The Garden as Interior: Reading Schoenberg’s Gardens in Context

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers a new reading of the garden in Schoenberg’s Erwartung, a domestic retreat wistfully remembered by the Woman as she wanders in a nocturnal forest. Theorizing interiority as a defining facet of the monodrama’s garden, the article traces this quality across literal and metaphorical dimensions. Through considerations of early twentieth-century Viennese urban planning and garden design, women’s horticultural professionalization, and discourses around the relevance of green space for psychological wellness, the guiding interpretative notion of a garden interior is grounded in context. Gardens in two other of Schoenberg’s works roughly contemporary with Erwartung—Das Buch der hängenden Gärten and Herzgewächse—are similarly shown to engage with interior space in sounding and textual-thematic domains. Moving past Freudian symbolic interpretations, Erwartung’s garden is instead understood as a sounding space and a social and material entity embedded in the practices and anxieties of modern Viennese life.