[citation needed] Schoenberg described Erwartung, saying "the aim is to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour.

"[1] Philip Friedheim has described Erwartung as Schoenberg's "only lengthy work in an athematic style", where no musical material returns once stated over the course of 426 measures.

[3] The musicologist Charles Rosen has said that Erwartung, along with Berg's Wozzeck and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, is among the "impregnable" "great monuments of modernism.

"[4] According to Christopher Small, "Schoenberg's intuitive understanding of the integrative process of dreams is revealed especially in the marvellous closing pages, filled as they are with tenderness and longing.

At the end we can almost see the sleeper awake as with a scurry of chromatic scales the music vanished from our hearing and the dream recedes from her waking mind.