Die glückliche Hand: Difference between revisions

===Spiritual and sociopolitical context===

===Spiritual and sociopolitical context===

Schoenberg’s {{lang|fr|œuvre}} explores [[Sisyphus|Sisyphean]] longing: first romantic (e.g., ”Hanging Gardens”, ”Erwartung”); gradually spiritual (e.g., ”Moses”, ”Modern Psalm”). These latter elements emerged in works like ”Lucky Hand”, ”Jakobsleiter” (1914–22, rev. 1944; on [[Jacob’s Ladder]]), and ”[[Der biblische Weg]]” (1926–27), a [[Zionist]] play, as he sought to find meaning and ways forward.{{sfn|Shawn|2003|loc=3, 9–10, 24, 44, 50, 53–54, 102, 110–111, 157–170, 173–174, 198–199, 223, 226, 233–234}} He compared art to a [[labyrinth]]{{sfn|Albright|2021|loc=159}} and, endorsing [[apophatic theology]], wrote to Kandinsky that [[mimesis]] and [[Hermeneutics|hermeneutic]]al interpretation led closer to what nonetheless lay beyond human comprehensibility, spurring [[imagination]] and [[creativity]].{{sfn|Albright|2021|loc=161}}{{efn|Schoenberg later wrote that the [[Ideation (creative process)|creative process]] was more often a “long path […] where, driven out of [[Paradise]], even geniuses must reap their harvest in the sweat of their brows.”{{sfn|Albright|2021|loc=158}}}}

Schoenberg’s {{lang|fr|œuvre}} explores [[Sisyphus|Sisyphean]] longing: first romantic (e.g., ”Hanging Gardens”, ”Erwartung”); gradually spiritual (e.g., ”Moses”, ”Modern Psalm”). These latter elements emerged in works like ”Lucky Hand”, ”Jakobsleiter” (1914–22, rev. 1944; on [[Jacob’s Ladder]]), and ”[[Der biblische Weg]]” (1926–27), a [[Zionist]] play, as he sought to find meaning and ways forward.{{sfn|Shawn|2003|loc=3, 9–10, 24, 44, 50, 53–54, 102, 110–111, 157–170, 173–174, 198–199, 223, 226, 233–234}} compared art to a [[labyrinth]]{{sfn|Albright|2021|loc=159}} and, endorsing [[apophatic theology]], wrote to Kandinsky that [[mimesis]] and [[Hermeneutics|hermeneutic]]al interpretation led closer to what nonetheless lay beyond human comprehensibility, spurring [[imagination]] and [[creativity]].{{sfn|Albright|2021|loc=161}}{{efn|Schoenberg later wrote that the [[Ideation (creative process)|creative process]] was more often a “long path […] where, driven out of [[Paradise]], even geniuses must reap their harvest in the sweat of their brows.”{{sfn|Albright|2021|loc=158}}}}

”Lucky Hand”’s thwarted visionary (the Man), unattainable form (the Woman), and [[burning bush|burning-bush]]-like, quasi-[[Greek chorus]] anticipate ”Moses”. The sparse, [[allegory|allegorical]] libretto and detailed stage directions, rich in [[symbolism (movement)|Symbolist]] imagery and suggestion, stress [[ineffability]], realized via stylized [[gesture]], lighting, scenery, and [[Consonance and dissonance|dissonant]], cinematic music with [[word painting]].{{sfnm|Krones|2003|1loc=17–26, quoting Schoenberg’s desire for “{{lang|de|italics=no|kinematographische Wiedergabe}}” (“cinematographic reproduction”)|Shawn|2003|2loc=3, 9–10, 24, 44, 50, 53–54, 102, 110–111, 157–170, 173–174, 198–199, 223, 226, 233–234}}{{efn|Music’s association with ineffability is continuous with strands of [[German Romanticism]].{{sfn|Krones|2003|loc=17–26}}}}

”Lucky Hand”’s thwarted visionary (the Man), unattainable form (the Woman), and [[burning bush|burning-bush]]-like, quasi-[[Greek chorus]] anticipate ”Moses”. The sparse, [[allegory|allegorical]] libretto and detailed stage directions, rich in [[symbolism (movement)|Symbolist]] imagery and suggestion, stress [[ineffability]], realized via stylized [[gesture]], lighting, scenery, and [[Consonance and dissonance|dissonant]], cinematic music with [[word painting]].{{sfnm|Krones|2003|1loc=17–26, quoting Schoenberg’s desire for “{{lang|de|italics=no|kinematographische Wiedergabe}}” (“cinematographic reproduction”)|Shawn|2003|2loc=3, 9–10, 24, 44, 50, 53–54, 102, 110–111, 157–170, 173–174, 198–199, 223, 226, 233–234}}{{efn|Music’s association with ineffability is continuous with strands of [[German Romanticism]].{{sfn|Krones|2003|loc=17–26}}}}

Opera by Arnold Schoenberg

Die glückliche Hand
The composer in 1927
Translation	The Lucky Hand
Language	German
Premiere	24 October 1924 (1924-10-24)

Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky^[a] Hand, 1909–1913), Op. 18, is a four-scene opera or “Drama with Music in One Act” by Arnold Schoenberg, who wrote the libretto. Like Erwartung (Expectation, 1909), it drew on Otto Weininger‘s book Sex and Character^[2] and reflected Schoenberg’s own life, perhaps including his sense of artistic mission, audience reception, wife’s affair, or some combination. It conveys the idea that man repeats his mistakes.^[3] The Vienna Volksoper premiered it on 24 October 1924.

Background and creation

Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand) is a four-scene opera or “Drama with Music in One Act” by Arnold Schoenberg.^[5] It bridges late-Romantic Gesamtkunstwerk and experimental theater. He wrote it, including the libretto, during a turbulent, productive time in his life, split between imperial Vienna, where artists turned inward amid the Habsburg monarchy‘s decline, and more progressive Berlin (1901–03, 1911–15, 1926–33).^[7]

Compositional means

Following his early Brahmsian–Wagnerian works, Schoenberg stretched tonality past key centers in his String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10 (1907–08) and dropped key signatures in Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op. 15 (1908–09). In Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony, 1910), he discussed what he later^{[when?][citation needed]} called the “emancipation of the dissonance“, trying it in a 1909–13 spate of atonal, expressionist music:^[b]

• Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11 (1909, Feb.–Aug.)^[c]
• Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16 (1909, May–Aug.)
• Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand), Op. 18 (1909 Jun.–1913 Nov.)^[11]
• Erwartung (Expectation), Op. 17 (1909, Aug.–Sept.)
• Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19 (1911, Feb.–June)
• Herzgewächse (Foliage of the Heart), Op. 20 (1911, Dec.)
• Pierrot lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot), Op. 21 (1912, March–July)

Written during each year of this outpouring and completed at its end,^[11] Lucky Hand spans a phase when Schoenberg was seeking new compositional means. He composed early sections spontaneously as in Erwartung, using a quasi-stream-of-consciousness method to inject and amplify psychodrama.^[d] He carefully sketched later sections, like scene 3’s fugato opening, after Pierrot, having reconciled atonality with familiar musical forms.

Schoenberg orchestrated many operettas as they flourished, and his works often use light music or its parody in an evocative, somewhat Ivesian manner. In Lucky Hand, Schoenberg used a small concert band plus derisive laughter (scene 1 m. 26; reprise: scene 3 m. 125) and a waltz-like episode (scene 3 m. 156). Working with monologists at the Überbrettl cabaret (1901–02) may have inspired his use of Sprechstimme (half speech, half song), including in Lucky Hand.^[e]

Lucky Hand, Erwartung, Pierrot, and parts of Moses und Aron (1923–37) may be considered dreamlike monodramas. But the work should be more abstract and surreal than a dream, Schoenberg told his publisher Emil Hertzka at Universal Edition.^[25] Some would have known psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900),^[f] and many consulted, whether for guidance or gambling, more popular dream books (Losbücher), shaping cultural imagination. In writing Lucky Hand, Schoenberg likely used these latter books’ schemes of color symbolism and possibly their numerology, which were marketed as having been drawn from ancient works like Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica.

19th-century dream books showing a gambling play (left) and promising an “infallible” fate divination system (right)

Personal tragedy

Tragic love, recurring in Schoenberg’s work since Verklärte Nacht (1899), Pelleas und Melisande (1902–03), and Gurre-Lieder (1900–03, 1910–11), became personal the year before Lucky Hand.^[3] In 1908, his first wife Mathilde, an educated pianist and composer Alexander von Zemlinsky‘s sister, had a romance with Fauvist and Expressionist painter Richard Gerstl, with whom she and Schoenberg painted.

Gerstl died by suicide when she returned to Schoenberg and their two children at composer Anton Webern‘s urging. Schoenberg may have contemplated suicide himself and likely processed this psychological trauma in Lucky Hand and other works from this time, with their anxious episodes, moods, or themes.^[g] When Mathilde, often ill, died in 1923, he self-medicated and wrote a requiem text.

In 1924, Schoeberg married Gertrud Kolisch, his artistic collaborator (pseudonym: “Max Blonda”) and sister of the Kolisch Quartet‘s first violinist Rudolf Kolisch. She made a schematic of Lucky Hand’s “color crescendo” in 1930.^[38]

Visual arts nexus

Schoenberg created portraits, abstract and naturalistic studies, caricatures, and set designs, including for Lucky Hand. In Alliance (Hands) (1910), he painted two mirrored forms in inseparable union.^[41] He emphasized eyes rather than faces in portraits, as also in the stage directions for Erwartung and Lucky Hand. A 1910 solo exhibition of forty works at Hugo Heller‘s bookstore in Vienna^{[citation needed]} was followed by group shows with Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Henri Rousseau, and Egon Schiele. Gustav Mahler was an anonymous patron.^[h]

Schoenberg’s ideas about music and color came from dream books, German Romantics (who drew on older texts), musicians, and teaching, including Guido Adler‘s students, Webern and Egon Wellesz. His music inspired Kandinsky’s Impression III—Concert (1911) and a correspondence.^[i] Citing Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre in On the Spiritual in Art (1911),^[j] Kandinsky linked free use of sound and color as he moved toward abstraction.

Sketches suggest Schoenberg used dream books’ popular color symbolism in Lucky Hand (e.g., blue for sadness, green for hope, red for love or pain, yellow for jealousy, black for persecution, violet for comfort). In scene 3, the “color crescendo” syncs expressionist music, psychodrama, and colorful lighting, reflecting Romantic and modernist interest in synaesthesia and altered states of consciousness at the fin de siècle.^[38][54][k] Kandinsky’s and Thomas de Hartmann’s Der gelbe Klang (The Yellow Sound, 1909; one of Kandinsky’s four “color dramas”, 1909–14) had a similar scene of only abstract action, sound, and stage lighting.^[58]

Literary–dramatic connections

In Lucky Hand, the dreamer (the Man) is an artisan. Recalling the forging scene from Richard Wagner‘s opera Siegfried (1851–1871), he forges a diadem from one hammer blow (a tertian chord of twelve tones: scene 3 m. 115). Lightning then emanates from the Man, as if electrocuting him in an intense, painful storm of his own emotion (the “color crescendo”; scene 3 m. 126). In Thomas Mann‘s novel Doctor Faustus (1947), the somewhat Schoenbergian genius receives artistic inspiration and visions through syphilis-induced seizures in a deal with the devil.

Spiritual and sociopolitical context

Schoenberg’s œuvre explores Sisyphean longing: first romantic (e.g., Hanging Gardens, Erwartung); gradually spiritual (e.g., Moses, Modern Psalm). These latter elements emerged in works like Lucky Hand, Jakobsleiter (1914–22, rev. 1944; on Jacob’s Ladder), and Der biblische Weg (1926–27), a Zionist play, as he sought to find meaning and ways forward. At the time of the Lucky Hand, he compared art to a labyrinth and, endorsing apophatic theology, wrote to Kandinsky that mimesis and hermeneutical interpretation led closer to what nonetheless lay beyond human comprehensibility, spurring imagination and creativity.^[l]

Lucky Hand’s thwarted visionary (the Man), unattainable form (the Woman), and burning-bush-like, quasi-Greek chorus anticipate Moses. The sparse, allegorical libretto and detailed stage directions, rich in Symbolist imagery and suggestion, stress ineffability, realized via stylized gesture, lighting, scenery, and dissonant, cinematic music with word painting.^[66][m]

Faint solo parts, hazy textures, and whispering (scene 1) may evoke the call and response of congregants and cantors from his mother’s Orthodox Jewish family.^[n] The Woman’s withdrawal when the Man drinks from the goblet (scene 2) may suggest apophatic theology. Schoenberg’s innovative, “emancipated” musical expression (e.g., scene 2 m. 36 strings) may reflect his social otherness within tradition:

After Lucky Hand, he served in World War I, finished Four Orchestral Songs, Op. 22 (1913–16), and, while working on Jakobsleiter, continued to work toward what would become a new compositional means, the twelve-tone technique. Born after Jewish emancipation and baptized Lutheran (1898), he would’ve always been seen as Jewish and confronted antisemitism repeatedly. He broke with Kandinsky over the Jewish question in 1922 and fled the Nazis in 1933 to Paris. There he formally returned to Judaism, witnessed by artist Marc Chagall.

Drama and staging

Roles

• ein Mann (a Man), baritone
• ein Weib (a Woman), silent
• ein Herr (a Gentleman), silent
• Chorus, Sprechstimme

Synopsis

The drama takes place in one act in which there are four scenes. It lasts about twenty minutes.

The staging of Lucky Hand is complex, due to the range of scenic effects that must be combined with the use of colored lights. These also prompt the Man’s gestures, with hands, eyes, and body responding according to Schoenberg’s stage directions.

The drama represents an inescapable cycle of man’s plight as it starts and finishes with the male character struggling with the monster on his back. The male character sings about his love for a young woman (mime) but, despite this favor, she leaves him for a well-dressed gentleman (mime). He senses that she has left him and eventually, when she returns, he forgives her and his happiness returns. Again the woman retreats. The woman is seen later with the gentleman, and the male soloist implores the woman to stay with him but she escapes and kicks a rock at him. This rock turns into the monster that was originally seen on the man’s back. Thus, the drama ends where it began.

Instrumentation

The score calls for: piccolo, three flutes (3rd doubling on 2nd piccolo), three oboes, English horn, D clarinet, three clarinets (in B-flat and A), bass clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, four trombones, bass tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, snare drum, tamtam, high and low bells, triangle, xylophone, glockenspiel, metal tubes, tambourine, hammer, harp, celesta, and strings. The piece also employs an offstage ensemble consisting of piccolo, E-flat clarinet, horn, trumpet, 3 trombones, triangle and cymbals.^[74]

See also

Notes

References