Hailey Christopher - Alban Berg and His World

Bergs Worlds
CHRISTOPHER HAILEY

Hermann Watznauers Biography of Alban Berg
TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED BY NICK CHADWICK

A Descriptive Overview of Bergs Night/Nocturne
INTRODUCTION BY REGINA BUSCH
TRANSLATED, EDITED, AND WITH COMMENTARY BY CHRISTOPHER HAILEY

Berg and the Orchestra
ANTONY BEAUMONT

deinen Wuchs wie Musik: Portraits, Identities, and the Dynamics of Seeing in Bergs Operatic Sphere
SHERRY D. LEE

Remembrance of things that are to come: Some Reflections on Bergs Palindromes
DOUGLAS JARMAN

1934, Alban Berg, and the Shadow of Politics: Documents of a Troubled Year
INTRODUCTION, TRANSLATIONS, AND COMMENTARY BY MARGARET NOTLEY

Alban Berg zum Gedenken: The Berg Memorial Issue of 23: A Viennese Music Journal
TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED BY MARK DEVOTO

Alban Berg and the Memory of Modernism
LEON BOTSTEIN

Alban Berg has never fit comfortably into the narrative of the Second Viennese School. His expressive Romanticism with its nostalgic references to tonality, his attachment to the preoccupations of fin-de-sicle Vienna, and the sheer sensual appeal of his music have always made him suspect to doctrinaire modernists. Part of the problem, of course, lies in his devotion to Arnold Schoenberg, a figure who created a teleology of musical progress so compelling and domineering that in the searing intensity of its glare even Schoenbergs own workscontradictory and multi-facetedhave been bleached of their historical contingency. As for Schoenbergs students and followers, who among them is not first and foremost a disciple, even when a renegade? All except Alban Bergso gracious and accommodating, loyal and devoted, and so very passive in his resistance. He maintains a special place in that narrative because even in its glare he managed to seek and find the shadows.

History is texture and texture loves a glancing light. This volume of essays, a companion to the 2010 Bard Music Festival, is an attempt to nudge Berg still further from the flattening perspective of Schoenbergs radiance by shining just such an angled light upon his music, his character, and his relationship to some of the broader issues of Viennese and European musical culture. If this carries with it more than a whiff of revisionism, it is a revisionism whose larger purpose is not to overthrow established figures but to reconnect them to their times.

To regard Viennese musical modernism as a saga of harmonic evolution from late-Romantic chromaticism through atonality to serialism is to dismiss nine-tenths of all that this rich musical culture produced. For decades research has been driven by a preoccupation with the consequences of the atonal and serial revolutions, a narrative that excluded, by definition, all composers who pursued other paths. This preoccupation encouraged a general cultural bias that also banished them from the concert and recorded repertory, published music histories, classroom syllabi, and academic research. In the 1960s and 70s, a postwar generation of composers, theorists, and historians was growing ever more conscious of the ruptures caused by totalitarian ideologies, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. It was a generation suspicious of dogma and teleology and eager to poke around in the rubble in search of overgrown paths and distant sounds. For them the question of musical syntax was but one of many contested legacies. Their interest in reviving forgotten figures and obscured connections also reflected a gradual transformation of the compositional landscape in which minimalism, neotonality, and stylistic pluralism were only the most prominent signs of the collapse of the familiar modernist narrative. This pluralistic approach led in turn to a more expansive view of modernism itself, including the cultural sphereturn-of-the-century Viennathat had nourished Schoenberg and his circle. It is in this context that the Mahler revival began in earnest and Alban Berg slipped out the backdoor of the Second Viennese School to take his place among the truants milling around the schoolyard.

One telling example of this transformation is the way a renewed interest in opera and music theater has revolutionized our understanding of twentieth-century music history. Bergs commitment to opera (a genre entirely absent in Weberns oeuvre and approached by Schoenberg with evident reserve) places him squarely in the midst of a remarkable resurgence of dramatic musical forms in early twentieth-century Austria, with direct links to two of its most significant practitioners, Franz Schreker and Alexander Zemlinsky. Zemlinsky and Schreker are two of dozens of Austrian composers, including Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Schmidt, Julius Bittner, Egon Wellesz, and Ernst Krenek, who made the stage a crucial locus of musical and intellectual discourse. In a history with opera as its focus, harmonic language takes its place as one of many elements in a far wider field of cultural and aesthetic inquiry. If this serves to relativize Schoenberg or Weberns historical significance, their works, like those of Berg, are only enriched by an enhanced depth of field.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of the composer, musicologist, theorist, and teacher George Perle, who in many ways paved the way for this transformed cultural landscape. Perle got to know Bergs music in 1937, when he chanced upon a score of the Lyric Suite.He was immediately struck by certain features that suggested a highly idiosyncratic application of the serial method. It was an encounter that led to a lifelong fascination with Bergs music, as well as to a series of theoretical ruminations that had profound consequences for his own music, a remarkable body of work with little apparent debt to Bergs style but greatly influenced by his example.

The parameters of Perles initial Berg publications were largely defined by issues that interested him as a composer, issues concerning musical language and creating tonal coherence within an atonal context: what he came to call twelve-tone tonality. In the 1970s and 80s Perle led a phalanx of Anglo-American Berg scholars who virtually redefined Bergs significance within the so-called Second Viennese School. It was, in a sense, a rescue operation because although Perle himself was no doctrinaire purist, his argument was driven by the conviction that Bergs credentials as a modernist were to be found in the layered complexity of his musicin those intricate stratagems of design by which Berg himself seemed determined to dodge the epithet