German Expressionist Opera, 1910–1935

Extract

The question of how the term ‘Expressionist’ relates to certain music can best be answered by reference to the principle features of Expressionism in painting. The word was coined by a German art critic in 1911 to serve as an appropriate antonym to Impressionism. The new art to which it was applied was based not on purely visual impressions of the outer world but on the expression of the artist's inner experience. The Expressionist does not paint an object but his own subjective reaction to it. He recreates it in the light of his emotions, often distorting form to penetrate essence and reveal the truth that lies behind the outward appearance. The results are highly emotive, dramatic, visionary and often violently ugly. They express the fears, real and subconscious, of men who saw materialism eating into society and enslaving the individual. The technical implications of this art meant that traditional principles of ‘beauty’, ‘symmetry’ and so forth gave way to exaggeration, distortion, grotesqueness, startling colour clashes and vehement emotional release; and precisely the same process, and results, can be seen in the work of Schönberg as he turned from the musical orthodoxes of form and key to the instinctive, tortured sounds of atonality. His work in this direction was more or less contemporary with that of the original Expressionist art group, ‘Die Brücke’ (‘The Bridge’), which existed as a community from 1905–13. Its members were Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff, and later Nolde, Pechstein and Müller. Schönberg's own paintings bear a strong likeness to the productions of this group. There are the same brutalized portraits and nightmare visions, the same distortion of natural forms parallelled by the angular, disintegrating lines of his atonal music.