Die glückliche Hand

Background and creation#

Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand) is a four-scene opera or “Drama with Music in One Act” by Arnold Schoenberg. A (artist-opera) and (I-drama or ego-drama), it bridges late-Romantic 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 (1901–03, 1911–15, 1926–33).

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 called the “emancipation of the dissonance”, trying it in a spate of atonal, expressionist music: *Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11 (February–August 1909) *Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16 (May–August 1909) *Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand), Op. 18 (June 1909 – November 1913) *Erwartung (Expectation), Op. 17 (August–September 1909) *Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19 (February–June 1911) *Herzgewächse (Foliage of the Heart), Op. 20 (December 1911) *Pierrot lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot), Op. 21 (March–July 1912) 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 (1901–02) may have influenced his use of (half speech, half song), 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 (scene 1 m. 26; obliquely: scene 3 mm. 104 and 125) and anagnorisis (reprise: scene 3 m. 200). Waltz-like passages, often involving violin, are like leitmotifs for the Woman (e.g., scene 2 m. 30, scene 3 m. 156). Like Erwartung, Pierrot, and parts of Moses und Aron (1923–37), 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, regarding its unrealized filming. Some would have known psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), 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 (the Man) is an artisan. He forges a diadem in one hammer blow (set to a tertian chord of twelve tones, scene 3 m. 115), recalling the forging scene from Wagner’s opera Siegfried (1851–1871). He is then seized as if by pangs of emotion in an overwhelming storm of light (the “color crescendo”, scene 3 m. 126), an episode echoed in Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus (1947), 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 (1899), Gurre-Lieder (1900–03, 1910–11), and Pelleas und Melisande (1902–03), turned personal in 1908. After frequent illness she died in 1923; Schoenberg self-medicated and wrote a requiem text. In 1924 he married Gertrud Kolisch (pseudonym: “Max Blonda”), sister of the Kolisch Quartet’s first violinist Rudolf Kolisch. They collaborated on the (opera of the time) Von heute auf morgen (From Today to Tomorrow, 1928–29). She made a 1930 schematic of Lucky Hands “color crescendo”.

Visual arts nexus#

Schoenberg created portraits, abstract and naturalistic studies, caricatures, and scenic designs, including for Lucky Hand. In Alliance (Hands) (1910), 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 (who drew on older texts), musicians, and teaching, including Guido Adler’s students, Webern and Egon Wellesz. His music inspired Kandinsky’s painting Impression III—Concert (1911) and a correspondence. Citing Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre in On the Spiritual in Art (1911), 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 . 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.

Spiritual and sociopolitical context#

Schoenberg’s explores Sisyphean longing: first romantic (e.g., Hanging Gardens, Erwartung) and gradually spiritual (e.g., Moses, Modern Psalm). These latter elements emerged as he sought meaning and direction in works like Lucky Hand, Jakobsleiter (1914–22, rev. 1944; on Jacob’s Ladder), and Der biblische Weg (1926–27, a Zionist play). Lucky Hands thwarted visionary (the Man), unattainable form (the Woman), and voice of revelation (the quasi-Greek chorus) 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. " O ne must not dream" about art, he later wrote in an essay, but rather “try hard to grasp its 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 (scenes 1 and 4) 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 (scene 2) may suggest apophatic theology. Schoenberg theorized dissonance treatment through shifting conceptual metaphors, including many related to antisemitism (especially Wagner’s). 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 (from scene 2 m. 36): : \new StaffGroup > 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 through 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.

Roles#

• (a Man), baritone
• (a Woman), silent
• (a Gentleman), silent
• Chorus,
• 6 (Women); 3 sopranos, 3 altos
• 6 (Men); 3 tenors, 3 basses

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 the following instrumentation. Woodwinds : piccolo : : 3 oboes : English horn : D clarinet : : bass clarinet : 3 bassoons : contrabassoon Brass : 4 horns : 3 trumpets : 4 trombones : bass tuba Percussion : timpani : cymbals : bass drum : snare drum : tamtam : high and low bells : triangle : xylophone : glockenspiel : metal tubes : tambourine : hammer : celesta Strings : harp : violins I : violins II : violas : cellos : double basses The piece also employs an offstage ensemble consisting of piccolo, E clarinet, horn, trumpet, 3 trombones, triangle and cymbals.

See also#

*6-Z44, the Schoenberg hexachord