Word: erwartung
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...last year on the occasion of its 10,000th concert when it delivered a ragged account of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. Yet under Music Director Zubin Mehta, 46, it can also deliver a blistering performance of something as difficult as Schoenberg's expressionist opera Erwartung, as it did recently with Soprano Hildegarde Behrens. Among other distinctions, the Philharmonic is the most unpredictable orchestra in America...
Oddly, the work that is relatively the most familiar, and historically the most significant, turns out to be the most disappointing. Erwartung (Expectation) is a half-hour Expressionist phantasmagoria in which a woman wanders a forest at night, yearning for a lover who has left her (or whom she may have killed), then finds his corpse (or imagines she has found it). The score, composed in 1909, broke down harmony until it had no real key, fragmented melody into an apparently unrelated succession of motifs and dissolved all structure by avoiding repetitions. It was as though Schoenberg felt a need...
...Erwartung's nightmare ambiguities can have a haunting power. The Santa Fe production makes them rather tame, except in the astringent sonorities arising from the orchestra pit. Soprano Nancy Shade, as the woman, has command of Schoenberg's difficult idiom, but her voice lacks the dramatic weight for a role that, as Musicologist Wilfrid Mellers describes it, is essentially "Isolde in nervous disintegration...
...grandiose, uncompleted oratorio. A chorus of souls in limbo shuffles about the stage, awaiting reincarnation. Their doubts and frustrations are chastened by the Archangel Gabriel, effectively sung by Bass-Baritone William Dooley. The music, first sketched around World War I and completed later, has more lateromantic intelligibility than Erwartung, but it is so somber and static that one eventually wants to cry out with the chorus: "Is it really to go on like this forever?" Yet there is a moving finale. Soprano Janet Northway, as a soul who is dying into a new life, slowly ascends a series of platforms...
Well, face it: 1763 was a very dull year anyway. It hardly holds a candle to 1924, for example. That's when insecticide was introduced; Juan Gris lectured at the Sorbonne; Bloch wrote his piano quintet; Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue; Puccini, Turandot; Schoenberg, Erwartung; Forster, A Passage to India; Galsworthy, The White Monkey; Shaw, St. Joan; Mann, The Magic Mountain. It was also the year that Woodrow Wilson and Lenin died, that Hitler got out of prison, Coolidge was elected President, China, Britain and France recognized the U.S.S.R., Churchill became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and, as everyone no doubt...