The modern and the plural

As an ‘Age of Extremes’ with a vigorously diverse mainstream, the twentieth century – in music as in other respects – does not lend itself to straightforward summarising, or the tracing of unambiguously consistent tendencies and trajectories, involving clear-cut lines of influence and dependency. What can be demonstrated, if the musical history of the century is surveyed, are networks of shared concerns which involve many different composers in many different ways, with many degrees of connection and divergence. To tell the story of twentieth-century music with Berg as a central character would require a particularly sensitive interpretation of such networks. The possibility that Berg could be an ‘indispensable’ figure has nevertheless been acknowledged for some time – for example, in a striking assessment by Pierre Boulez, first published in 1958, and all the more important for the ways in which it modifies Boulez's own earlier (1948) and much more hostile ‘reception’ of the composer. Observing first that Berg's ‘influence’ was ‘at present less decisive than that of Webern, despite the greater immediate range of his music’, Boulez continued:

When Berg was in Frankfurt for the premiere of the Three Fragments from ‘Wozzeck’ in 1924 he was introduced to a twenty-one-year-old student named Theodor Wiesengrund. Wiesengrund was about to submit a doctoral dissertation in philosophy on the then fashionable topic of Husserlian phenomenology, but he also had some training as a musician and had published a number of journalistic pieces on contemporary music. Later, Wiesengrund would claim that at the time he saw in Berg a representative of the ‘true new music’ – ‘at the same time Schoenberg and Mahler’. He proposed to move to Vienna to study composition with Berg as soon as the formalities for the granting of his doctoral degree were completed. Berg agreed to take him as a student.

Wiesengrund was the only son of a wealthy Jewish wine merchant, Oskar Wiesengrund, and of Maria Calvelli-Adorno, a French singer. He was a highly intelligent, deeply cultured and aesthetically sensitive young man, but had in some ways a not very attractive character. Schoenberg found his oily, self-important manner, arrogance and beady-eyed stare repulsive, and certainly Wiesengrund's writings give the impression of being the work of a more than usually self-absorbed person. Despite this, Berg seems to have had a genuine affection for him and a high opinion of his compositions, although no interest at all in his philosophical speculations.

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The two major works of the period 1923 to 1926 – the Chamber Concerto (1923–5) and the Lyric Suite (1925–6) - embodied major developments in Berg's compositional technique. Between these two scores, Berg composed his second setting of Theodor Storm's poem ‘Schliesse mir die Augen beide’, which, in a letter to Webern, he described as his ‘first attempt at a strict twelve-note composition’. Roughly speaking, the Chamber Concerto is mostly atonal, while the Lyric Suite is mostly twelve-note, although the Chamber Concerto does contain ‘passages that correspond to the laws […] for “composition with twelve notes related only to one another”’ and, conversely, the second and fourth movements of the Lyric Suite, as well as parts of the third and fifth, are ‘free’ in ‘style’. Twelve-note composition thus connects all three of these works and is the central topic addressed in this chapter.

Klein and Hauer

Berg's twelve-note technique has always been recognised as different from that of Schoenberg and Webern, and, as Douglas Jarman writes, ‘although characteristics of both Schoenberg's and [Josef Matthias] Hauer's systems can be found in Berg's music, none of his works employs either method exclusively’. The import of this statement has been scrutinised by the American musicologist Arved Ashby, who questions the significance of Hauer's theory of tropes for Berg's twelve-note technique and suggests that ‘the concept of additional, systematically derived rows’, which in practice sets Berg's technique apart from that of Schoenberg and Webern, originated in the work of Berg's pupil Fritz Heinrich Klein (1892–1977).

If the quantity of performances and recordings is anything to go by, and the warmth of their reception, Berg's music is reaching a wider audience as the twentieth century ends than it has at any previous time. Since the appearance in 1979 of Friedrich Cerha's edition at last allowed Lulu to be heard in its entirety, this opera has arguably overtaken Wozzeck in both popularity and critical esteem. Recordings of the Lulu Suite threaten to outnumber those of the ever-popular Violin Concerto in the catalogues.

It is no longer remotely fashionable to ask ‘what if?’ questions about composers who died prematurely, but the popular emphasis on Berg's final compositions makes my mind, at least, turn occasionally to such idle speculation. Berg's compositional technique in the final act of Lulu and in the Violin Concerto is remarkably focused and fluent, and belies the opera's long gestation. His willingness to consider a substantial list of future projects as he neared the end of his work on the opera – a third string quartet, a piece of chamber music with piano, a symphony, a piece for radio or film – might be taken to suggest that he was ready to unleash an outpouring of creativity, following a long period of frustration whilst composing the first two acts. The Violin Concerto would have fitted into such a pattern, for though one can certainly see signs of the speed at which it was put together, it remains a work that almost unerringly forges what was for Berg a new balance between the intricate and the communicative. At 50, he knew himself and his ways as a composer well enough to organize his working methods so that the music would flow

On the evening of 31 March 1913 the Great Hall of the Vienna Musikverein erupted as Arnold Schoenberg conducted two of Berg's songs Op. 4, the Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskartentexten von Peter Altenberg. The audience bawled for composer and poet to be sent to the madhouse, knowing full well that Altenberg was already a patient in the State Mental Institution at Steinhof on the outskirts of the city. Fights broke out, the police were called, and Erhard Buschbeck, a friend of Berg's and an organiser of the concert, was arrested after trading blows with the operetta composer Oscar Straus. At the trial Straus remarked that the thud of the punch had been the most harmonious thing in the whole concert.

Although the Skandalkonzert has entered the folklore of modern musical history, it is perhaps not fully appreciated just how symbolic this event was, nor how indicative (albeit in a fairly extreme form) of cultural life in the city as a whole. For the glorious cultural florescence of ‘Vienna 1900’ – now almost as clichéd as is the other Vienna of Johann Strauss and Sachertorte – was riven with factions, spite and, on occasions, violence. As often as not, the aggression focused on a man revered by Alban Berg: the satirist Karl Kraus (1874–1936), a close friend of Altenberg and no stranger to non-verbal altercation. As early as 1897 fists replaced brains when Felix Salten, author of Bambi, boxed the satirist's ears for suggesting that the Budapest-born Salten's command of German grammar was less than perfect.

First songs and instrumental music

Berg's dozen or so ‘official’ compositions, from the Piano Sonata Op. 1 through to the Violin Concerto he composed more than a quarter of a century later, are many times outnumbered by the songs he wrote between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three. Only eight of these were published during Berg's lifetime – the 1907 setting of Theodor Storm's ‘Schliesse mir die Augen beide’ and the selection of Seven Early Songs that Berg revised and orchestrated in 1928 – though one more was made available by Willi Reich shortly after the composer's death. The publication of two volumes of Jugendlieder in 1985 changed the picture entirely: it meant that roughly two-thirds of the approximately eighty-five early songs were available in published form; within a short while the same could be said of a significant proportion of the piano music Berg wrote in his early twenties. Between them, and almost exclusively, these two genres - solo song and piano music – carried him from his first teenage efforts as a composer through to atonality in the manner of Schoenberg.

One of the most striking features of this development is the disparity of Berg's achievement in the two genres. In a famous and characteristic letter written in 1910, Schoenberg described the situation without mercy:

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The contents of this chapter have been removed for rights reasons.

The contents of this chapter have been removed for rights reasons.

The effervescence of Vienna's turn-of-the-century culture, its spontaneous combustion of ideas, was an explosion of pent-up energies, of unstable ingredients long compacted under the pressure of Vienna's remarkably dense social, cultural and physical geography. Vienna's central first district was a magnet of extraordinary power, the centre, as it were, of a solar system around which its outer districts spiralled in uneven orbit. The sources of that power – the Hofburg and its bureaucratic appendages, the parliament and city hall, the banks and stock exchange, the university and academies, the Court Opera, Burgtheater and Musikverein – produced enough noteworthy activity, intrigue and gossip to fill the columns of the city's more than two dozen newspapers and tabloids, and to fuel agitated coffee-house debates on art, politics, philosophy and sex. But if the first district was the place where everyone met, only a few chose to live there. Peter Altenberg, of course, occupied a small hotel room in the Dorotheagasse, and Karl Kraus slept by day at his apartment in the Dominikaner-bastei, but such creatures of the first district were the exception. It was in the city's orbiting outer districts that the rumblings within Vienna's core found their resonating chamber.

The twenty-one administrative districts of early twentieth-century Vienna were established between 1850 and 1904 (see Map 1) and were part of a process, along with the removal of the inner-city fortifications, the construction of the Ringstraße and Gürtel, the canalisation of the Wien river and the construction of the Stadtbahn, that would forge the city's scattered communities into a single sprawling metropolis.

Lieder begin with words; they are born when a composer encounters poetry. If the statement seems obvious, it is not reflected in writings on music, which tend to “skip over” the literary surroundings in order to arrive more swiftly at musical matters. Considerations of historical context are customarily confined to discussions of the composer and the music rather than the poet and the poetry, even in those instances where the poet and composer knew one another. Although scholars have, on occasion, probed questions of transmission – how a composer found a particular poetic repertory and, more commonly, Schubert's “reading” of those poems he set to music – many issues remain tantalizingly fertile areas for investigation. There are even basic enigmas of identification yet to solve – who was “A. Pollak,” whose name appears on the title page of the late song Fruhlingslied (D919). Who wrote the texts for Aufden Sieg der Deutschen (D81) or the beloved Wiegenlied (D498)? Song composers tend to search a variety of sources for new and old poetry to convert into Lieder; if they do so in special ways and for specialized reasons, they are nonetheless active participants in the literary milieu of their day.

The gravitational forces that draw a composer to a particular poet, poetic circle, or specific anthology are multitudinous and shift into new configurations at each encounter with a body of poetry. Proximity to local writers, access to poetic works from Germany as well as Austria, friends with wide-ranging philosophical and literary interests, literary fads and fashions (the Walter Scott craze, the Ossian enthusiasm, and the like), and various crises in life all play a part in Schubert's adoption of a poem for musical purposes - as long as the poem had music in it, his music. This evocative phrase, difficult to define, is at the heart of the songwriting enterprise and is one of its most intriguing mysteries.

The mimetic elements of Gretchen am Spinnrade (D118) have always been easily identified, and they are amazingly specific: the right-hand sempre ligato represents the turning wheel; in the left, the tenor sempre staccato imitates the continuous clicking sound of the spinning, and the bass (particularly in measures 4 and 6) the occasional impulse that the spinner's foot must give to the pedal. These elements dominate the opening of Schubert's first acknowledged masterpiece of October 19, 1814 (see Ex. 4.1, measures 1–16). And every music student knows that the imitation gives the basic structure of the song at its climax: as Gretchen remembers Faust's kiss, the wheel ceases to spin, only to start up again as she returns to the contemplation of her sorrow and her despair.

Mimesis determines the song in other ways as well, one aspect already revealed in the first sixteen measures. First, however, we should remark the faulty declamation. The meaning of the opening lines demands accents on “hin” and “schwer.” However, my peace is gone, my heart is heavy, is Schubert's odd emphasis, which goes against the sense, as if another state of mind could be gone, some other organ heavy. But it makes a better sound: “Ruh” has a more beautiful and agreeable vowel for singing than “hin,” and it is clear that musical considerations take priority over meaning and prosody for Schubert, and they continue to do so until the end of his life.

Franz Grillparzer, Vienna's preeminent poet, sketched five epitaphs for Schubert's grave (SDB 899). The controversial one ultimately adopted – the art of music here entombed a rich possession, but even far fairer hopes – has been interpreted in various ways. Robert Schumann, Schubert's most astute early critic, lost patience with Grillparzer: “It is pointless to guess at what more [Schubert] might have achieved. He did enough; and let them be honored who have striven and accomplished as he did.”

Perhaps Grillparzer's words are better viewed not as a lament over the loss of what more Schubert might have achieved had he lived longer, but rather as evidence of how the composer's genuine artistic achievement was not fully appreciated during his own time, how the true scope of his accomplishment eluded even some of his most sympathetic friends and admirers. During Schubert's lifetime, Grillparzer and the majority of his contemporaries never heard Schubert's late piano sonatas, the C Major String Quintet, the mature symphonies and operas. Many of his supreme compositions remained unknown to a Biedermeier Vienna that revered Beethoven, adored Rossini, and thrilled to Paganini.

Schubert's position, literally as well as symbolically, has changed dramatically since his death in 1828 at the age of thirty-one. Over the course of the nineteenth century, he gradually joined the elect, becoming an immortal composer: the peer of Beethoven, and superior to Rossini and Paganini.