Last week I spent an afternoon listening to recordings of Arnold
Schoenberg’s Erwartung in preparation for Seattle Opera’s
doom-laden double bill of Bluebeard’s Castle by
Bela Bartók and Erwartung (Feb 21–March
7, McCaw Hall, $25–$137). Kudos to Seattle Opera for planning
such a brave program; a half-century after his death, Schoenberg
(1874–1951) still shoulders the blame for bringing unrepentant
dissonance into classical music.
Superficially, snippets of his century-old Erwartung sound
familiar to anyone who watches movies or TV: Stabbing blasts of
trumpets, horns, and trombones create suspense while harrying strings
(quickly whisper, “dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum”) insinuate tension and
menace.
Yet seen and heard whole, Schoenberg’s one-act
opera—Erwartung has a cast of one, so “monodrama” is
more accurate—still shocks. By transmuting wincing
dissonances into a complete language, Schoenberg devours, Cronos-like,
the film-score clichés that followed his work. One of
Schoenberg’s greatest students, composer Alban Berg, noted an
“infinite abundance compressed into the smallest space” in
Erwartung. Indeed, every sound remains in continual flux as
instruments mount into colossal orchestral tsunamis only to recede,
leaving quietly shivering violins or eddying harp notes. The
conductor Robert Craft has noted that within Erwartung‘s 427
measures the tempo changes almost 200 times.
Amid such temporal and timbral convulsion, “Die Frau” (the woman)
sings, ranting, cowering, fretting, and wondering where her lover might
be. Erwartung translates as “Expectation,” and for a miraculous
half hour we wait on tenterhooks to see Die Frau’s agony gradually
unravel into madness. Composed in 17 days, Erwartung surely holds the record for the most quickly conceived orchestral
masterpiece in the 20th century.
The other half of Seattle Opera’s program, Bluebeard’s
Castle, might be the only opera ready to be remade into a
torture-porn splatter film. The aging Duke Bluebeard, who has just
eloped with the lovely Judith, yields to his young wife’s insistent
demand to see what lurks behind seven closed doors inside his dark,
dank castle. After each door opens, the rooms—a torture chamber,
an armory, the treasury, and so forth—reveal more about the
enigmatic duke. Bleak and quiet, trembling woodwinds, discreet strings,
and an occasional burst of brute percussion accentuate the doomed
couple’s escalating torment.
The current cast features bass-baritone John Relyea (Bluebeard), who sounded duly stentorian in Seattle Opera’s Contes
d’Hoffman several years ago, as well as Susan Pierson (Die
Frau) and Malgorzata Walewska (Judith).
Catch flutist Jeffrey Cohan (Sat Feb 21, Christ Episcopal
Church, 7:30 pm, $15 suggested donation/free-will offering) as he
sallies through the Twelve Fantasies for Solo Flute by Georg
Philipp Telemann (1681–1767). To my ears, much of Telemann’s
music is perfunctory—he manufactured enough cantatas to fill
30 years of Sundays—but each of the Fantasies has a
singular charm.
