ALBAN BERG Lyric Suite For Strings

ALBAN BERG: Lyric Suite for Strings Alban Berg created some of the most lastingly beautiful compositions
of the past century. In this aloneas in so many other aspects of this fascinating artistBerg continues to defy some of the more dogged clichs about modern music. True enough, his scores abound with labyrinthine complexitiesas do, for that matter, those of J.S. Bach. But for all their intricacies, Bergs compositions remain rooted in the Romantic tradition, particularly its conviction that music can convey the most intimate emotional truths. The Lyric Suite is a paradigm of this confessional mode. What makes it even more fascinating is that, at the same time, Berg forged ahead with his own innovative language, rich in patterns of cross-reference between purely musical terms and his private life. All this Berg did while reverting to the classical form of the string quartet, in which Beethoven had similarly applied his boldest experiments a century before. Bergs preoccupation with secrets and coded messages is a corollary to his fervent belief in musics capacity to reveal the inner life. Composers have employed musical codes for centuries: Bach and Shostakovich etched their names into recurring motifs, while Elgar incorporated portraits of his friends into the Enigma Variations. Bergs coded messages stand out for their ingenuity and density. His Vienna was, after all, the city of Freud, who arrived at many of his psychoanalytical insights by drawing attention to the human minds powerful capacity for encoding messages in dreams and unconscious behavior. In 1925 Berg met and fell in love with a woman named Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (she happened to be the sister of his friend Alma Mahlers third husband, the novelist Franz Werfel). Their passion, however, was apparently expressed in a sublimated waya kind of Modernist take on medieval chivalry. Both Berg and Hanna were married and neither wanted to break up with their spouses. Its also been pointed out that Berg, in a sense, needed the psychic scenario of an impossible, doomed passion to spur his creativity. One immediate result was the Lyric Suite, which Berg began not long after their first encounter in the spring of 1925, completing his score the next year. Later he singled out three of the works original six movements to prepare a version for string orchestra (with a line added for double bass). This versioncomprising movements two, three and fouris the one youll hear tonight.
From the start, the Lyric Suite impressed audiences with its emotional urgency, achieving an instant success quite in contrast to other scandalous premieres of Modernist music. Musicological clues and plain old detective work eventually uncovered the extent to which Berg had encoded his affair into the suite. In the 1970s Berg expert George Perle was able to locate a copy of the score that had been personally annotated as a gift for Hanna. It explained in detail how Berg had used numerological and musical symbols throughout to fashion a small monument to a great love. The six movements of the original Lyric Suite unfold in a reverse alternating pattern whereby the odd-numbered movements each become faster, while the even-numbered movements progressively slow down. Thus in the final two movements, a delirious Presto yields to a Largo desolato. The progress of the entire work retraces the emotional arc of the affair as Berg perceived it, moving from an almost inconsequential and jovial opening movement through the discovery of love and ecstatic union, only to end with utter desolation. One of Perles discoveries was that Berg had originally intended to end the Lyric Suite with a vocal movement (a precedent Schoenberg had set with his Second String Quartet). The text was to have been a poem of Baudelaire (De profundis clamavi) that conjures a barren, lonely inner landscape. In purely musical terms, the Lyric Suite was also a pivotal work for Berg. Here he first composed with the method known as the twelve-tone system, which Schoenberg had formulated in the early 1920s. The twelve-tone system involved developing thematic material from a basic tone rowa series using all 12 notes of the chromatic scale in a particular order before they can be repeated. It was considered more objective and formally designed than the emotion-saturated language of unlimited atonality pioneered the decade before in such works as Bergs opera Wozzeck. In the first movement of the Lyric Suite, Berg introduces an especially intriguing row that happens to incorporate every possible interval within the octave (he alters the row later). His manipulations of the thematic material give a special importance to the notes representing his and Hannas initials: A, B-flat (for B), B (for H) and F. Numbers also come into play, for example in the tempo markings and inner proportions. Bergs symbolic number is 23, while Hannas is 10. However abstract all of this seems, the sensual beauty of Bergs music is never obscured. The amorous Andante that opens the string orchestra arrangement is a rondo in which music associated with Hanna is at the center. The intensity to come is foreshadowed, while hints of dance suggest the world of society beyond. Berg even playfully introduces her children. For example, repeated Cs on the viola encode Hannas daughter Dodo; Do (as in do, re, mi) represents C. Berg heads the next movement Allegro misterioso because, as he wrote in Hannas score, everything was still a mysterya mystery to us. Along with unusual scoring
effects like muted pizzicatos in the strings, a motif based on their initials gains special significance here. In the Trio estatico, Berg resorts to yet another form of code: musical quotation. The source is Alexander von Zemlinskys Lyric Symphony, a composition of Mahler-like song settings. As a counterpart to his private dedication to Hanna, Berg in fact publicly dedicated the Lyric Suite to Zemlinsky. The Adagio appassionato continues the suites sense of an increasingly inevitable attraction, both erotic and spiritual. Berg interweaves ideas from preceding movements to further suggest this sense of inevitability. Here he begins with a slower version of the Zemlinsky quote. Later, at the climax of the movement, he quotes yet another passage from the Lyric Symphony (set to the words, You are my own!), with the violin echoing the violas declaration. This movement encapsulates the bipolar nature of the whole affair, touching on both passionate abandon and serenity. At the end of the movement, in his secret score, Berg inscribed the words, fadingintothe wholly, ethereal, spiritual, transcendental. Thomas May

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ALBAN BERG: Lyric Suite for Strings Alban Berg created some of the most lastingly beautiful compositions

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