A Soulful Journey

In one of Arnold Schoenberg’s orchestral works,  Opus 4, Verklarte Nacht- Transfigured Night , he wanted to convey through music the message of the redemptive power of love. He used as inspiration a poem by Richard Dehmel. Transfigured Night tells the story of a man and a woman walking through a bare, cold forest on a moonlit night.  The woman confesses to the man whom she loves that she’s carrying a child that is not his. The child within he womb is the product of sin, she cries. She desperately wanted to be a mother, but there is no one who loved her. And so, as she put it, she yielded her body “to then embrace of a stranger.”  She cries, “Now life has taken its revenge; now I have met you, O you.” She knows that she will now be abandoned by this man whom she truly loves and who has said that he loves her.  They live in a Victorian society; she is a fallen woman; all that she can envision out for herself is the life of shame and misery. ...