Symphony of Expectation

Warning: this show is cancelled to help contain the spread of the new coronavirus.

“It is impossible for people to have only one feeling.
People have thousands of emotions simultaneously.” ­– ARNOLD SCHÖNBERG

During Klarafestival, Symphony of Expectation combines two iconic, 20^th-century compositions: Sinfonia by Luciano Berio and Erwartung by Arnold Schönberg. Berio composed Sinfonia in the turbulent year 1968 as “a documentary, faithful to the explosive character of the age”. This is evident in the fragmentary structure of the symphony. Scraps of text by Samuel Beckett, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Martin Luther King are interwoven with musical motifs from Mahler, Stravinsky and Schönberg, among others.

The author Marie Pappenheim wrote the libretto for Schönberg’s monodrama Erwartung. She uses one second of the maximal spiritual excitement of the female main character – who is looking for her beloved on the edge of an ominous forest – and makes it explode into an intense theatrical experience. Symphony of Expectation reduces Berio’s explosion of voices to the essence of one female voice in Erwartung.

• In 2017, the Polish dramaturg, librettist and director Krystian Lada signed for the dramaturgy of Ivo van Hove’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared, which was staged at Kaaitheater during the Klara Festival. He was awarded the inaugural Mortier Next Generation Award in 2019.