Alban Berg and His World

Christopher Hailey, Christopher Hailey

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781400836475
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

An incisive new look at the pivotal modernist composer Alban Berg and His World is a collection of essays and source material that repositions Berg as the pivotal figure of Viennese musical modernism. His allegiance to the austere rigor of Arnold Schoenberg's musical revolution was balanced by a lifelong devotion to the warm sensuousness of Viennese musical tradition and a love of lyric utterance, the emotional intensity of opera, and the expressive nuance of late-Romantic tonal practice.The essays in this collection explore the specific qualities of Berg's brand of musical modernism, and present newly translated letters and documents that illuminate his relationship to the politics and culture of his era. Of particular significance are the first translations of Berg's newly discovered stage work Night (Nocturne), Hermann Watznauer's intimate account of Berg's early years, and the famous memorial issue of the music periodical 23. Contributors consider Berg's fascination with palindromes and mirror images and their relationship to notions of time and identity; the Viennese roots of his distinctive orchestral style; his links to such Viennese contemporaries as Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold; and his attempts to maneuver through the perilous shoals of gender, race, and fascist politics.The contributors are Antony Beaumont, Leon Botstein, Regina Busch, Nicholas Chadwick, Mark DeVoto, Douglas Jarman, Sherry Lee, and Margaret Notley.

Berg’s Worlds

CHRISTOPHER HAILEY

Vienna is not the product of successive ages but a layered composite of its accumulated pasts. Geography has made this place a natural crossroads, a point of cultural convergence for an array of political, economic, religious, and ethnic tributaries. By the mid-nineteenth century the city’s physical appearance and cultural characteristics, its customs and conventions, its art, architecture, and literature presented a collage of disparate historical elements. Gothic fervor and Renaissance pomp sternly held their ground against flights of rococo whimsy, and the hedonistic theatricality of the Catholic Baroque took the pious folk culture from Austria’s alpine provinces in worldly embrace. Legends of twice-repelled Ottoman invasion, dreams of Holy Roman glories, scars of ravaging pestilence and religious persecution, and the echoes of a glittering congress that gave birth to the post-Napoleonic age lingered on amid the smug comforts of Biedermeier domesticity. The city’s medieval walls had given way to a broad, tree-lined boulevard, the Ringstrasse, whose eclectic gallery of historical styles was not so much a product of nineteenth-century historicist fantasy as the stylized expression of Vienna’s multiple temporalities.

To be sure, the regulation of the Danube in the 1870s had channeled and accelerated its flow and introduced an element of human agency, just as the economic boom of the Gründerzeit had introduced opportunities and perspectives that instilled in Vienna’s citizens a new sense of physical and social mobility. But on the whole, the Vienna that emerged from the nineteenth century lacked the sense of open-ended promise that characterized the civic identities of midwestern American cities like Chicago or St. Louis, or European upstarts like Berlin. This was certainly true in a physical sense because to the east, north, and west Vienna’s growth was checked by wetlands and alpine foothills. But the containment was temporal as well. It was as if Vienna were approaching a kind of saturation point in which density, not sprawl, would be the strategy for accommodating modernity.

The City

Vienna’s inner city, the Innenstadt, was all that had once been contained within the walls and fortifications that, in another age, had meant the difference between survival and destruction. Now this cluttered warren of shops and churches, apartments and palaces, here the traces of periwigged elegance, there the vestiges of an ancient Jewish ghetto, was suddenly free to look out upon the world past the open spaces and hulking monuments of the Ringstrasse, past its rows of trees and manicured parks toward the surrounding districts of the Vorstadt. The Innenstadt was Vienna’s core, the site of its vast bureaucracy from the imperial court to the myriad ministries that managed the immense, multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire. Within or arrayed along the Ringstrasse were also the institutions of the city’s cultural memory, its libraries, archives, museums, and theaters, its schools, academies, university, and conservatory—in short, all that embodied the attainments of ages past. But what brought it all to life were those narrower apertures of the moment, often shoehorned into narrow streets, a cramped courtyard, or along its bustling streets: the editorial offices of its newspapers, the frayed headquarters of its clubs and political organizations, the huddled confabulations of the Fiaker stand, and, above all, the edgy Gemütlichkeit of the coffeehouse. These were the organs of Vienna’s self-reflection, its purchase upon the present.

Berg was born in the very heart of Vienna’s central first district. By economic class, religious upbringing, and educational background, he enjoyed a degree of material comfort, social integration, and professional entitlement that set him apart from many of his colleagues within the Schoenberg circle, and most especially from Arnold Schoenberg himself. Though Berg was an indifferent student who had to repeat two grades and had no ambition toward achieving a university degree, he was an obsessive reader. In her Berg “Dokumentation” prepared late in life, Helene Berg is at pains to frame her husband’s early aspirations within the bourgeois cult of Bildung, or self-betterment through cultural edification:

Since his family had an excellent library young Alban grew up in a world filled with “wonders,” that is, immortal works by our great musicians and thinkers! From these he also absorbed those lasting life values that deeply influenced his spiritual and intellectual development. Thus, barely 16 years old, he had a thorough knowledge of all classical music and was exceptionally well read. There are 11 volumes […] filled with the most profound and beautiful maxims from the Bible, our great poets, philosophers, and musicians, which Alban copied out between the ages of 15 and 20 in order to be able to read and ponder them always.¹

Figure 1. Berg reading in the family residence, Breitegasse, c. 1900.

In Berg’s “Von der Selbsterkenntnis” (Of Self-Knowledge), each quotation is assigned a category such as “Beauty” or “Longing” and all are carefully, even pedantically cataloged and cross-referenced. Berg’s love of methodical detail is a reflection of his own, sometimes ponderous habits of mind. These habits were cultivated amid bourgeois comforts and pleasures that Berg could not do without, though they might be husbanded when reduced means dictated ascetic privation. But there is pleasure, too, in the savored indulgence, and this was much in keeping with Berg’s love of minutiae. His life rocked gently in the wake of Gründerzeit opulence. He, too, had a book-lined study—as we see in his Night (Nocturne), introduced in this volume by Regina Busch—and his devotion to his library bespeaks a deeper longing for guidance and the confirmation conferred by authority. In this Berg was a child of an age in which home libraries, the clutter of treasured possessions, and the admonitory gaze of hallowed figures peering down from walls or bookcases reflected a world of interdependent, overlapping social, cultural, and historical sureties. Berg’s social psyche was predicated upon the pervasive imbrications of this collective order; his moral compass was set by figures who challenged its authenticity.

From an early age, perhaps exacerbated by the loss of his father in 1900, Berg was drawn to forceful personalities, to writers like Gerhart Hauptmann, Henrik Ibsen, and August Strindberg. Central, however, were four men Soma Morgenstern described as Berg’s Hausgötter —Gustav Mahler, Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, and Schoenberg—all of whom exercised a powerful influence in shaping his intellectual and aesthetic universe.² They offered orientation, prescription, points of affiliation, and the articulation of deeply held experience. But there was something more, for these were outsiders (three of the four were Jews) who had forced their way into the inner sanctums of Viennese culture and proceeded to castigate the moneylenders in the temples at which they all worshipped. These were scourges of society, Berg’s society, who provided conduits for his self-righteous anger. It was an anger that bordered at times on self-loathing.

Berg chose these Hausgötter not out of elective affinity but from a pronounced obsession with self-discovery. Consider by contrast Schoenberg, Mahler, Kraus, or Loos. These were men of conquest who erected defiant bastions on terrain they won and held. They found allies and engendered fierce loyalties, but they also made and cultivated enemies. Berg, on the other hand, held no ground, was forever pulling back, lacking the talent for making enemies. Not that he shrank from engaging in polemical battles—as in his public attack on Hans Pfitzner or his debates with the music critic Julius Korngold—but he staked his terrain in others’ names, never his own. In other issues, such as politics, he was considerably more circumspect, so very unlike his chosen mentors.

In their presence Berg could be diffident to the point of obsequiousness. He himself was not a scintillating conversationalist, but was content to sit listening in the background, a tendency exacerbated by his physical self-consciousness. His height was an embarrassment in a world of short men. Moreover, vain as he was, he spent a lifetime cultivating a sensitive, sensuous mouth, whose half-closed lips concealed an awkward and silly gap between his front teeth that undermined his studied likeness to Oscar Wilde. To the acute awareness of his size and appearance were added a perception of internal frailty: he had chronic bouts with asthma and was firm in his belief that his heart was weak and undersized.

To Berg’s pantheon of Hausgötter Morgenstern adds a fifth name: Peter Altenberg, the apostle of Natürlichkeit, a “character” at once provocative and intensely vulnerable, whose eccentricities bespoke a kind of naïve authenticity to which Berg may have aspired but could never emulate. It is through Altenberg that Berg indulged his own vulnerabilities and slipped most easily from Vienna’s Innenstadt into other, more private environments.

The Suburb

In the organism that was Vienna, its outermost districts were like lungs, literally cleansing the air through a belt of green but also absorbing ideas flowing in and out of the inner city through the filtering membranes of civic memory. And that daily, rhythmic act of expansion and contraction, going down into the city—hinunter in die Stadt —and returning home again along the spokes and arteries radiating from the center and into the crooked weave of neighborhoods, was to slip back and forth in time. To look up from the Ringstrasse into that green haze on the hills that announced spring, or watch autumn disappear as limbs grew bare and the fields above turned brown, was to reconnect with nature’s cycles. And to pass through the Vorstadt to the Vororte, to communities like Hietzing that bled into the countryside beyond, was an ever-present reminder of life outside Vienna—not of the larger world, not that “Draußen” beyond the borders of the land—but of that alpine Hinterland and the pastures along the Danube from which the city took its deepest breaths.

If the “memory” of Vienna’s Innenstadt was the past on display, a feast for the eye and the imagination upon the fullness of time, there was in the Vororte, those districts beyond the outer perimeter, a different kind of memory, less public, less constructed, shot through with those little anachronisms from the living past that anchor recall in the particularities of place. Here everyday experience offered a refuge for memory under siege from those insistent abstractions and agendas of modernity. Here those barriers of class, culture, education, or generation so carefully cultivated in the Innenstadt melted away in daily interactions in shops and markets, on park benches or in trams, among neighbors, in social and family circles, through myriad religious, cultural, or civic affiliations. Compared to the outsized scale of the Ringstrasse, the outer districts represented a parallel universe from another age, still cut to human dimensions and flowing at a slower pace. It was the premodern world extolled by Ringstrasse critic Camillo Sitte, the theorist of urban planning who championed organic growth, the picturesque square and winding street against the tyranny of the apartment block and soulless boulevard.

For twenty-five years, from 1911 until his death, Berg lived in just such a time-forgotten world, in the quiet, leafy Viennese district of Hietzing in a parterre apartment located on what Heinrich Jalowetz described as “a hidden suburban lane that always seemed to conceal its approach from the visitor.”³ During his studies with Berg, Theodor Adorno made his way there twice a week:

At the time I thought the street incomparably beautiful. With its plane trees it reminded me, in a way I would find difficult to explain today, of Cézanne; now that I am older it has not lost its magic for me. When I went to Vienna again after my return from emigration and looked for Trauttmansdorffgasse I got lost and retraced my steps to my starting point at the Hietzing church; then I simply took off without thinking, blindly as it were, relying on my subconscious memory, and found my way there in just a few minutes.⁴

For Berg, Hietzing was the world of habits and routine, family, friendships, entanglements—and secrets.

Berg’s earlier life followed him here. He remained closely involved in family affairs, his own and, increasingly, those of his wife. And despite crises, feuds, even lawsuits, he accepted the responsibilities of a husband, son, brother, uncle, and in-law with the same dogged persistence that characterized his attention to detail in his music. He never lost touch with the schoolmates and acquaintances of his youth, including his fatherly mentor, Hermann Watznauer, whose interest in Berg was tinged with a homoeroticism that may have been reciprocated. Throughout his life Berg inspired devotion from friends and colleagues, and he cultivated close relationships with his students, several of whom he enlisted as couriers in his marital infidelities.

These romantic entanglements, only intermittently physical, were largely relegated to correspondence where he could indulge in adolescent fantasies at a safe remove. His capacity for hopeless infatuation is as evident in his courtship of Helene Nahowski as it is in his relationship with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. Helene Berg was wise enough to look the other way when her husband went in search of stimulus for his flagging creative potency. He made no intellectual demands upon the objects of his affection or indeed upon those with whom he socialized. He was quite content to sit in on a good round of gossip with his wife and her friends, and though he could be blunt in his assessment of Alma Mahler’s flawed character, he adored her company. Their friendship had a central significance for Berg’s creative life, which Leon Botst...