Opera after 1900

Margaret Notley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351555784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The articles reprinted in this volume treat operas as opera and from some sort of critical angle; none of the articles uses methodology appropriate for another kind of musical work. Additional criteria used in selecting the articles were that they should not have been reprinted widely before and that taken together they should cover an extended array of significant operas and critical questions about them. Trends in Anglophone scholarship on post-1900 opera then determined the structure of the volume. The anthologized articles are organized according to the place of origin of the opera discussed in each of them; the introduction, however, follows a thematic approach. Themes considered in the introduction include questions of genre and reception; perspectives on librettos and librettists; words, lyricism, and roles of the orchestra; and modernism and other political contexts.

Part I
Operas by Viennese Composers, c.a. 1910–1935

[1]
Expressive principle and orchestral polyphony in Schoenberg’s Erwartung

Carl Dahlhaus

I

Schoenberg’s Erwartung has been understood by contemporaries and historians in two ways: on the one hand — regarded from the perspective of Geistesgeschichte^* — as the musical epitome of Expressionism, on the other — seen in terms of the history of composition — as the realisation of the idea of a music that is athematic and not definable by formal categories.¹ These judgments are clearly based on the idea that expression and form or structure are mutually opposed, as if one principle predominated at the expense of the other. Theodor W. Adorno, by contrast, who distrusted rigid oppositions and thus preferred to perceive and emphasise the interdependence of extremes rather than the way they diverged, described Schoenberg’s Erwartung as ‘case study and construction in one’.² ‘The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the structural law of the music. It forbids continuity and development.’³ The lack of ‘continuity and development’ should not be taken as a negation of form, but as a ‘structural law’ in itself. To borrow a phrase from Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie, expression and form are conveyed through one another: ‘When works are not properly constructed, properly formed, they lose that very expressiveness for the sake of which they dispense with formal rigour.’⁴ An analysis of Erwartung—an interpretation which does not accept the premiss that the work cannot be analysed — ought therefore to try to describe those structural elements which form the basis of the expressiveness; and it ought to try to make that sense of form which Adorno defined exclusively in negative terms — as an absence of ‘continuity and development’ — comprehensible in terms of compositional technique.

The use of historical categories tends to obscure what is new and unique. But if it may be permitted for just a moment, Schoenberg’s Erwartung can be seen in two ways: on the one hand, as a recitativo accompagnato expanded for the length of an entire musical drama, in other words as musical declamation supported by expressive or descriptive orchestral motifs, and on the other hand as the work of a composer whose musical thinking was influenced first and foremost by the tradition of chamber music. The result is an orchestral texture which is athematic in the manner of accompanied recitative but polyphonic in the chamber music sense, a texture, therefore, which forces heterogeneous premisses together into a paradox: in the nineteenth century excessive counterpoint in a recitativo accompagnato was as unthinkable as athematicism in polyphonic chamber music.

The instrumentation is characterised by an avoidance of mixed colours. It is true that the bassoon is sometimes doubled, either at the unison or at the octave, by contrabassoon, violins by violas or — in the woodwind family — oboes by flutes and clarinets; but mixed colours, which are almost the rule in Strauss and Schreker, are avoided by Schoenberg, whose technique of instrumentation derives from that of Mahler. Tone colour is a means of clarification and therefore a function of the polyphony, rather than the polyphony being a function of the richness of orchestral colour. This use of unmixed colours to bring polyphonic structures into prominence is a feature reminiscent of chamber music.

Orchestral polyphony as Schoenberg understood it does not cancel out the expressiveness of the monodrama but on the contrary supports and even generates it. This would hardly need to be emphasised if the prejudice that expression and counterpoint are mutually opposed had not proved well-nigh indestructible, despite frequent refutation; so persistent is the conception, indeed, that it even haunts the thoughts of those whose musical instincts on the whole convince them of the opposite. To talk of mere ‘pseudo-polyphony’, as soon as contrapuntal writing becomes expressive instead of contenting itself with the expressive poverty of the archaic, is absurd in the light of Tristan and Parsifal.

From the technical point of view, expression can indeed be understood as a function of polyphony, for the more ‘eloquent’ a contrapuntal voice is — and the more significant what it has to say — the more emphatically it impresses itself on the consciousness of the intelligent listener as part of the contrapuntal discourse. The espressivo is a means of clarification and not — as detractors of Romanticism would have it — of obfuscation. And conversely the expressiveness of a contrapuntal voice is not diminished through being combined simultaneously with other ‘eloquent’ voices; rather — through contrast, through being thrown into relief or through some process of complementation — it is highlighted, at any rate for listeners who are capable of perceiving contrapuntal structures in general and who are not satisfied with merely registering the fact that different things have been superimposed. In expressive polyphony expression and construction are, as Adorno would say, ‘conveyed through one another’.

II

The attempt to define more precisely the relation between expression and orchestral polyphony in Schoenberg’s Erwartung, and to find some concrete analytical basis for the dialectical formula of how the different elements are conveyed through one another, requires some prior qualification of the theory that the musical structure of the work is athematic. It is surely beyond dispute that the monodrama is not based on themes or leitmotifs, and that both the Brahmsian and the Wagnerian traditions of ‘musical logic’ have therefore been suspended; and it seems pointless to search for ‘leading chords’. But it is still an open question to what extent one can speak meaningfully of motivic connections and even of motivic (as opposed to thematic) work.

If one assumes that Schoenberg understood Webern’s orchestral pieces to be symphonic movements compressed into the smallest possible space of time, it is not absurd to interpret the sections of 1–5 bars into which Erwartung is divided as contracted Wagnerian periods—those ‘poetic—musical periods’ which in the Ring generally extend to roughly 20–30 bars⁵ (or at least, it is not absurd to suppose that Schoenberg saw them in this way). And the sections in Erwartung—not unlike Wagnerian periods—are not infrequently defined by means of a characteristic musical idea, which constitutes the predominant motif, albeit not the only one. Particularly striking, though by no means unique, is the motivic work in bars 245–7. At the words ‘Wie kannst du tot sein?’ the vocal line is based on the three-note figure e²—d² sharp—a¹; this figure is extended, by means of a sequence which overlaps with the model, into e²—d² sharp—a¹—g¹ sharp—d¹. The motif is anticipated by the horns in double diminution and imitated by the woodwind, first in simple diminution and then in double diminution and inversion. The double basses counter the principal motif with a figure, d¹ flat—c¹—a, which could be a variant of it (resulting from the contraction of the tritone to a minor third) but which, when one analyses the context, proves to be the true basic motif, from which conversely the characteristic motif of bars 245–7 is derived.

Of course, the expression ‘basic motif’ may well be suspected of being a terminological error or at the very least an exaggeration. For while the musical idea in bars 245–7 emerges unmistakably as a motif, it is uncertain whether, to what extent and in what passages the figure D flat—C—A, which appears to be the basic substance of bars 235–49, constitutes a motif with unifying effect or whether it can merely be regarded as a premotivic, diastematic element.⁶

The hypothesis that it is a motif could find support, first, in the fact that the three-note figure permits a semantic interpretation and thus performs a musico-dramatic function. It appears in an exposed register of the voice in bar 415 at the words ‘Wo bist du?’, creating an analogy with bars 235–49 — in which the woman is presented as struggling, when faced with her dead lover, to evoke the image of the living man.

Secondly, if one assumes that the figure is a motif the way is clear to a meaningful interpretation of the form. The central compositional problem of a work whose ‘structural law’, as Adorno puts it, forbids ‘continuity and development’ is to establish reasons why the sections follow one another in the order they do. And one means of imposing unity on sharp contrasts is to interlock the end of one section with the beginning of the next. From the textual point of view, bar 242 — ‘Und dann winkten wir beide’—is a conclusion (in the sense that the character is lost in recollection). Musically, however, ‘a tender thought … [is] expressed by a quick and violent theme’, as Schoenberg wrote in the Blauer Reiter (1912), ‘because the following violence will develop from it more organically’. Blauer Reiter (1912),⁷ Vehemently explosive figures in the orchestra anticipate dynamically — though not melodically — the singer’s ‘Nein, nein, es ist nicht wahr’ in the next bar. Yet the contrasts do not remain unmediated. Rather, the counterpoint of the horns and trombones in bar 242 is a fortissimo variant of the figure that was played ‘sehr zart’ by the oboe in bar 241 of the previous section. The dynamic and expressive contrast is conveyed motivically—to the extent that one can speak of a motif at all, for what is involved is none other than the three-note figure D flat—C—A, whose motivic status is not entirely clear.

It would be fruitless to try to make the question of whether these are motifs or pre-motivic linguistic elements dependent on psychological tests to establish the audibility of connections which may or may not be interpreted as motifs. On the other hand, it is not enough that a motivic relationship can be deduced from the notes. Rather, the essential criterion must be whether the connection is form- or structure-building, and that in a sense which accords with the form and structure of the work as a whole; the individual relationship only becomes what it is through the system in which it is subsumed.

Whether the three-note figure D flat—C—A, which appears in bars 235—49 of Erwartung in varying degrees of clarity and definition, is essential or — in part, at least — merely an accidental feature depends, therefore, on its relationship to the constitutive features of the work: to the characteristic configuration of expression and orchestral polyphony.

III

The principle that forms the basis of Schoenberg’s counterpoint — in Erwartung as in the orchestral works — is not the textbook ideal of the equality of voices but the idea that the voices should be clearly separate in function. Vocal line, instrumental Hauptstimme, Nebenstimme and accom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I OPERAS BY VIENNESE COMPOSERS, CA. 1910–1935
• PART II OPERAS FROM OTHER EUROPEAN CONTEXTS
• PART III OPERAS BY BRITTEN AND BIRTWISTLE
• PART IV OPERAS COMPOSED IN THE UNITED STATES
• Name Index