At A Glance
Maurice Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) and Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung (Expectation) are very different works. One dances toward light, the other walks wide-eyed into darkness. One is suffused with a sense of enchantment and wonder, the other with grim foreboding. But there are deep similarities between the works, too—as befitting the fact that they were composed within a few years of each other. Both view the world from the perspective of a subject for whom reality and fantasy are indistinguishable. And there’s nothing sentimental about either of them. This is clearly true of Schoenberg, whose “emancipated dissonance” illustrates an acute psychological tension with no prospect of relief. But it’s true of the Ravel, too: he glories in the child’s perspective, but as Tom Thumb makes clear, he knows well that the child’s world, just like the world of the adult, can be a dark and lonely place.
