Alban Berg

A Research and Information Guide

Bryan R. Simms

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815387008
• eBook ISBN: 9781351174183
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Alban Berg: A Research and Information Guide, Third Edition is an annotated bibliography highlighting both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources that deal with Berg, his compositions, and his influence as a composer. It is a reliable, complete, and useful resource and a starting point for anyone—performer, teacher, student, or scholar—wanting to learn about Berg's life, works, and cultural milieu. The third edition has 162 additional citations since the publication of the second edition, many arising after the expiration of copyright of Berg's musical and archival works 2005.

Many important new, primary sources of information have appeared, most notably the letter exchanges with his wife, recently published in a three-volume critical edition (in German), as well as letter exchanges with Alma Mahler and Erich Kleiber, and later correspondences with Anton Webern. There has also been a notable increase in the availability of commercial video recordings of Berg's operas, Wozzeck and Lulu.

1

Alban Berg

The Making of a Classic Composer

ALBAN BERG IS NOW RECOGNIZED as a classic figure in the history of music. His entire oeuvre is performed repeatedly around the world, recorded regularly, studied in more than 1,500 books and articles, and enjoyed and pondered by the serious musical public everywhere. His music has been influential to, indeed indispensable to, other major composers. Operas including Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten and Wolfgang Rihm’s Jakob Lenz could probably not have been written without Wozzeck, the brilliant virtuosity of Pierre Boulez’s Éclat would be hard to imagine without the Chamber Concerto, the pathos-laden music of George Rochberg without the Orchestra Pieces, the quotation collages of Luciano Berio and Mauricio Kagel without the Violin Concerto, or the provocative eclecticism of Alfred Schnittke without Lulu and Der Wein.

But Berg’s vast importance—so obvious in the present day—only became generally known long after the composer’s death in 1935. Before the 1960s and 1970s, he was widely regarded as a minor figure who left relatively few works, which were either imitations of Schoenberg or confused by allegiances to both the romantic and modern periods. His teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, although sensitive to Berg’s talent, was long unaware of his student’s true importance. Following World War II, as works by Schoenberg and Webern became models for the emerging European and American avant-garde, relatively few observers rated Berg’s oeuvre at the same high level as others in the Second Viennese School, finding it more of a romantic atavism than a model for the future.

But gradually Berg’s true position in the future of music forced its way out. His ultimate recognition came almost solely from the inherent greatness of the works themselves—their power, exerted independently of fashions and personalities, to grasp and hold the musical imagination. A vivid reflection of this change in perception is contained in the specialized literature that is the main subject of this volume. Writing in 1920, the pianist Eduard Erdmann—one of the first interpreters of Berg’s Piano Sonata—could only compare the work to Schoenberg’s. Erdmann found its style derived from Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony although lacking in Schoenberg’s “sweep of imagination.” In 1951, Hans Keller dismissed Wozzeck as an inferior copy of works by Schoenberg. Pierre Boulez in 1948 found in the Lyric Suite “the most vulgar veristic bombast of Italian opera.” By the 1980s, however, such evaluations had become unthinkable among reputable music critics. More typical of the present day is George Perle’s 1982 assessment of Lulu as “one of the supreme masterpieces of its genre in the entire repertory.”

Trends in Research

Until the late 1950s, published research on Alban Berg was generally limited to studies by the composer’s friends and students, including Theodor Adorno (1903–69), Willi Reich (1898–1980), and Erwin Stein (1885–1958). The first important book on Berg was Reich’s Alban Berg (no. 1342) of 1937. Berg had asked Reich to be his official biographer, and he gave his former student many documents to further this project. Following Berg’s death, a sense of urgency entered into Reich’s work, and he collaborated on the 1937 volume with Theodor Adorno and Ernst Krenek, who wrote most of the analytic material. As in virtually all of Reich’s studies of composers, this book contained many of the composer’s own writings, allowing Berg, as it were, to speak for himself. Reich was also the author in the 1930s of the first detailed English-language analytic studies of Wozzeck and Lulu (nos. 342 and 592), both reviewed by Berg before publication. Reich immigrated permanently to Switzerland in 1938 and, following the war, wrote two additional documentary monographs on Berg (nos. 1340 and 1341). Ironically, he was not in the forefront of the new discoveries concerning Berg in the 1960s and 1970s, and, in fact, came under pointed criticism for mythologizing Berg in his pioneering studies.

The growth in Berg’s reputation as a composer in the 1950s and 1960s was accompanied by the appearance of important new sources of information. A general study in 1957 by Hans Redlich (no. 1330) was the first major work to come from outside of Berg’s circle of personal acquaintances. Redlich’s book contained a new and detailed analysis of the music that dispensed with Reich’s documentary approach, although Redlich’s work was not spared an ample measure of criticism from Stein, Reich, Adorno, and others who had known the composer personally. The appearance in 1965 of a volume of letters from Berg to his wife (no. 88) greatly added to an understanding of the man, although Berg’s widow was widely criticized for omitting an explanatory commentary on the letters, for suppressing passages in some letters, and for denying scholars access to the original documents. Theodor Adorno’s 1968 book on Berg (no. 981) was also a disappointment to many, as it was largely a compilation of earlier published writings and did not reveal Adorno’s intimate personal knowledge of the composer nor contain new insights about the music. A more forthright and valuable recollection of Berg by Adorno is found in his “Im Gedächtnis an Alban Berg” (no. 990), which was published posthumously in 1984.

The rivalries that simmered among Berg’s early scholars and supporters boiled up in 1967 with the founding of the International Alban Berg Society. Although the organization was headed by a celebrated group of composers—Igor Stravinsky being the titular president—the main players were George Perle and Hans Redlich, who came from outside of Berg’s circle and had no sympathy for Helene Berg’s restrictions on Lulu or her refusal to allow a close study of Berg’s early songs. The new organization was looked upon with skepticism, sometimes outright hostility, by Berg’s old acquaintances, those who were loyal to his widow. In a letter of 6 March 1967, Reich warned Helene: “One should be very cautious about this Society because the big names—Stravinsky, Krenek, Milhaud, et al.—are only a facade behind which lurk Redlich, George Perle, and other ‘Lulu-Completers.’ ” The American scholar and composer George Perle was, in fact, relentless in his demand to have Lulu performed in its entirety, but his campaign proved futile so long as Helene Berg was alive.

Perle was also at the forefront of a new branch in Berg research beginning in the 1960s. It was characterized by the systematic analysis of Berg’s music and focused especially on pitch structures in the composer’s atonal and 12-tone works. A stimulus for this direction had been provided in the 1940s and 1950s by Milton Babbitt, who studied the resources of 12-tone music by applying ideas from mathematics, especially from set theory. Allen Forte and David Lewin, among other American and English scholars, took Babbitt’s methods in differing directions, but Perle was the first to address works by Berg in detail, with the others turning more to Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky for examples. Perle’s Serial Composition and Atonality (no. 1296) paid considerable attention to Berg’s 12-tone method, especially as it applied to Lulu.

In the 1970s and 1980s, competing systems of analysis appeared. Perle’s study of Berg’s music ultimately led him to depart from Babbitt’s ideas and to create a new general theory of pitch structure in atonal music based on symmetrical collections of tones as generated by interval cycles. His theory, which has been very influential on later analytic studies of Berg, took its departure from Berg’s own theoretical speculations (see Perle, no. 1291 and 1294). Set theory, another approach to understanding pitch organization in atonal music, also grew in importance in the literature, and it has been used especially by American and British writers, including Allen Forte, Janet Schmalfeldt, and Craig Ayrey. European scholars in the 1970s and 1980s generally kept their distance from these lines of thought, developing instead more traditional or eclectic approaches to analysis that explored the mixture of tonal and nontonal elements in Berg’s music and looked for meaning by uncovering latent programs. Constantin Floros’s “semantic analysis” of Berg’s music (no. 1093) is an example of the latter approach.

A new era in Berg studies began around 1980. It was ushered in as Berg’s manuscripts at the Austrian National Library became better known and more thoroughly studied than heretofore. Access to Berg’s legacy unleashed a torrent of manuscript studies and editions based on materials from the composer’s legacy. Dissertations by Ulrich Krämer (no. 1220), Susanne Rode-Breymann (no. 601), Thomas Ertelt (no. 478), Wolfgang Gratzer (no. 1129), Patricia Hall (nos. 193, 499), and Werner Grünzweig (no. 1134) among others used documentary materials from the Berg Collection that created a new level of understanding of the composer’s life, cultural milieu, and working methods.

The passing of Berg’s widow in 1976 allowed scholars to address openly sensitive details about his relationship with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin and its impact upon his music. George Perle’s 1976 discovery of Berg’s annotated score of the Lyric Suite began a new chapter in the search for secret programs in Berg’s music. New assessments of Berg’s life and works continued to appear, as in Mosco Carner’s biography (no. 1048) and the detailed analytic studies by Douglas Jarman (no. 1191) and Dave Headlam (no. 1157).

In the 1980s, Universal Edition began to publish Berg’s student compositions, composed before his Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (something that Berg’s widow would not allow). These editions paved the way for the appearance in the 1990s of the first installments of the Berg critical edition, or Alban Berg Sämtliche Werke.

Online access to the full texts and images of primary documents has greatly facilitated the study of Berg’s life and music in the last 20 years. Items cited in this book that are available online have a notation to that effect. These include scores available through the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP, imslp.org), and Alexander Street/ProQuest; journal articles through JSTOR (jstor.org), ProQuest Central (proquest.com), and publisher websites; newspaper articles through ANNO (anno.onb.ac.at) and ProQuest; dissertations through ProQuest’s Dissertations and Theses; and musical manuscripts through links provided by the archive where items are housed.

IN THE 20 YEARS SINCE THE FIRST EDITION of this volume, the number of scholarly books, dissertations, and articles on Berg has increased by half, far outstripping the number published in any comparable period in the past. Although lacking the high profile that surrounded information about the composer that emerged in the late 1970s, the new publications on Berg in these years have proved to be no less important. Especially notable is the appearance of editions of the complete letter exchanges with Schoenberg (no. 89), Theodor Adorno (no. 96), Alma Mahler (no. 98), Erich Kleiber (no. 97), Soma Morgenstern (no. 1264), Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (no. 91), and, most important, his wife (no. 95). Soma Morgenstern’s memoir of the composer during his later years (no. 1264) has provided a uniquely fresh and, in many details, controversial perspective on Berg’s personality and artistic circle. In three volumes of the Quellenkataloge zur Musikgeschichte (nos. 1212, 1214, 1215) Herwig Knaus has transcribed hundreds of Berg’s letter drafts ultimately sent during all stages of his life to a variety of correspondents. Editions of Berg’s complete writings by Bryan R. Simms (no. 87) and Anna Maria Morazzoni (no. 83) have shed light on Berg’s expertise as an author. A great increase in original research published in French, Italian, Russian, and Czech is also characteristic of recent times.

Archival Collections

The principal location for Berg’s papers—including correspondence, musical manuscripts, and notes—is the Music Collection of the Austrian National Library (www.onb.ac.at/bibliothek/sammlungen/musik). Access to the contents of the Berg Collection is facilitated by an excellent online catalog found at www.onb.ac.at/kataloge. The records in the catalog often go to the item level and give detailed information, sometimes including excerpts from letters and links to many digitized manuscripts.

Searching this catalog has idiosyncrasies that may be unfamiliar to North American researchers. For example, the search engine does not ignore certain marks of punctuation. Searching the term berg may not make a hit in a record containing the string of characters berg, or berg/ because of the presence of punctuation. By adding the wildcard symbol berg*, a hit will be made in such records.

The library is very accommodating with requests for scans of most nonfragile and public domain documents, which, for a fee, will be sent to the researcher by disc or e-mail attachment. In the “links” area of a catalog record, click on “Reproduktionsanfrage,” fill out the form, and submit it online.

Many of the items in Berg’s legacy, including his extensive library of books and scores, remain in his residence in Hietzing, which is now the home of the Alban Berg Foundation and the Alban Berg Sämtliche Werke. There is no published catalog that describes the archival items there, and access is by invitation only. Inquiries can be addressed to the Alban Berg Stiftung, Trauttmansdorffgasse 27, A-1130, Vienna.

Many of Berg’s manuscripts, letters, and primary sources are found in other libraries and archives worldwide. See, especially, the holdings of the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus (www.wienbibliothek.at), the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Vienna), Morgan Library & Museum in New York, Library of Congress, and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. A good discovery tool for Berg items in libraries and archives in North America (and a few in Europe) is ArchiveGrid (https://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/).

Sound Recordings

Unlike composers such as Schoenberg or Stravinsky, Berg did not leave behind recordings that document his own interpretations of his works. Fortunately, there exist several recordings by other early interpreters. One such is of the Lyric Suite, which was the first of Berg’s compositions to be issued in a commercial recording. This was made by the Galimir Quartet at the French Polydor studio in 1935 and issued in 1936. The ensemble—consisting of the Viennese violinist Felix Galimir and his three sisters—had rehearsed the work with Berg, so their recording has documentary significance. It was reissued and digitally remastered as Continuum SBT1004 or Rockport RR5007. Regrettably, there is no recording of the Lyric Suite with the Wiener Streichquartett, led by Rudolf Kolisch, which gave its premier performance in Vienna in January 1927. After arriving in America, Kolisch created a new ensemble, the Pro Arte Quartet, which recorded the Lyric Suite in 1950 (Dial 5). A controversial dimension for the understanding of the Lyric Suite has been provided by several recent recordings in which a soprano voice is added to the finale to sing words by Charles Baudelaire that were in Berg’s mind as he composed the piece, although not part of his final version. The vocal melody has been reconstructed by George Perle and can be heard in the 2003 recording by the Kronos Quartet with Dawn Upshaw (Nonesuch 796962).

The earliest recording of Berg’s Violin Concerto (Continuum SBT1004, digitally remastered) was taken from a BBC radio broadcast on 1 May 1936, conducted by Anton Webern with soloist Louis Krasner (for whom the Concerto was written). The work had been first heard in Barcelona only weeks before, conducted then by Hermann Scherchen after Webern, distressed over Berg’s untimely death, had been forced to step aside. The BBC recording is of considerable documentary value since there are still questions about the accuracy of passages in the score that was published by Universal Edition in 1936, shortly after Berg’s death. Webern’s difficult relations with the English players on this occasion have been documented by Krasner and Seibert (no. 853), Chadwick (no. 1054), and Foreman (no. 833). The Violin Concerto remains Berg’s most often recorded composition, with outstanding interpretations available from most of the prominent concert violinists of the last 50 years. Listeners will still find much to admire in two of the earliest of these interpretations: the 1940 recording by the Cleveland Orchestra under Artur Rodzinski, again with Krasner as soloist, and a live recording made in 1945 by the NBC Symphony conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos with Joseph Szigeti as soloist (Bruno Walter Society WSA701A, reissued in 1981 on Fonit-Cetra DOC3).

No other recordings of Berg’s music were issued prior to the end of World War II. During the 1950s, with the dawn of the LP, virtually his entire oeuvre was quickly made available on sound recordings. The first full recording of Wozzeck appeared in 1951 (Columbia SL118), performed by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Dimitri Mitropoulos, conductor, with Mack Harrell as Wozzeck and Eileen Farrell as Marie. Their commendable interpretation has been reissued on CD (Sony MH2K 62759). No known recording was made of the original staging of Wozzeck in Berlin in 1925 under Erich Kleiber, but Kleiber made several later recordings of excerpts from the opera, beginning with a live recording of the Wozzeck Fragments with the Cologne Rundfunk Orchestra and Annelies Kupper, soprano (Fonit-Cetra DEC3, issued in 1981). Mitropoulos’s recording of the complete Wozzeck was the only one available until 1965, when Deutsche Grammophon brought out an all-star alternative: Karl Böhm conducting the Deutsche Oper Berlin, with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Wozzeck, Evelyn Lear as Marie, and the great Fritz Wunderlich as Andres (LPM18991). Deutsche Grammophon followed up on this highly successful venture with a 1968 recording of the two-act Lulu (SLPM139273–5), again with Böhm, Lear (Lulu), and Fischer-Dieskau (Dr. Schön). The two recordings, digitally remastered, were reissued in 1997 (DG 435705–2).

The last of Berg’s major works to appear on a commercial sound recording was the Altenberg Songs, Op. 4, which Columbia first issued in a 1960 LP (ML5426/MS6103) featuring the soprano Bethany Beardslee and conductor Robert Craft. The work itself was scarcely known before this time. Two of its songs were to have been performed in Vienna’s Musikverein at a concert on 31 March 1913 of modern music, conducted by Schoenberg. But during Berg’s pieces, the audience protested, the remainder of the concert was canceled, and the hall was cleared by the police. Later, Berg had t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Alban Berg: The Making of a Classic Composer
• 2 Music by Berg
• 3 Berg’s Writings
• 4 Wozzeck
• 5 Lulu
• 6 Berg’s Chamber Music
• 7 Berg’s Orchestral Music
• 8 Berg’s Songs
• 9 Berg’s Life and Works
• Index