| Four Songs, Op. 2 |
| The Vier Lieder, Op. 2, are written for piano and soprano. The texts are taken from poems by Hebbel and Mombert. The songs are extremely important in Berg's oeuvre; in them, several of the essentials of Berg's mature style are revealed and tonality is superceded by what Schoenberg called "pan-tonality." I will discuss three of the songs seperately. The first song, with text by Friedrich Hebbel, is the first instance in Berg's music of what was to become a favourite technique of his: retrograde. The song has the ABA form, meaning that very similar sections are seperated by a unique section. The inherent symmetry of this design is greatly enhanced by "an encompassing series of pitch events that progresses to the midpoint (coinciding with the climax) and then continues in reversed order to the end" (Gable and Morgan: 134). The song is also Bergian in that it is multivalent, "incorporating features attributable to several possible formal models: ternary [ABA], tension-release, continuous variation, and retrograde" (ibid., 136). In the second song, a new compositional method becomes apparent : overlapping of motives. The vocal line at the start of the song is accompanied chordally. During the interlude in the song, the piano picks up the "remnant" of the vocal line and develops it. The voice re-enters in the midst of this development, presenting the upper voice of the above-mentioned chords. Those chords "thereby retroactively become thematic" (Adorno:48). Perle describes Berg's Op. 2 as containing a radical questioning of the traditional concept of a tonal center, and therefore as being similar to Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, Op. 10. The three Alfred Mombert songs each represent an attack on tonality, with the third being fully successful. Op. 2 No. 2, the first Mombert song, "has a key signature of six flats and is presumably in E flat major. It concludes, however, with the chord of the augmented sixth. The second Mombert song, in A flat major, ends on the dominant [rather than the tonic] harmony of that key. The last song has no key signature, and concludes with a progression and a cadential chord that cannot be defined in terms of the harmonic categories of diatonic tonality" (Perle 1980:4). In this song, "not only is all reference to a central tonality abandoned, but even the construction of each of its wholly dissonant chords conspicuously avoids tonal implication" (Adorno:49). In addition, the song depends on Schoenberg's one-act opera Erwartung in that it "largely dispenses with thematic work: no formal segment is repeated" (ibid.). There are many hallmarks of Berg's style in the concluding song, and these are pointed out by Perle: rhythmic variation of a reiterated melodic interval, a statement of the total content of the semitonal scale via simultaneous white and black key glissandi, and similar chromatic motion of some parts while others remain fixed. An example of the latter can be found in mm. 12-14, where the left hand of the piano and one finger of the right are repeatedly transposed upwards by semitones, while the remainder of the right hand repeats the same figure. The work as a whole contains the special quality of Berg's mature works: the conjunction of emotional intensity with the most rigourous and abstract formalism. Adorno speculates that the transgressions the Four Songs make against the Lieder form are a prediction of "Berg's musical destiny: opera", where such transgressions are commanded by formal precepts (49). HOME next.......String Quartet, Op. 3 |