User:Lauriegf/Marie Pappenheim

Marie Pappenheim

Marie Pappenheim was a Viennese writer, who is best known for writing the libretto of Arnold Schoenberg's expressionist Monodrama Erwartung (1909), at the composer's request. Born in 18XX, she trained as a medical student, and it was shortly after completing these studies that she wrote her libretto. She was familiar with Freud's work, both because of the artistic and intellectual circles that she moved in, and also through family connections: her father was the cousin of Bertha Pappenheim, the patient whose case-study (under the pseudonym Anna O.) was one of Freud's first and most important pieces of psychoanalysis. Her interest in Freudian ideas is very apparent in Erwartung, written in a free stream of consciousness, as an unnamed woman searches at night in a wood for her lover, whose murdered body she then discovers. Her fragmentary thoughts are heavy with symbolism, and as the drama progresses, suggest that she herself may have murdered her lover.

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