Hamburg, February Constantin Floros

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2 Foreword The central point of this book is the realization that the creative work of Alban Berg, which in recent years has moved to the forefront of scholarly interest, is largely rooted in autobiography, so that therefore one can gain access to the music by studying the inner biography of its creator. Accordingly, the first of the three parts of this volume outlines a character portrait of this great composer. His music proves increasingly an image of his emotional and intellectual constitution. Part two considers the conditions relevant to a deeper understanding of Berg and of the Second Viennese School generally: questions of the psychology of creation, of art theory, of aesthetics, philosophy and weltanschauung, the concept of a magical music, the diverse artistic means by which Berg semanticizes his music, and the relations between tonality, atonality and dodecaphony. In part three, then, Berg s key works will be analyzed and semantically deciphered in terms of his inner biography. My study is based not only on the sources in print but also on the rich unpublished material: on the as yet unpublished correspondence between Berg, Schönberg and Webern (comprising some 3000 pages of typescript), and on Berg s many notes (such as his collection of quotes), drafts of letters, personal copies of books and music autographs (sketches, particellos and clean copies), largely preserved in the Music Collection of the Austrian National Library. I have also repeatedly been able to view and study Berg s library in his Viennese apartment in Trauttmannsdorffgasse 27, Hietzing, now the seat of the Alban Berg Foundation. A passionate love of the music of Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg has been with me since my youth, when it was awakened by Hans Swarowsky and Gottfried Kassowitz, my teachers in conducting at the Viennese Academy of Music from 1951 to My initial interest was above all in Berg s and Schönberg s compositional techniques. I sought to track down the secret of their music s expressive power. My first lecture courses as a young adjunct instructor (privatdozent) at the University of Hamburg fifty years ago ( ) dealt with Schönberg and Berg. Early in 1975, my treatise on the esoteric program of the Lyric Suite appeared until then no one had talked about any covert programs in Bergs music. In 1979, I began to study Berg s sketches to nearly all of his works systematically. In 1985, I received a lasting impression from the magnificent Berg exhibition in the sumptuous grand hall of the Austrian National Library 1

3 at the Josefsplatz. Between then and 1992, I mostly worked on this book, published in that year in its original German version. The book would not have been possible without the constant help and support of several institutions and individuals. My thanks go above all to the Music Collection of the Austrian National Library and their director, Hofrat Dr. Günter Brosche, the Alban Berg Foundation and its president, Professor Gottfried von Einem, and the Music Collection of the Viennese Municipal and State Library and its director, Dr. Ernst Hilmar. They gave me permission to study, excerpt and copy valuable Bergiana and put microfilms at my disposal. The German edition of this study was published in Wiesbaden by Breitkopf & Härtel in In the same year, the Austrian National Library acquired the now famous annotated score of the Lyric Suite, as well as Berg s secret letters to his distant beloved Hanna Fuchs, which I published in an annotated and commentated edition in In 2008, that edition appeared in English at Indiana University Press, Bloomington, under the title Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs. The Story of a Love in Letters, translated by Professor Dr. Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch, the translator also of the present text. The latter contains some fresh research results inter alia about the biography of Hanna Fuchs and the Carinthian Song and has profited from numerous questions put to me by Professor Bernhardt during the translation process. My most heartfelt thanks go to him. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Dr. Altug Ünlü for his formatting of the book, and to Michael Rücker and Thomas Papsdorf of the Peter Lang International Publishing House for harmonious collaboration. Hamburg, February 2013 Constantin Floros 2

4 1 Part One: Personality Aspects Man s mind is his fate. Herodotus A man s life is his character. Goethe, Italian Journey, Frascoli, October 2, 1787 (Quotation Collection No. 705) 1.1 Principles That is the rebus of Berg s music. One could hardly characterize it more simply and accurately than by saying that it resembled himself. Theodor W. Adorno. 1 The prominent sociologist, philosopher and aesthetician Theodor W. Adorno did not think much of the Romantic notion of a unity of life and art, biography and creative work. He was skeptical of the view that experience was an indispensable precondition of artistic creation, asserting, on the contrary, a belief that the subjective conditions of the genesis of works of art, that is to say, everything personal and biographical, were irrelevant. In Adorno s philosophy, the composer as a private person is of no interest whatever. Adorno saw in him merely the producing instrument a subordinate executive organ. 2 These reflections evidently inspired by Hegel s Phenomenology of the Spirit crop up both in Adorno s book on Mahler of 1960 and in that on Berg of A familiarity with them is needed if one wants to understand many a formulation of Adorno s that otherwise will seem strange. Of Mahler s symphonies, for example, he remarked that their process toward externalization, toward totality was little bound to the private person, which rather made itself an instrument for its [the totality s) production. 3 And of Alban Berg, whose pupil in composition he became in 1925, he wrote in a similar vein: In the eleven years during which I knew him I always sensed more or less clearly that the empirical person wasn t quite involved, wasn t quite in the game, His own person he treated at once cautiously and indifferently, like the musical instrument he was to himself. If one remembers that Adorno s special domain was dialectics, one will understand why nevertheless the personality of the artist played a significant role in his aesthetics. Thus his entire book on the composer circles about the thesis that Berg s music ( at once excessive and frail ) was Berg s mirror image. Adorno thought he could see certain traits of Berg s personality reflected in his music. Berg s enormous sensitivity, his desire for happiness, his hedonism and his pessimism, the sternness of his convictions all this, according to Adorno, gave Berg s music its characteristic stamp. To illustrate 3

5 with some quotes: If Mahler once said about the landscape around Lake Attersee that he had wholly composed it away, Berg, in so many respects Mahler s heir, could have said the same of his inner landscape. The specific sadness in his music is probably the negative of his desire for happiness, disillusion, a lament of the fact that the world did not answer to the utopian expectations his nature harbored. Something voluptuous, luxuriating, that is inseparable from his music and his orchestra also colored his desire for happiness. 4 The long and the short of these observations is that, despite Adorno s reservations, the personality of the artist cannot be separated from his creative work. This is true especially of Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who, like the contemporary Expressionist poets and painters, had a strong need for expression and self-expression. Whether or not one adopts Adorno s principles, it is certain that inquiring into Berg s personality can contribute significantly to a deeper understanding of his music. An inquiry of this kind must depend primarily on Berg s written utterances, especially his correspondence with his wife and with his friends Arnold Schönberg and Anton Webern. These letters afford profound insights into Berg s psyche, his way of thinking, his views about art, as well as his inner biography. Additional information can be derived from reminiscences and testimonies by persons who were close to him or at least knew him. Of special interest here, besides the comments of Helene Berg, are the reminiscences of the publisher Hans W. Heinsheimer, the writer Elias Canetti, and the musicologist Willi Reich, who had been a pupil of Berg s, as well as those of Theodor W. Adorno, published originally in February of 1936 in the journal The author not being a trained psychologist or psychoanalyst, rigorous psychological methods will not be applied in this book. 6 The goal of his investigation will be attained if, based on the sources, he succeeds in drawing an authentic personality profile of Alban Berg. 4