|
BERG Alban Maria Johannes born 9th February 1885 at Vienna died 24th December 1935 at Vienna ─────────────────────────────────────── works include - recommended works - brief bibliography
The name and the music of Alban Berg has been inextricably linked with those of his teacher Schoenberg and his fellow pupil Webern. Of the three, it was Berg who most completely fused the emotional inheritance of the late Romantic composers - in particular the emotional if not always the musical legacy of Mahler - with the new ideas and explorations of Schoenberg. Collectively the three composers have become known as the Second Viennese School, a tag that has hindered appreciation of the individuality of each composer, and of Berg in particular.
Berg produced a very small number of works of astonishing power and emotional and technical range, less strictly tied to the minutiae of systems than his two fellow-composers. Unfortunately, his name is so circumscribed by 12-tone ideas in the popular imagination that many have shied away from the discovery of his music for fear of a dissonance and complexity comparable to that of Webern. This has been reinforced by the tendency of academics to treat Berg's music in terms of quasi-mathematical formulae, to the detriment of the emotional content and in particular the expressive powers of word-setting that inform his most powerful works. A couple of works apart (discussed below), the actuality is quite different. Indeed, much of the type of sound that Berg created has passed into the common currency of subsequent mainstream composers. His music provides an excellent introduction to that later mainstream, as well as a comfortable initiation into atonal and 12-tone ideas, quite apart from the intrinsic power of the music itself. It is the overt emotional content, as opposed to the shift to the cerebral in Webern's music, that provides an avenue of response and a link with more familiar traditions for those unused to or suspicious of such idioms.
His earliest music consists of a large number of songs, long unpublished but recently unearthed, that follow the tradition of Schumann and Brahms. However in 1904 he started studying with Schoenberg, developing his idiom through the late Romantic German tradition, and then following his teacher's lead to increasingly atonal works. The Seven Early Songs (1905-1908, orchestrated in 1928) still have the feel of a grand outpouring of emotion, the intensity heightened by a sense of tense restraint, rich in colour, especially in the version for voice and orchestra. The influential one movement Piano Sonata op.1 (1907-1908), a model for later composers making a similar break with tonality, is built on the transformation of a few seminal ideas. This concise and fascinating work has a sense of transition, from the echoes of late Romanticism in the melodic cast and the feeling of broken chords, to a more astringent, angular idiom in which the emotional content has become compressed. Any tonal associations are almost lost apart from clear moments of restful resolution, like a snake in the process of sloughing off its skin. The last of the Four Songs op.2 (?1909-1910), is totally atonal without any key signature, and it was followed by the original and inventive String Quartet (1910). Developing concepts initiated in the Piano Sonata, Berg used themes and ideas without any tonal implications, but constructed in such a way that they act as points of reference analogous to traditional tonal development, thus providing the listener with a clear aural map. Again, these devices have been subject to countless analyses, but the potential listener should not be put off by these, informative as they can be.
Berg's next work is a masterpiece that remained virtually unknown until given its first complete performance by the Swiss conductor Ansermet in 1952. The Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtkartentexten von Peter Altenberg (1912) for soprano and orchestra, usually known as the Five Altenberg Songs, have been described as `aphoristic', a misleading catch-phrase that has been to the detriment of the wider dissemination of this song-cycle. The songs are based on Expressionist postcard texts by Altenberg (which are indeed aphoristic), and Berg takes the huge apparatus of the Mahlerian orchestral song-cycle and compresses it into five short songs (whose brevity led to the aphoristic tag), extending the harmonic ideas into spare and alienated regions. Quite apart from the multiplicity of fascinating technical devices that create an extraordinary cohesion in their web of inter-related ideas, the emotional intensity and variety of these songs are knife-edged and tortured, expressing the intense introversion, psychological turmoil, and alienation of the age. Yet this is overlaid with an extraordinary sense of the vastness of the nature in which this vision is placed, augmented by the huge orchestra, simple bright colours (such as the celesta) at its centre, by the magical and mysterious ostinato opening (prefiguring more recent musical developments, with no two patterns the same), by the climatic Mahlerian outburst in the last song, and by the latent lyricism. In this song-cycle Berg expressed an aspect of the troubled human experience, verging on the neurotic and the despairing but pulling back from the brink, that has come to everyone, if momentarily. He does so in a fashion that has rarely, if ever, been exceeded by any other composer. The Five Altenberg Songs are one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.
Schoenberg was scathing of the Altenberg Songs, and Berg's response was to attempt in the Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, op.5 (1913) the kind of genuine aphorisms that his teacher and Webern had explored. The pieces are exceedingly short (12,9,18, and 20 bars). The technical brilliance is undoubted (the pieces correspond to a four-movement classical sonata) but the results are completely sterile, especially when set alongside Webern's similar works. They are primarily interesting as a musical example of psychological dependence. Berg's own musical reaction to this bit of musical masochism was a controlled explosion of emotional intensity: the Three Orchestral Pieces (1914-1915, revised 1929). This wonderful work bridges the sultry turbulence of late-Romanticism and the asceticism of the new music Webern and Schoenberg were bent on achieving. With the benefit of hindsight, the Three Orchestral Pieces are unmistakably a development of the idiom of late Mahler, most obviously in the use of a ländler and a march, more covertly in the conjunction of fragmentary ideas of eclectic emotions swirling around a central core of progression, in the quick fusion of climax, in the orchestral colours, in the use of timpani and trilling woodwind phrases. The development lies in the adoption of the kind of thematic structures and atonal harmonic idioms Schoenberg and Webern were putting to different uses, and in the more pointed strands of isolated instrumental colour. The genesis of thematic material is contained in the opening `Präludium', to be unravelled in threads in the subsequent movements. Above all, the impact is emotional, not intellectual - the passion of the Altenberg Songs revisited - from the opening, like a hollow groan, to the sense of strands of resolution that precede the dissonant close.
The Altenberg Songs also act as a kind of prelude to the works for which Berg is now perhaps best known, the operas Wozzeck (1917-1922) and Lulu (1929-1935). At the heart of these operas is a similar emotional intensity, combined with the study of the human psyche on the edge of neurosis, circumscribed by the dysfunctions of the world around. Wozzeck is a seminal work, as central to 20th-century opera as Wagner's Tristan und Isolde had been to the music of the late 19th century. Its place as the first atonal operatic masterpiece has often been attested, being seen either as a break with the Romantic tradition of grand opera or as the culmination of opera itself. Less often remarked is the revolution created by its plot (though Schoenberg was quick to recognize it), based on Büchner's incomplete 1837 play (in its turn based on a true story), which had received its first stage performance only in 1913. Wozzeck is the first truly proletarian opera, its main characters coming from the seamy underside of social life, presented without a trace of sentimentality, romantic hue, or patronizing. The characters that might traditionally have been presented as examples of a higher social order - the Doctor, the Captain - are equally starkly drawn, their social position doubtful. In this, Wozzeck destroyed the conventions of large-scale opera, attacked - and continues to attack - the complacency of opera audiences, demanded their compassion, and questioned the normality of social order. Wozzeck, an ordinary private soldier, is naive, trusting, but entirely human. His gullibility is preyed upon by the neurotic Captain and by the obsessive Doctor, who performs experiments on him. His essentially passive nature is incapable of satisfying the more wanton dreams of his young wife, Marie, who is wooed by a visiting Drum Major. Goaded on by those around him, tormented by his bewilderment at the evil world in which he finds himself and by the inexorable progression of events, Wozzeck builds up angry passion until he is overwhelmed by paranoia and murders Marie. The opera ends with the voices of children, playing with Wozzeck's daughter and running off to see her dead mother.
Berg was aided in his setting by the fragmentary nature of the incomplete play, in which the scenes, and thus the plot, were complete but untrammelled by any 19th-century linkage. This entirely suited his musical conception, which again made a break with operatic tradition. The work is divided into three acts, further divided to follow the scenes of the play. The five scenes of Act II are the psychological centrepiece; Act I sets the background, and Act III expounds the inevitable consequences of those five scenes. For the musical realization of this structure, Berg used forms that were associated with abstract music, and not with opera. The opening five scenes are self-contained musical units (`character sketches'), including a suite and a passacaglia. The second act constitutes a five-movement symphony, and is constructed as such. In Act III each of the five scenes is an `invention': on a theme, on a sound, on a rhythm, a tone, and a perpetuum mobile, the interlude being an invention on a key. Musical motifs and their manipulations and variations bind this structure together, and each act ends with a cadence on the same chord. The danger of such a scheme is that adherence to the formal musical requirements will override the suitability for the dramatic action. This Berg brilliantly avoids in an astonishing synthesis of form and content, the structural elements providing a musical symbolism for the characterization. His formal innovations have since been widely emulated.
However, such technical considerations should not disguise the purely expressive intent of this powerful opera, as Berg himself was at pains to point out. Indeed, it is not necessary to be even aware of them for the work to have extraordinary impact, though they add layers of depth when one becomes more familiar with the opera. The atonal language with its varied vocal lines, from wide leaps to Sprechgesang (half-speech, half-song), is completely suited to the nature of the psychological torment of the work, and many who have found such a musical language otherwise difficult have found it perfectly acceptable when heard in such a dramatic context. The score abounds in marvellous moments, when Berg, who generally uses the orchestra on a chamber scale, matches the musical content to the dramatic situation: a march, a lullaby, the juxtaposition of innocence and terrible knowledge at the close. Above all, he avoids musical judgement, presenting the characters, their good or their evil sides, for what they are, with compassion and understanding. Recordings provide a marvellous opportunity to follow and understand the formal constructs of Wozzeck; but they can only hint at the emotional impact a good production of this most important of 20th-century operas can have.
Berg's next work, the Chamber Concerto (1923-1925) for piano, violin and 13 wind instruments, is, after the Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, the second odd work in his canon. Given its dedicatory purpose for the occasion of Schoenberg's 50th birthday, it is tempting to see it as another attempt to please the master rather than follow his own compositional instincts. With its abstract formal designs and lean instrumental textures, it has more than a hint of a neo-classical hue, overlaid by harmonic procedures that, while using 12-tone formal techniques, had not yet arrived at a fully organized system. The results sound curiously stilted for such an emotionally fluid composer. Berg used the full 12-tone system first in a song, Schliesse mir die Augen beude (1925; he had set the same song tonally in 1905), and then, using for the first movement the same 12-note series as the song, in the Lyric Suite (1925-1926) for string quartet. However, Berg does not follow the strict constraints of the 12-tone technique that were self-imposed by Schoenberg and Webern. Instead, he evolved a less rigid (but intellectually equally well-ordered) use of the main elements of 12-tone technique, better suited to his expressive purpose. For the strict adherence to the 12-tone rules, while it answered the aesthetic of Webern, ill-suited the expressive nature of Berg's idiom, with its roots in a late-Romantic expression and its latent sense of extra-musical inspiration. The problem (as Schoenberg himself, as well as many later composers, discovered) was that while such strict adherence did provide a structural base for musical expression that removed it from outmoded Romantic tonal or chromatic formulae, in so doing it imposed too many constraints to act as a vehicle for the wider expression Berg was seeking. Berg's solution was create a structural base largely outside the controls of the 12-tone system. He used smaller scale integrated structures, usually echoing classical models, building up a series of these units to create an overall form (often using symmetry or palindromes): this is a primary technical break with the Mahlerian late-Romantic tradition, which had preferred sonata-first movement symphonic structure. Onto this formal scaffolding he grafted the 12-tone techniques to extend the harmonic language.
He had used such a construction with an atonal harmonic language in Wozzeck; in the six-movement Lyric Suite the 12-tone elements are used to build the material that is placed within that structure, and to unify the individual units (Lulu has similar structural priorities). Thus only the first, third (less its trio) and the sixth movements are built entirely on 12-tone principles; the first movement has three 12-note series, rather than the single one preferred by Schoenberg (echoing, in the new context, Mahler's use of a number of principal themes in the first movements of his symphonies). There are 12-note ideas in the second and fifth movements that prefigure those of the following movements, and themes and longer sections are shared by more than one otherwise autonomous movement. All these give an overall cohesion to the work, and the return of ideas or material is aurally recognizable; but the temperamental and structural aesthetic is very different from that of Webern, where the structural base and the 12-tone usage are inextricably interwoven. From this crucial difference stem two of the main main trends of post-1945 composition, the serialists following the lead of Webern, and, as it has turned out, a larger and more influential number of composers following Berg in integrating 12-tone elements into languages and structures that are derived from, or inspired by, other sources.
That the Lyric Suite has primarily an expressive intent is confirmed by its secret programme: the basic cell (B-F-A-B flat, in German H-F-A-B) is based on Berg's own initials and those of the object of his passion, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the wife of an industrialist. It is also an intense and dramatic work, as if the quartet were together telling some dramatic tale, and this drama is reflected in the titles of the movement, each of which has a description (giovale, amoroso, misterioso, appassionato, delirando, desolato) which themselves describe the emotional progression. Berg himself suggested that the changes to the initial 12-tone series that occur through the work represented a `submission to fate'. It is also a technically dramatic work, stretching the expressive range of the string instruments by a plethora of techniques and sonic effects, most obvious in the fragmentary, hallucinatory effects of the `Allegro misterioso', with its use of harmonics. In 1928 Berg orchestrated three of the movements (the `Andante amoroso', the `Allegro misterioso' and the `Adagio appassionato') to form an orchestral suite. This is probably more often encountered than the full suite for string quartet; unfortunately it is usually billed as the Lyric Suite rather than its full title of Three Pieces from the `Lyric Suite', which can cause some confusion.
Berg's next vocal work, Der Wein (1929) for soprano and orchestra, is an extended dramatic aria to three poems by Baudelaire (in German), equating wine with its power over world-weariness. It anticipates some of the concepts used in Lulu, notably the use of a saxophone and piano in the orchestration. Berg uses a 12-note row freely, as a source of thematic material and without following the strict permutations. A connection with a tonal language is maintained, anticipating the Violin Concerto, in that the row chosen has in its constituents the possibility of tonal chordal implications. The work thus still has its origins in an extension of a late-Romantic idiom, particularly in the orchestral flow and the flowing vocal line, with echoes of Mahler in the climaxes and the falling orchestral swoops. Against these, the angular nature of the intervals in the vocal line and the juxtaposition of thematic ideas create a nervous energy and a disassociated, unsettled atmosphere that takes the work far beyond a purely Romantic aesthetic; the absence of a closing finality suggests the insubstantial place at which the musical ambience has arrived.
The opera Lulu (1925-1935) extends the musical and dramatic world of Wozzeck. For many years it was given in a truncated two-act form, as Berg did not finish the orchestration or short sections of the final act. This was completed by Friedrich Cerha, and first given in 1979 (Cerha had secretly completed it some years earlier, but had to wait until the death of Berg's widow before publishing it). Such is the formal and emotional importance of that third act that any two-act version is best avoided. The central theme of the opera, distilled from two controversial plays by Frank Wedekind, is of the sexual obsession of men, with the associated themes of power and death. Through the often lurid scenes weaves the object of that obsession, Lulu, at one and the same time a victim and an instigator of her liaisons. Again, Berg makes no moral judgement on her or on her surroundings, and in modern terms Lulu might be described as a study of a series of co-dependent relationships. The entire opera is built in an arch. The first act describes Lulu's rise, the death of her husband when he discovers her making love to a painter, her marriage to the painter, his suicide when he discovers that she has a patron, and her manipulation of that patron to cast aside his fiancée. The second act is her triumph, with marriage to her patron, and a bevy of admirers and lovers of both sexes. She murders her husband and is jailed, but her Countess lesbian lover takes her place, allowing her to escape. The third act is her fall. Living with the son of her murdered patron, she is blackmailed in an attempt to sell her into white slavery, but again she escapes. In the final scene she has been reduced to living as a prostitute in London. She is visited by the Countess, but, offstage, she is murdered by one of her clients, Jack the Ripper, who then kills the Countess.
Such a plot could easily emerge as melodramatic. That it does not is due first to a host of structural devices that Berg employs, including an introduction by a circus-master, expressing the nihilism of this aspect of the human condition, the duplication of Lulu's three admirers in the opening of the opera by her three clients at the end (with the same singers, and musical associations), and a kind of substitute father figure from Lulu's past who stalks through the work unscathed. Second the depth of characterization is considerable, complete with the contradictory torments that such obsessions imply: Berg spins an extraordinary expressive atmosphere, creating a world in which such crazy behaviour seems the norm. Again Berg takes advantage of relatively short, self-contained scenes, that allow a series of snap-shots of the long time-span of the story. The symmetry of the plot is emphasized, with a three-minute film designated for the central point of the opera, showing Lulu's trial and imprisonment, and its retrograde, her escape from prison. A major change from the earlier opera is that Berg now employs the 12-tone system developed since Wozzeck by Schoenberg. Berg's use of material derived from 12-note series and other core cells binds the work together by association with ideas and characters, whether they are recognized as such or subconsciously assimilated. The actual analysis of that usage has prompted endless argument and discussion, which although fascinating, is about as relevant to Lulu as a work of operatic art as a discussion of the structural stresses and mechanical physics of the architecture of Chartres is to its purpose as a cathedral. More important to those who wish to experience this opera rather than dissect it, is the overall scheme. Each act has a central musical structure (a sonata-allegro in Act I, a rondo in Act II, a theme and variations in Act III), used less rigidly than in Wozzeck, as they are surrounded and interrupted by other self-contained musical events. These shorter units hark back to earlier, classical conceptions: ariettas, canzonettas, duets, interludes, and the like. The vocal writing is wide-ranging (Berg himself identified six degrees of vocal style used in the score); jazz is employed (in the theatre scene) though for purely dramatic purposes, as a distant backdrop to the foreground action and music (which is, in the opening to this scene, extremely lyrical, the orchestral start of the scene and the more extended vocal writing recalling the Altenberg Songs).
All these devices serve one single purpose: the realization for expressive ends of the drama and the characters, of the slice of the human dilemma, presented in a close marriage of music and word. Of all the operas yet written, Lulu perhaps comes closest to the fast interplay of human speech, of dialogue, interruption, argument. This is partly due to the consummate dialogue of the libretto, partly to the flexibility of the vocal lines, again wide-ranging in technique, but most of all to the extraordinary elasticity of Berg's musical setting. The instrumental language, kept for the most part to chamber proportions, wraps itself around the vocal lines like an outer skin, acting as a kind of musical body-language to our encounter with the characters and their emotions, pointing up here, colouring there, making associations there; certain instruments are associated with particular characters. The genius of Berg's setting is that these constant fluctuations flow so naturally into each other, a flow founded on the thematic and formal techniques already discussed. The ending of the opera, with the Countess crying out for Lulu, has the musical ambience of, and quotes directly from, the final Altenberg Song, which itself describes the emptiness of oblivion. This magnificent opera, more wide-ranging, clearer, musically more lucid and ultimately more harrowing than Wozzeck, clearly had autobiographical associations for Berg. Wedekind's character Alwa is altered by Berg to a composer (and at one point a quote from the opening of Wozzeck cements the association), there are connections with the lives of his own family, and there are echoes of Berg's passion for Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. The suite of five symphonic pieces from Lulu (Symphonische Stüke aus der Oper `Lulu', 1934, for soprano and orchestra) is probably more often encountered than the actual opera. It utilizes the music from the orchestral interludes (including those from Act III), Lulu's Lied from Act II, and the Countess' final words from the end of the opera.
Berg's final completed work, the Violin Concerto (1935) is subtitled To The Memory of an Angel, and was written following the death from polio of the daughter of Mahler's widow and her second husband, the architect Walter Gropius. Berg incorporates a quote from the opening of the Bach chorale Es ist genug! ("It is enough!") and a Carpathian folksong. However, there is also a second, secret autobiographical programme, contained in the numerology of the bar numbers, in some of the markings, and in the (unprinted) actual words to the Carpathian folksong. This programme reflects Berg's first major love affair, with a servant-woman that led to the birth of his illegitimate child, and his last, with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. Musically, the concerto is founded on a 12-tone row, which has strong tonal associations, as it unfolds two major and two minor triads, and at its end the whole-tone scale, while its penultimate three notes form the motif of the Bach chorale. The subsequent material interlaces tonal and 12-tone elements, and much ink has been spilled on the separation of these elements. However, in essence Berg's harmonic language had arrived at a position where the synthesis had reached a unity of its own. It exists in itself, for expressive intent, and the 12-tone and tonal elements are simply building blocks of that language, like using a combination of brick and stone in a building. The strict framework of the overall structure, as in most of Berg's works, provided him with the base for expressive and harmonic freedom. The four movements are divided into two pairs, with the only silent break coming between the second and third. The internal structures of these movements are aurally clear, and founded on classical example. Following the public programme, the first pair of movements portray Berg's dead young friend, the second (which reverses the traditional order, putting the slow movement at the end), the tragedy, death and transfiguration, returning us to the principal philosophical theme of late-Romanticism. The rocking opening of the concerto, leading to the first recognition of the Bach chorale, is steeped in the warmth of affection, and the work progresses through the development of that mood, a lyrical sense of reminiscence, echoes of the Viennese ländler, tense threat, and the chorale-variations final movement, with its feeling of acceptance and reconciliation. The solo line provides a continuous thread among these changes of emotional expression, and is not merely fluid, but has something of the freedom of flight, like a swallow or a swift spontaneously darting and soaring over a pond, keeping to the boundaries of its knowledge, buoyed up by the eddies and gullies and thunderstorms of the orchestral air in which it moves, eventually gliding in the calm of sunset.
Now that over half a century has passed since Berg's death, it is becoming clear that Berg's ties to Schoenberg and Webern existed primarily on two levels. The first was psychological: a strange triangle of dominance and submission, with Schoenberg as the tyrannical father-figure, who seems to have answered some psychological need in both his pupils. The second, stemming from this, is the common exploration of certain new techniques, generated by Schoenberg and developed to their own ends by Berg and Webern. But, as the experience of the development of music since then has made clearer, in the crucial area of the musical results, the actual sounds received by an audience, there is little other than technical means to link the mature works of the three composers, and Berg in particular. It is high time that the music of Berg was divorced from such tight associations; then a wider audience mioght begin to appreciate Berg not for what he is reputed to be, but for what he is: the composer of some of the most emotionally intense and psychologically compelling music written in this century, propelled, not dominated, by a formidable intellect.
There is an International Alban Berg Society, which has published since 1968 a newsletter devoted to Berg studies. ─────────────────────────────────────── - violin concerto; Chamber Concerto for piano, violin and 13 wind instruments; Lyric Suite (from suite for string quartet) and Three Pieces for orch.; - 4 Pieces for clarinet and piano; Adagio from Chamber Concerto for violin, clarinet and piano; string quartet; Lyric Suite for string quartet - piano sonata - Five Symphonic Pieces from Lulu, Four Altenberg Songs, Three Fragments from Wozzeck and Der Wein for voice and orch.; Seven Early Songs (also orchestrated version), Four Songs, two settings of Schliesse mir die Augen beide and many early songs for voice and piano - operas Wozzeck and Lulu ─────────────────────────────────────── All Berg's mature output is recommended. For those new to Berg, it is suggested that they start with the Altenberg Songs, the Three Pieces for Orchestra, and the Violin Concerto, and continue with Wozzeck and Lulu. Specialists may care to note that there is a recording of Webern conducting the Violin Concerto and the Lyric Suite. ─────────────────────────────────────── T. Adorno Alban Berg, Vienna, 1978 (revised edition) D.Jarman The Music of Alban Berg, London, 1979 W.Reich Alban Berg: the Man and his Music (Eng.trans.), Vienna, 1957 A short but detailed survey of Berg's life and works by G.Perle will be found in The New Grove Second Viennese School, (London 1980) which includes an extensive bibliography. ─────────────────────────────────────── |
