Pipe Dream (1955), though a commercial and (according to its creators) artistic failure, nonetheless has many innovative features. More a Zeitoper than an optimistic Broadway musical, its picaresque characters include a female romantic lead who in the source material is a sex worker. Based on two novels by John Steinbeck, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, the musical’s lyrical style was at odds with the social commentary inherent in the plot. Although Hammerstein softened the hardest-hitting aspects of Steinbeck’s novels, the characters were still too atypical for what audiences (and critics) expected from Rodgers and Hammerstein. Playing Fauna, who runs the local brothel, was opera singer Helen Traubel. Rodgers and Hammerstein hoped that by casting an opera singer in this role, it would give the character additional gravitas. With Pipe Dream, Rodgers and Hammerstein continued their legacy of expanding what a musical could be and do.

The androcentric tropes typical of modernist narratives distort Schoenberg’s story and the interpretation of his compositions by eliding his engagement with women and the feminine. Yet his social circle included a number of progressive women, including the educator Eugenie Schwarzwald and medical doctor Marie Pappenheim. This study considers two operas Schoenberg composed twenty years apart, each based on a libretto written by a woman and featuring a female protagonist who reflects the social situation of women in her milieu. Moreover, each opera was a vehicle for a distinctive compositional innovation, Erwartung (1909) marking the pinnacle of Schoenberg’s ‘intuitive aesthetic’ in its freely non-tonal, non-repetitive style, and Von heute auf morgan (1929) the first twelve-tone opera.