SOURCE: "Schoenberg's First Opera," in The Opera Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 3, Spring, 1989, pp. 48-58.

In the following essay, Hamilton concludes that Schoenberg's opera Erwartung, while highly original, owes more to the influence of his contemporaries than to his later, more radical, atonal music

Each of Arnold Schoenberg's four operas is sui generis. The first two one-acters, Erwartung (1909) and Die glückliche Hand (1910-1913), stem from his most experimental period and break new ground both musically and dramatically. The former is an intense, apparently freely associative psychological drama, the latter an auto-biographical allegory with a more self-evident musical structure. The one-act comedy Von heute auf morgen (1928-1929), the first opera written using the twelve-tone technique, belongs theatrically to the Zeitoper tradition.

The libretto by Gertrude Schoenberg, the composer's second wife (under the pseudonym "Max Bionda"), was, like that of Strauss's Intermezzo, suggested by an incident from contemporary life—in this...