“The genuinely revolutionary element in his music is the transformation of the function of expression. Passions are no longer faked; on the contrary, undisguised, corporeal impulses of the unconscious, shocks, and traumas are registered in the medium of music. […] Schoenberg’s formal innovations were closely related to the change in the emotional content.They serve the breakthrough of its reality. The first atonal works are depositions, in the sense of psychoanalytic dream depositions. […] Real suffering has left behind [scars, disfiguring stains, “in opposition to the compositional will,” that cannot be wiped away] in the artwork as a sign that it no longer recognizes its autonomy; their heteronomy defies the self-sufficient semblance of music.  [...]

What radical music knows is the untransfigured suffering of men whose powerlessness has so increased that it no longer permits semblance and play. […] The avowal of hatred and desire, of jealousy and forgiveness and beyond that is the whole symbolism of the unconscious, is wrung from [the protagonist of Erwartung]; and only in the moment of her insanity does the music recall its right to console. Yet the seismographic record of traumatic shock at the same time becomes the technical law of music’s form. It forbids continuity and development. The musical language is polarized into its extremes: on the one hand, into gestures of shock—almost bodily convulsions—and on the other, into the brittle immobility of a person paralyzed by anxiety.”