Schoenberg's Vienna, Freud's Vienna: Re-examining the connections between the monodrama Erwartung and the early history of psychoanalysis

Musical Quarterly

Volumn 93, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 144-181

  Carpenter, Alexander ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77950163086     PISSN: 00274631     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/musqtl/gdq003     Document Type: Review

References (97)

1. H. H. Stuckenschmidt uses the phrase "drama of destroyed love" to describe both Erwartung and its companion piece, Die glückliche Hand. Stuckenschmidt, Arnold Schoenberg: His Life, Work and World, trans. Humphrey Searle (New York: Schirmer Books, 1977), 122. Schoenberg's marriage to Mathilde was apparently already in decline as of the First String Quartet, op. 7, of 1905, with its "secret programme" outlining Schoenberg's unhappiness and inability to find peace. Bryan Simms has noted that Schoenberg apparently remained equivocal about Mathilde from 1908 up to the time of her death in 1923, at which point he wrote a requiem text for her that remarked on how they seemed to barely know each other. All told, the marriage was evidently not a very happy one. For the program of the op. 7 Quartet, see Joseph Auner, ed., A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 47-48
2. Regarding Mathilde and Schoenberg's "Requiem," see Bryan Simms, The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 216
3. Letter from Schoenberg to Wassily Kandinsky, dated 24 January 1911. In Arnold Schoenberg, Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures, and Documents, ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch, trans. John C. Crawford (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 24
4. While it is widely accepted that Schoenberg began composing Die glückliche Hand in 1910, it appears that the composer began some of the work much sooner than this. Josef Rufer notes that the earliest sketches for the work date from 11 October 1908; Mattias Schmidt claims that the text of Die glückliche Hand "was written as soon as [Schoenberg] had finished composing 'Erwartung' ('Expectation') between September 1909 and June 1910." This places the genesis of Schoenberg's autobiographical "drama with music" at the epicenter of the crisis years of 1908-1909
5. See Rufer, The Works of Arnold Schoenberg, trans. Dika Newlin (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 37
6. and Schmidt, "Programme Notes," on the website of the Arnold Schoenberg Center, http://schoenberg.at/6-archiv/music/works/op/compositions- op18-notes-e.htm (accessed 18 June 2008)
7. Undated letter from Schoenberg to Busoni, part of a correspondence spanning July of 1909. In Ferruccio Busoni, Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Antony Beaumont (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 389. Emphasis in the original
8. For the original German, see "Briefwechsel zwischen Arnold Schönberg und Ferruccio Busoni 1903-1919 (1927)" Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 19, no.3 (1977): 163-211
9. Letter from Schoenberg to Kandinsky, dated 18 January 1911. In Arnold Schoenberg, Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures, and Documents, 23. Emphasis in the original
10. Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 416
11. Lewis Wickes, "Schoenberg, Erwartung, and the Reception of Psychoanalysis in Musical Circles in Vienna until 1910/1911," Studies in Music 23 (1989): 89
12. See Alexander Carpenter, "Erwartung and the Scene of Psychoanalysis: Interpreting Schoenberg's Monodrama as a Freudian Case Study" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2004). Robert Craft called Erwartung "the first Freudian music drama."
13. See Craft's liner notes to his recording of the monodrama, The Music of Arnold Schoenberg, vol.1, Columbia M2L 279 (1963)
14. See Steiner,"Schoenberg on Holiday: His Six Summers on Lake Traun," Musical Quarterly 72, no.1 (1986): 36
15. See Carpenter, "Erwartung and the Scene of Psychoanalysis," 198-254
16. Sigmund Freud, "The Moses of Michelangelo," in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol.13 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 211
17. See, for instance, two essays by Cora L. Diaz de Chumaceiro: "A Brief Comment on Freud's Attendance at Opera Performances: 1880-1890," American Journal of Psychoanalysis 50, no.3 (September 1990): 285-288
18. and "Richard Wagner's Life and Music: What Freud Knew," in Psychoanalytical Explorations in Music, 2nd series, ed. Stuart Feder et al. (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1993), 249-278 Freud was well acquainted with some of Vienna's most important musicians, on a personal and professional level, including Gustav Mahler, Bruno Walter, and Alban Berg
19. Stuart Feder, Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 219. Feder suggests that Freud really only liked opera because it had words (220); he notes too that Freud, according to Marie Bonaparte's recollections, could barely hum a folk song in tune (230)
20. Neil M. Chesire has claimed that Freud was not as unmusical as he claimed to be; rather, he describes Freud's relationship with music as ambivalent and contradictory, concluding that he was sensitive enough to music - he was attracted to it and enjoyed it - to be troubled by his inability to "impose cognitive organisation (and hence ego-control)" on his musical experiences. See Chesire, "The Empire of the Ear: Freud's Problem with Music," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 77 (1996): 1127-1168
21. Joan Allen Smith, Schoenberg and His Circle (New York: Schirmer Books, 1986), 4-5
22. Joan Peyser, The New Music (New York: Dell, 1971), 60
23. Arnold Greissle-Schönberg, Arnold Schönberg und sein Wiener Kreis (Vienna: Böhlau, 1998), 27. Greissle-Schönberg does not recall any details surrounding his mother's association with Freud, other than being certain she was his patient as of the mid 1920s. He believes that Gertrud may have been referred to Freud through Eugenie Schwarzwald, founder of the Schwarzwald School; he also suggests that Gertrud may have come in contract with Freud through his associations with Schoenberg's circle in Mödling, including Berg, Webern, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Loos, Franz Werfel, and Alma Mahler. Personal correspondence with Arnold Greissle-Schönberg, 11 June 2008
24. Letter from Alban Berg to Helene Berg, dated 29 November 1923. In Berg, Letters to His Wife, ed. and trans. Bernard Grun (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 335
25. Marco Corner, "Alban Berg in His Letters to His Wife," Music & Letters 50, no.3 (1969): 370-371 Corner claims that Berg saw Alfred Adler after the First World War for psychoanalytic treatment
26. Letter from Berg to Schoenberg, dated 21 August 1911. In The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence, ed. Juliane Brand, Christopher Hailey, and Donald Harris (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1987), 9-10
27. See Julian Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 212
28. Hans Moldenhauer and Rose Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Work (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1979), 178
29. Kathryn Bailey, The Life of Webern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 66
30. Cited in Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern, 178
31. Feder, Gustav Mahler, 229-230
32. See Severine Neff, "Historical Contexts," in Schoenberg, The Second String Quartet in F-sharp Minor, Opus 10, ed. Severine Neff (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 150
33. See Wickes, "Schoenberg, Erwartung, and the Reception of Psychoanalysis in Musical Circles in Vienna," 88-106. Wickes notes that Schoenberg and Freud shared several friends and colleagues, including the music critic (and Schoenberg's childhood friend) David Josef Bach, the publisher Hugo Heller, and the music historian and critic Max Graf
34. See Lancelot Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960)
35. Schoenberg remarked, a number of times, on Webern's tendency to immediately and comprehensively adopt his new compositional innovations and paradigms. Schoenberg recalled telling Erwin Stein that he had taken care not to tell Webern about the twelve-tone method, because "Webern immediately uses everything I do, plan or say, so that - I remember my words [to Stein] - 'By now I haven't the slightest idea who I am.'" Schoenberg also denied the historical priority of Josef Hauer's twelve-tone music, which apparently predated his own by several years. See Schoenberg, "Hauer's Theories" and "Composition with Twelve Tones," in Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 209-12, 245-248
36. Allan Janik, Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 3. Emphasis in the original
37. Ernest Jones revealed her identity in 1953 in the first volume of his biography of Freud. See Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, vol.1 (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), 245n4
38. The "Anna O." case history is found in Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, S. E., vol.2 (1955). Breuer was Bertha Pappenheim's doctor and analyst, not Freud. Over the course of her treatment, Bertha coined the phrase "the talking cure."
39. According to Adorno, the "heroine" of Erwartung is "consigned to music in the very same way as a patient is to analysis." The music wrenches out of her "the admission of hatred and desire, jealousy and forgiveness . . . and the entire symbolism of the unconscious." Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 42
40. Robert Craft, "Notes on the Dramatic Structure."
41. Simms, The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg, 90. Marie Pappenheim published four of her poems in Die Fackel in 1906, using the name Marie Heim
42. See Robert Falck, "Marie Pappenheim, Schoenberg, and the Studien über Hysterie," in German Literature and Music: An Aesthetic Fusion, 1890-1989, ed. Claus Reschke and Howard Pollack, Symposium on Literature and the Arts, Houston, 1989 (Munich: Fink, 1992), 131-145
43. See Peter Stadlen, "The Operas of Schoenberg," in Opera on Record 2, ed. Alan Blythe and Malcolm Walker (New York: Beaufort Books, 1984), 355
44. Elizabeth Keathley, "Revisioning Musical Modernism" (Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1999)
45. Dianne Penney, "Schoenberg's Janus-Work Erwartung: Its Musico-Dramatic Structure and Relationship to Melodrama and Lied Traditions" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Texas, 1989)
46. Stadlen, "The Operas of Schoenberg," 355
47. Arthur Levi, Genealogy of the Pappenheim Family of Pressburg and Vienna (Longmeadow, MA: A. Levi, 1993). It is held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., under the call number CS409 .P37 1993
48. See McClary, Feminine Endings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 104-109 passim
49. See Simms, "Whose Idea was Erwartung?" in Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformation of Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Julian Brand and Christopher Hailey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 100-108
50. Robert Falck, "Marie Pappenheim, Schoenberg, and the Studien über Hysterie," 133
51. Falck, "Marie Pappenheim, Schoenberg and the Studien über Hysterie," 136. Schoenberg apparently began work on Erwartung one year to the day of the beginning of the Gerstl affair, that is, one year to the day of Mathilde leaving him. As Freud insists, numbers and dates are very significant in psychoanalytic theory
52. See, for instance, The Interpretation of Dreams, S. E., vols. 4-5 (1953), 414-418 Schoenberg, it is well known, was also obsessed with numbers and numerology
53. See Colin C. Sterne, Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as Numerologist (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993)
54. Breuer, "Anna O.," 21-22
55. Sigmund Freud, letter to Wilhelm Fliess, 8 February 1897. In The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press, 1985), 229
56. Freud, "Fräulein Elisabeth von R.," in Studies on Hysteria, 180
57. Freud, "Fräulein Elisabeth von R.," 178-179
58. Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud's Women (New York: Penguin 2000), 91
59. Appignanesi and Forrester, Freud's Women, 89. The von Lieben family, according to Dr. Ferdinand Opll, lived just outside of the Alsergrund in the first district at Oppolzergasse 4, just south of Schottentor on the Ring. Personal correspondence with Dr. Ferdinand Opll, Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, 18 January 2008
60. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O. (New York: Routledge, 1996), 11-12, 12n19. My emphasis
61. Freud, "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," S. E., vol.7 (1953), 64
62. Freud, "Fragment of an Analysis," 94-95
63. See Marie Pappenheim and Arnold Schoenberg, Erwartung (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1916), 13
64. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 346
65. See Keathley, "Revisioning Musical Modernism," 211-12, 230. These first two postulates, concerning Pappenheim's feminism and Judaism preventing her from writing a psychoanalytic monodrama, are not wholly convincing. Schoenberg converted to Protestantism in the late nineteenth century and was not outwardly motivated by Semitic concerns until the 1920s; Pappenheim, like Schoenberg and many other professional Jews, may have converted too. As a woman - one of the first - and a Jew in the University of Vienna's faculty of medicine, she may well have converted and sought assimilation. Marsha Rozenblit, in her book The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1983), notes that "[c]onversion to Christianity was . . . on the rise in Vienna in the final decades before the First World War. . . . Vienna's Jewish conversion rate far outranked that of any other city in the Dual Monarchy or elsewhere in Europe" (132). Pappenheim's circle, which included Karl Kraus, Schoenberg and his associates, would have been comprised largely of converted Jews. Moreover, if we are to accept Keathley's construction of Marie Pappenheim as a proto-feminist, we have to allow for the possibility that she, like subsequent generations of feminists, might have regarded Dora as kind of early feminist heroine, rejecting and defying Freud's phallocentric interpretations and insistencies. On Dora and feminist resistance to psychoanalysis see, for example, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
66. Hannah Decker, Freud in Germany: Revolution and Reaction in Science, 1893-1907 (New York: International Universities Press, 1977), 288
67. Edward Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 94-95
68. Sigmund Freud, "Some General Remarks on Hysteria," S. E., vol.9 (1975), 229
69. Hannah Decker notes that, as of 1900, "Jews formed 20 percent of the population of the Ninth District and were most attracted to its southeastern portion, which bordered the five-mile long, splendid Ringstrasse." Citing Rozenblit's The Jews of Vienna, Decker claims that "[h]alf of the Alsergrund's Jews 'clustered . . . compactly' on eleven streets, including the Berggasse." See Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 24, 218n47
70. Regarding Dora's addresses, see Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900, 14, 46
71. Regarding Schoenberg's addresses, see the biography link on the website of the Arnold Schoenberg Center (http://schoenberg.at/1-as/bio/biographie-e.htm)
72. Lewis Wickes cites the physical proximity of Schoenberg and Max Graf as of 1910-11. Graf was a musicologist, an acquaintance of Schoenberg's, a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and the father of "Little Hans," the subject of one of Freud's most famous case studies, published in 1909. Both Graf and Schoenberg lived in Vienna's eighth district as of the autumn of 1910; Berg moved there in the spring of 1911. "Schoenberg, Erwartung, and the Reception of Psychoanalysis in Musical Circles in Vienna," 103n. It is worth noting, too, that Graf and his family spent their summer vacations in Gmunden in 1906 and 1907, near Traunstein where the Schoenbergs also spent their holidays in 1907 and 1908. Regarding Graf's vacations, see James Strachey, "Editor's Note" to "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy," S. E., vol. 10 (1955), 4
73. regarding Schoenberg's vacations, see Ena Steiner, "Schoenberg on Holiday: His Six Summers on Lake Traun."
74. and Patrick Mahoney, Freud's Dora: A Psychoanalytic, Historical, and Textual Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 5, 14, 17-21
75. Patrick Mahoney notes that Bertha Pappenheim also lived on Liechtensteinstrasse at one time. Freud's Dora, 5. In her biography of Bertha Pappenheim, Melinda Given Guttman clarifies that Bertha and her family lived at Liechtensteinstrasse 2, until 1888. Guttmann, The Enigma of Anna O.: A Biography of Bertha Pappenheim (Wickford, RI: Moyer Bell, 2001), 26
76. Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900, 249n13
77. According to Dr. Michaela Laichmann of the Vienna City Archives, Althanplatz became Julius-Tandler-Platz in 1949. Personal correspondence with Dr. Michaela Laichmann, 9 August 2005. It seems likely that Althanplatz is the correct address because it is near Ida Bauer's parents and because it corresponds to Kurt Herbert Adler's account of his parents living near the Franz-Josefs Bahnhof at the time of his birth: "Meine Eltern wohnten damals [i.e., April 1905] in der Nähe des Franz-Josephs-Bahnhofs." Julius-Tandler-Platz is directly adjacent to the Franz-Josephs Bahnhof. See Imre Fabian,"Kurt Herbert Adler im Gespräch mit Imre Fabian," Opernwelt 27, no.10 (1986): 55
78. Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900, 151
79. See also Fabian, "Kurt Herbert Adler im Gespräch mit Imre Fabian," 56
80. "Elisabeth Rethi studierte für kurze Zeit 1910/11 Harmonielehre bei Schönberg. Im Jahr darauf heiratete sie den ebenfalls bei Schönberg lernenden Dolbin [i.e., Benedict Fred Dolbin]." Website of the Arnold Schoenberg Center, http://www.schoenberg.at/1-as/schueler/wien/Rethi- e.htm (accessed 22 June 2008)
81. Steiner, "Schoenberg on Holiday: His Six Summers on Lake Traun," 36
82. For these addresses and dates, see Guttmann, The Enigma of Anna O.: A Biography of Bertha Pappenheim, 26, 63
83. While she occasionally visited him, Bertha and Wilhelm were apparently not particularly close, despite the fact, according to Marion Kaplan, that he "owned one of the greatest libraries of social work in Central Europe." Kaplan, "Anna O. and Bertha Pappenheim: An Historical Perspective," in Anna O.: Fourteen Contemporary Reinterpretations, ed. Max Rosenbaum and Melvin Muroff (New York: Free Press, 1984), 102
84. See Kaplan, "Anna O.: Being Bertha Pappenheim - Historiography and Biography," Australasian Psychiatry 12, no.1 (2004): 67
85. Regarding Wilhelm Pappenheim see also Pietro Castelnuovo-Tedesco, "Anna O.," in The Freud Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2002), 24
86. Lucy Freeman, The Story of Anna O. (New York: Walker and Company, 1972), 97
87. Freeman, The Story of Anna O., v
88. Personal correspondence with Dr. Karl Fischer, archivist at the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, 6 April 2007
89. Keathley, "Revisioning Musical Modernism: Arnold Schoenberg, Marie Pappenheim, and Erwartung's New Woman," 70. Keathley notes that Marie Pappenheim "volunteered as a cholera doctor in Istanbul and Bulgaria, and served in a barracks hospital during World War I. . . . By 1930 Pappenheim was campaigning for the rights of working class women . . . [and] was an anti-Nazi activist in the (illegal) 'Roten Hilfe.'" (72)
90. Guttmann, The Enigma of Anna O., 119-120
91. Lewis Wickes, "Schoenberg, Erwartung, and the Reception of Psychoanalysis in Musical Circles in Vienna," 105n66. Wickes notes that Martin Pappenheim "later was one of a small number of professors at the University of Vienna who did teach Freudian theory and method." He also remarks that, before this time, during the first decade of the century, Martin Pappenheim "must have been at least generally familiar with Freud's theories" and that Martin and Marie had a "close relationship," suggesting that Marie could have learned of Freud's theories through her brother (96)
92. See Eva Weissweiler, "Schreiben Sie mir doch einen Operntext, Fräulein!" Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 6 (1984): 5
93. Albrecht Hirschmüller, The Life and Work of Josef Breuer (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 33
94. Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 147
95. It is perhaps more likely that Schoenberg and Marie Pappenheim would have known Joseph Breuer and his family than Freud. Breuer was a well-respected scientist and physician, and was socially better connected than Freud. As Hirschmüller asserts, at Vienna's high-society parties, "there were hardly any Viennese scientists, writers, musicians, actors, painters or architects whom Breuer could not get to know at some time or other." While Schoenberg may not have attended many high-society parties in the early part of the century, he was nonetheless an integral part of Vienna's literary, artistic and musical life. Breuer's son Leopold was also a physician, roughly a contemporary of Pappenheim's, and was also involved in Vienna's musical community: he knew Brahms and married the daughter of composer Ignaz Brüll. See Hirschmüller, The Life and Work of Josef Breuer, 30-33 passim
96. Arnold Schoenberg, "New Music: My Music," in Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 105
97. See Kirchmeyer's liner notes to Arnold Schönberg: Erwartung (Monodram) op. 17 (Wergo 50001)