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Hier, hinein? Man sieht den Weg nicht.
[In here? The path is not clear.]
(Marie Pappenheim/Arnold Schoenberg, Erwartung, Op. 17)
The path, the twisted, convoluted path — ‘die verschlungesten Wege’ — is Sigmund Freud's metaphor for the course of psychoanalytic treatment, for the process of closely following and interpreting the speech of the neurotic towards the discovery of an originary trauma and the ultimate cure of her neurosis.2 This process — the analysis of the unconscious — and the concomitant relationship between analyst and patient are foreshadowed or directly represented in a number of musical dramas from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. These are works whose meaning and significance centre in no small part around what this paper — with a nod to Gerhard (1990) — identifies as ‘the scene of psychoanalysis’: the musico-dramatic representation of psychotherapy in action. In Arnold Schoenberg's 1909 atonal monodrama Erwartung, Op. 17, there is near-perfect, if tacit, fusion of music, drama and Freudian psychoanalysis, a fusion that is a key to the meaning of this otherwise recondite work of early Modernism. Richard Wagner's music dramas Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg, and Richard Strauss's opera Elektra are Erwartung's precursors; Kurt Weill's Broadway musical Lady in the Dark is its successor. This paper argues that, beginning at the apogee of the romantic era, opera begins to take its cues from the early influences of psychoanalysis, especially Schopenhauer, and later directly from Freud's burgeoning science