Arnold Schoenberg
"Erwartung" Op. 17
Brettl-Lieder
Jessye Norman
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
James Levine
Philips 426 261-2 (1993)
Composed in less than a month in 1909, Schoenberg's Monodrama is perhaps the closest musical composition to a psychoanalitic study. This powerful and chilling drama was laid out on a poignant text by a young medical student, Marie Pappenheim. The Austrian Master set this text to music in a wonderful atonal style, conveying into a wholly modern language both the protagonist's - the Frau (woman) - hysteria and her passion for the man she had lost (and found dead later in the opera). A miracle of psychological music, the score requires top dramatic and vocal skills from the only singer. The great American soprano delves into the tormented character with true understanding, letting out the
character's paranoia as well as delivering her most subconscious expressions. Interestingly, the climatic moment in the opera - the discovery of the Woman's dead man's body in the forest - is characterised by an extreme musical figure by the soprano, a sudden high B followed by a low C-Sharp
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7/23/2012
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