Artist: Arnold Schoenberg
Date: 1911
Size: 17 x 10 cm
Museum: Arnold Schönberg Center (Vienna, Austria)
Technique: Watercolor
“Write an opera text for me, Miss!” – August 1909: Schönberg and his family spent their vacation in Steinakirchen (Lower Austria). It was through Alexander Zemlinsky and Karl Kraus that the young Viennese physician Marie Pappenheim was introduced to the circle around Schönberg. During her medical studies at the University of Vienna, Pappenheim wrote poetry under the pseudonym Maria Heim, and it was in the Lower Austrian summer resort that Schönberg invited her to write a libretto: In expectation of her lover, the woman sets out in search and follows wrong trails to stations of uncertainty – remembrance – hope – rationalization – jealousy – sorrow – and finally excessive exhaltation of the man who survives only as a dead object. The depth of the forest scenario becomes a projection room for distressing traumatic states – obscurity, danger, threat, fear, loneliness, horror, darkness – and naturalistically reinterprets the subjective ordeal of suffering the woman lives through in four scenes. In his striving for an artistic synthesis, Schönberg also drafted the stage designs for his monodrama Erwartung (Expectation), along with a revolving stage construction that intended to enable the protagonist to walk continuously through the stylized woods using a seamless visual effect.
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