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Musical Modernism and German Cinema from 1913 to 1933 pp 29–43Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Cinema and Expressionist Drama

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Abstract

For a considerable part of his life, Arnold Schönberg was drawn to cinema, just like he was attracted to other forms of cross-pollination between different arts and languages. The history of the relationship between Schönberg and German cinema dates back to the project for a filmic adaptation of Die glückliche Hand in 1913, a project that can be regarded as representative of Schönberg’s rather singular approach to cinematic music and, more generally, to cinema as an art form. Alban Berg also looked at the new cinematic medium with great interest in those same years. In Berg’s artistic horizon, cinema appeared for the first time in the project for a monodrama entitled Nacht (Nokturn) and conceived in the years 1915–1916.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A representative example of this is a statement from the 1940s, which in many respects closes the story of Schönberg’s relation to cinema and his misunderstanding of both the cinematic medium and its music: “I had dreamed of a dramatization of Balzac’s Seraphita, or Strindberg’s To Damascus, or the second part of Goethe’s Faust , or even Wagner’s Parsifal . All of these works, by renouncing the law of ‘unity of space and time’, would have found the solution to realization in sound pictures. But the industry continued to satisfy only the needs and demands of the ordinary people who filled their theatres” (Schönberg 1971, p. 154).

  2. 2.

    Schönberg’s painting activity increased between 1908 and 1911. So much so, that, for some time, he thought about abandoning composition all together and devoting himself solely to painting. We know that he was a member of the Blauer Reiter, the Munich circle that had gathered around Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc . By the end of 1911, Schönberg’s paintings had not only been featured in one exhibition of the group, but he had also contributed to an almanac of the same name as the group with reproductions of two paintings and the score of Herzgewächse op. 20 . Cf. Kandinsky and Marc (1912). Schönberg’s painting work is now published in Schönberg (2005).

  3. 3.

    Schönberg’s personal library contains a complete edition of the German writer’s works: Cf. Goethe (1901). Archive of the Arnold Schönberg Center, under cataloguing number BOOK G19, 12 vols.

  4. 4.

    Schönberg received from Kandinsky himself a copy of Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1912), shortly after starting to correspond with the Russian painter.

  5. 5.

    Of the three artists mentioned by Schönberg, only Alfred Roller later collaborated in a film, creating the stage design for the Rosenkavalier by Robert Wiene (infra p. 88).

  6. 6.

    Berg’s interest in cinema is now well established. In recent years, many Berg scholars have discussed it, in particular Busch (2008) and Seminara (2012).

  7. 7.

    Many references to US and German films can be read in Berg (1971). On this topic, see also the statement of his nephew, Erich Alban (Berg 1976).

  8. 8.

    Letter quoted in Morgenstern (1995), p. 196. Berg later alluded to Eisenstein’s film Bronenosec Potëmkin [Battleship Potemkin] (1925) in another letter to Hanna Fuchs , written from Prague in November 1926. Cf. Floros (2008), p. 43.

  9. 9.

    Facsimile documents have been published in Busch (2008) as well as, in an English translation, in Busch (2010). On this topic see also Seminara (2012), especially pp. 75–82.

  10. 10.

    Concerning Dostoevsky, Berg picked passages from the novel Der Jüngling (Dostoevsky 1915). As for Strindberg, the composer used two works from the Kammerspiele: Die Brandstätte and Gespenstersonate (Strindberg 1908). From Kraus, he quoted the aphorisms collected under the title Nachts, and the verse piece Den Zwiespältigen, all published in Die Fackel (Kraus 1917a, b). The other quotes are drawn from the Aphorismen of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (now in Lichtenberg 1994, p. 445), and from Liebe und Ehe by Peter Rosegger (1915).

  11. 11.

    Quoted by the facsimile edition: Busch (2010), pp. 126–127.

  12. 12.

    Busch (2010), pp. 103–131.

  13. 13.

    Cf. also Busch (2008), p. 117.

  14. 14.

    Letter quoted in Redlich (1957), pp. 65–66.

  15. 15.

    Berg did not go beyond a few generic notes related to the musical mood of the various parts that make up the monodrama. These are reproduced in Busch (2008), pp. 120–123.

  16. 16.

    The same theme crops up again, a few years later, in a drama by Yvan Goll, Methusalem ou l'Éternel Bourgeois (1922), where the protagonist’s dream is projected within a window frame. This coincidence reveals the existence of a widespread theatrical topos. On the dramaturgy of Yvan Goll and its relationship with film aesthetics, see Denkler (1967), pp. 126–134, and Wackers (2004), pp. 118–125.

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  1. University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Francesco Finocchiaro

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Finocchiaro, F. (2017). Cinema and Expressionist Drama. In: Musical Modernism and German Cinema from 1913 to 1933. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58262-7_3

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