Die glückliche Hand


Die glückliche Hand, Op. 18, is a four-scene opera or "Drama with Music in One Act" by Arnold Schoenberg to his own libretto. Like Erwartung, it drew on Otto Weininger's book Sex and Character 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. The Vienna Volksoper premiered it on 24 October 1924.

Background and creation

Die glückliche Hand is a four-scene opera or "Drama with Music in One Act" by Arnold Schoenberg. A italics=no and italics=no, it bridges late-Romantic Gesamtkunstwerk and experimental theater. He wrote it to his own 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.

Compositional means

Following his early Brahmsian–Wagnerian works, Schoenberg stretched tonality past key centers in his String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10 and dropped key signatures in Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op. 15. In Harmonielehre, he discussed what he later called the "emancipation of the dissonance", trying it in a spate of atonal, expressionist music:
Written during each year of this outpouring and completed at its end, 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. He carefully sketched later sections, like scene 3's fugato opening, after Pierrot, having reconciled atonality with familiar musical forms.
Working with monologists at the Überbrettl cabaret may have influenced his use of Sprechstimme, including in Lucky Hand. This and his work orchestrating many operettas during their Silver Age heyday may have led to his evocative and sometimes spatial use or parody of light music, not unlike Gustav Mahler or Charles Ives. In Lucky Hand, he used derisive laughter, often with a small, off-stage wind band, as prolepsis and anagnorisis. Waltz-like passages, often involving violin, are like leitmotifs for the Woman.
Like Erwartung, Pierrot, and parts of Moses und Aron, Lucky Hand may be considered a dreamlike monodrama. But it should be more abstract and surreal than a dream, Schoenberg wrote his publisher Emil Hertzka at Universal Edition. Some would have known psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, and many consulted, whether for guidance or gambling, more popular dream books, shaping cultural imagination. In writing Lucky Hand, Schoenberg may have used these latter books' color symbolism and numerology, purportedly drawn from ancient works like Artemidorus' Oneirocritica.

Literary–dramatic connections

In Lucky Hand, the dreamer is an artisan. He forges a diadem in one hammer blow, recalling the forging scene from Richard Wagner's opera Siegfried. He is then seized as if by pangs of emotion in an overwhelming storm of light, an episode echoed in Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus, whose quasi-Schoenbergian genius gains artistic inspiration and visions via syphilitic seizures in a deal with the Devil.

Personal relationships

Tragic love, recurring in Schoenberg's work since Verklärte Nacht, Gurre-Lieder, and Pelleas und Melisande, turned personal in 1908. His wife Mathilde, a pianist and composer Alexander von Zemlinsky's sister, left him for a mutual friend and colleague, Fauvist and Expressionist painter Richard Gerstl. Composition student Anton Webern helped convince her to return to Schoenberg and their two children. Gerstl died by suicide, and Schoenberg may have also contemplated suicide while processing this psychological trauma in Lucky Hand and other works from this time, which often express anxiety.
Mathilde handled some clerical work for the opera. After frequent illness she died in 1923; Schoenberg self-medicated and wrote a requiem text. In 1924 he married Gertrud Kolisch, sister of the Kolisch Quartet's first violinist Rudolf Kolisch. They collaborated on the italics=no Von heute auf morgen. She made a 1930 schematic of Lucky Hand's "color crescendo".

Visual arts nexus

Schoenberg created portraits, abstract and naturalistic studies, caricatures, and scenic designs, including for Lucky Hand. In Alliance , he painted two mirrored forms in inseparable union. 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 was followed by group shows with Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Henri Rousseau, and Egon Schiele. Mahler was an anonymous patron.
Schoenberg's ideas about music and color came from dream books, the German Romantics, musicians, and teaching, including Guido Adler's students, Webern and Egon Wellesz. His music inspired Kandinsky's painting Impression III—Concert and a correspondence. Citing Schoenberg's Harmonielehre in On the Spiritual in Art, 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. 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. Kandinsky's and Thomas de Hartmann's Der gelbe Klang had a similar scene of only abstract action, sound, and stage lighting.

Spiritual and sociopolitical context

Schoenberg's œuvre explores Sisyphean longing: first romantic and gradually spiritual. These latter elements emerged as he sought meaning and direction in works like Lucky Hand, Jakobsleiter, and Der biblische Weg. Lucky Hands thwarted visionary, unattainable form, and voice of revelation anticipate Moses und Aron, their conceptions of God, and the theophany of the burning bush respectively.
At the time of the Lucky Hand, Schoenberg compared art to a labyrinth and wrote Kandinsky that mimesis and hermeneutic interpretation led closer to what nonetheless lay beyond human comprehensibility, spurring further imagination and creativity. "ne must not dream" about art, he later wrote in an essay, but rather "try hard to grasp meaning."
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. Faint solo parts, hazy textures, and whispering may evoke the call and response of congregants and cantors from his mother's Orthodox Jewish family. The Woman's withdrawal when the Man drinks from the goblet may suggest apophatic theology.
Schoenberg theorized dissonance treatment through shifting conceptual metaphors, including many related to antisemitism. His innovation within tradition, and perhaps his social otherness within his milieu, is evident in his chromatically "emancipated" musical expression, as in the following melody :

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After Lucky Hand, he served in World War I, finished Four Orchestral Songs, Op. 22, and, while working on Jakobsleiter'', continued to work through what would become a new compositional means, the twelve-tone technique. Born after Jewish emancipation and baptized Lutheran, 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

Synopsis

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 but, despite this favor, she leaves him for a well-dressed gentleman. 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, three oboes, English horn, D clarinet, three clarinets, 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.