear. What she gave Schoenberg was truly not a libretto, but instead an interior monologue, with no distance, none of the objectivity required by a drama of characters who must display external selves to each other and to the spectator. In previous operas that objectivity occasionally gives way to the special, close-up focus of the soliloquy or scene, but in Erwartung that focus is both normative and exclusive, persisting for the entire opera. Nor does Pappenheim's libretto indulge in artifices of verbal structure and parallelism. Its imagery, however conditioned by the period of its origin, offers itself as symptomatic rather than symbolic, as raw mental data rather than metaphor.

Schoenberg's response to this unique text was equally extraordinary. In 1946 he wrote that "I personally belong to those who generally write very fast, whether it is 'cerebral' counterpoint or 'spontaneous' melody," and he cited Erwartung as an example, claiming that he wrote its nearly thirty minutes of music in just fourteen days. The first page of the composition draft in short score (see illustration) is dated 27 August 1909, and the end of the work 12 September, which actually makes a total of seventeen days; the manuscript full score was finished a few weeks later, on 4 October. As Charles Rosen has observed, when Schoenberg "lost the thread of a piece, he could almost never pick it up again without disaster," and fortunately no Austrian equivalent of Coleridge's "person on business from Porlock" interrupted this period of extreme concentration, though in 1940 Schoenberg told his class at UCLA that "when he was about halfway through, he found something in the text that didn't seem to fit the rest, so lost a whole day correcting that. He had to write to Marie P. about it and wait for her answer." According to Josef Rufer, Pappenheim's manuscript text includes "many cuts and alterations in Schoenberg's handwriting, and several musical sketches at various points in the text."

As already noted, Erwartung's reputation as "athematic" and "atonal" has eventually yielded to analytic efforts; certain motivic cells (among them tri-tone-plus-semitone, minor-third-plus-semitone) pervade the texture both horizontally and vertically. Occasional suggestions of Schoenberg's favored D minor come to a head near the end in the quotation from the song "Am Wegrand" (originally in that key), at "Tausend Menschen ziehn vorüber" (m. 411). The motivic and harmonic correspondences are close enough to the surface to bring about consistency, yet too ephemeral to afford the security—the formal bearings, the sense of location within the piece's progress—we are accustomed to receive from explicit themes and from procedures such as repetitions and symmetries, abjured in the music of Erwartung.

This is intentional, of course, and appropriate to an opera in which the time scale is not realistic, but purely psychological: to a mind at sea, buffeted by conflicting impressions of nature and spontaneous irruptions from the sub-conscious, the flow of consciousness is constantly unordered and surprising. Schoenberg has captured this with remarkable fidelity, so that even after repeated hearings we can hardly help experiencing the music's progression as still startling. (This characteristic definitely complicates performance. In a recent conversation James Levine reported—and concurred with—Pierre Boulez's view that Erwartung is one of the two most challenging pieces to conduct from memory, because there is no ordered repetition of elements.) That music influences our perception of time is a truism; Erwartung's aggressively heterogeneous aspect effectively numbs the listener's ability to measure the passage of time.

Erwartung isn't formless, but the dimensions of the formal units are small—as brief as a few measures each—and they aren't articulated in traditional ways, via cadences or symmetries. That many of these segments center around a leading melodic component should help, but will do so only if the performance is really well prepared; too often, those melodic components fail to emerge from the orchestral polyphony, despite the cautionary Hauptstimme markings in Schoenberg's full score. Again, the performance difficulty is a necessary consequence of the special expressive task Schoenberg has undertaken. For maximum timbrai diversity he generally uses the large orchestra as a repository from which to draw ever-fresh chamber ensembles for successive formal units. The players must therefore continually readjust to "new" colleagues with whom they are playing and trying to balance lines—quite a contrast to conventionally scored repertory, whose relatively standardized orchestrational practices (not to mention, in most cases, the works themselves) they have long since internalized.

Yet, for all its originality, Schoenberg's first opera remains fundamentally within the operatic aesthetic promulgated by Wagner in doctrine and example, and subscribed to in the present century by Strauss and Berg among others (though rejected by Debussy and Stravinsky): structural and emotional weight concentrated in the orchestra, formal units linked to yield an uninterrupted composition, intensively motivic textures, the strong didactic intent inherited from Beethoven's high ethical concerns. Its three successors would further extend that tradition, if each in a specific direction.