- Wozzeck (3 Excerpts)

- The 20th-century Violin Concerto, Vol. 1

- Violin Concerto "To the Memory of an Angel" · 3 Orchestral Pieces, Op.6

Alban Berg. (Vienna, 1885 - Vienna, 1935)

World War I - that Great Divide in modern history - cut across the middle years of Alban Berg's too-short life, transforming his native Vienna, which had been the hub of Franz Joseph's vast, multicultural empire, into the capital of a small, inward-looking republic. But Berg, who was born on 9 February 1885, was profoundly rooted in the old Vienna - the Vienna of daring, cosmopolitan creative minds: Sigmund Freud and his disciples, the writers Arthur Schnitzler and Karl Kraus, the painters Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, the architect Adolf Loos and the composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg.

Berg, a merchant's son, studied the piano from childhood on and began to compose when he was in his teens, but at the age of 19 he took a job as a bookkeeper. That same year, however, he began to study composition with the 30-year-old Schoenberg, who was a leader of the city's artistic avant-garde. The encounter proved to be decisive: Schoenberg gave him the technique through which he could learn to express his artistic personality more completely. At 21 Berg gave up his bookkeeping job and dedicated himself full-time to composition, and at 25 he completed his studies with Schoenberg.
Even the earliest of Berg's mature compositions - the Piano Sonata, Op. 1, Four Lieder, Op. 2, and String Quartet, Op. 3 - demonstrate that the bounds of traditional harmony, Western music's centre of gravity for three centuries, were becoming too tight for him. With the Three Pieces for Orchestra Op. 6, which were written in 1914-15 and dedicated to Schoenberg on his 40th birthday, Berg shattered those bounds. The Pieces also betray the overwhelming impression that Mahler's symphonies had made on Berg - especially the first, posthumous performance of the Ninth in June 1912. The Three Pieces require vast orchestral forces that are often called upon to provide dense sonorities - through which, however, a multitude of melodic and rhythmic motifs that run through all three pieces must be clearly audible. The composer-conductor Pierre Boulez has pointed out that the first piece ("Prelude") begins with mere "noises" on percussion instruments, continues with definite pitches played by the timpani and finally admits the rest of the instruments, which "give birth to a theme"; it ends by reversing the process. The second piece ("Rounds"), which makes use of expressionistic versions of Viennese waltz and ländler themes and rhythms, is of a lighter nature; but the final piece ("March"), where the link with Mahler is at its strongest, is as overpowering and brutal - although in a completely different way - as Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), with which it is roughly contemporary. But The Rite's brutality represents prehistoric savagery, whereas the "March" seems to represent the disintegration of modern society. "In it can be sensed an almost demented intoxication of the dramatic gesture, a hysteria... in declamation swelled out to unbearable din", Boulez says. The Berg expert Mosco Carner called the movement "Berg's most daring excursion into chaos, but organised chaos..." The first two pieces were performed in Berlin on 5 June 1923, under the baton of Anton Webern, the other of Schoenberg's two great pupils; although some critics pointed to Debussy's influence, strangely enough, the music was well received. Not until 14 April 1930, when Johannes Schüler conducted them at Oldenburg, were the three pieces heard together.

Berg enlisted in the Austrian army during World War I, although most of the time poor health left him fit only for office duty in the War Ministry. His principal composition of the war and immediate postwar years was the opera Wozzeck, which, along with his later opera, Lulu, is one of the few post-tonal lyric dramas to have won itself a substantial and enthusiastic following. Wozzeck was finished in 1921 but not performed until 1925, and in the meantime Berg had written, among other things, the fascinating Chamber Concerto for piano, violin and 13 wind instruments. He had also begun the Lyric Suite for string quartet, which was completed in 1926 and premiered by the Kolisch Quartet in Vienna on 8 January 1927. While still composing the Lyric Suite, Berg described it as a group of "six rather short movements of a lyrical rather than symphonic character". He later described the thematic relationships among the movements as a "continuing intensification of mood". This is also conveyed through tempo: the first, third and fifth movements are increasingly fast ("jovial", "mysterious-ecstatic" and "delirious-sinister", as the composer indicated), and the second, fourth and sixth are increasingly slow ("amorous", "passionate" and "desolate"). Not until 1977, more than four decades after Berg's death, was it discovered that the work's manic-depressive character and ultimate despair, as well as its motivic structure, were intimately connected to the composer's passionate love affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the wife of a wealthy Prague industrialist. (Hanna was also the sister of the writer Franz Werfel, the third husband of Mahler's widow, Alma, a close friend of the Bergs.) Berg's widow, Helene, had successfully suppressed the story for decades. In the first movement, the main part of the third and all of the sixth, as well as segments of the others, Berg followed Schoenberg's new 12-tone compositional technique, but the work conveys a sense of complete expressive freedom that only a master could have achieved. Berg later arranged the second, third and fourth movements for string orchestra, and in that form they were first performed in Berlin on 31 January 1929, with Jascha Horenstein conducting, and are heard in the present recording.

Later that year, Berg wrote Der Wein, a concert aria for soprano and orchestra, after a poem by Baudelaire, and began work on Lulu, which monopolised most of his creative energies for the rest of his life. (The orchestration of its last act was still incomplete when he died.) In the spring of 1935, however, he interrupted that project to write his Violin Concerto that had been commissioned some months earlier by the Russo-American violinist Louis Krasner but was directly inspired by the tragic, sudden death, in April, of Manon Gropius, the 18-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler and her second husband, the famous architect Walter Gropius. Berg usually composed slowly, but in this case he worked so quickly, to create a memorial for the dead girl (the concerto is dedicated "to the memory of an angel"), that the complex masterpiece was fully sketched out by July and completed on 11 August. It is one of the greatest of all violin concertos and one of the most moving of all 20th-century compositions. Its four movements are paired into two larger parts. According to the composer and scholar George Perle, the first part "was conceived as a musical 'portrait' of [Manon Gropius], the second as a representation of catastrophe and, finally, submission to death, and transfiguration". The vivacious second movement makes use of an Austrian folksong; the third contains the shattering climax that represents the girl's death; and the fourth, based on Bach's harmonisation of the chorale Es ist genug (It is enough), is a prayer for deliverance from earthly suffering. By scoring the chorale for woodwind, Berg creates an organ-like effect. There are two variations on the chorale melody and brief, touching reminiscences of the folksong and the chorale, and then the Concerto ends quietly, like a soul finding rest.

Within days of having finished the work, Berg developed a painful abcess on his back. Over the next four months the infection persisted and worsened, and on 24 December 1935 he died in a Vienna hospital, at the age of 50. Thus on 19 April 1936, when Krasner and the conductor Hermann Scherchen gave the concerto its premiere at a festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music in Barcelona, it was heard as a memorial to its composer as well. It was also destined to remain one of the last important works created in what was left of the cosmopolitan Vienna of bygone days: two years later, Hitler entered the city in triumph.

Harvey Sachs

Biographical notes (c) 1996, by permission of Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg