| Five Orchestral Songs, Op.4 |
| On 3 May 1911, Alban Berg married Helene Nahowski. On 18 May, Alma Mahler, who would become Helene Berg's closest friend, lost her husband. Gustav Mahler was the composer we have most to thank for modern music. His symphonies, with their frequent chromaticism, heavy counterpoint, and sonic diversity and oddity, allowed the innovations of the Second Viennese School (Arnold Schoenberg, Berg, and Anton Webern) to occur. Berg attended Mahler's funeral on 21 May. On 26 June 1912 Berg would hear the premier of Mahler's 9th Symphony in Vienna. Schoenberg left for Berlin in September of 1911 and thus Berg's formal lessons with him came to an end. Berg took on some of Schoenberg's pupils. The next composition Berg planned would be his first written not under his teacher's supervision. Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtkartentexten von Peter Altenberg was composed in the autumn of 1912. The texts of the five songs are miniature poems inspired by postcard photos. The sources, if such they must be called, of Berg's Op. 4 are his own Opp. 2 and 3, and Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, String Quartet, Op. 10, and Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16. The brief character of the five Altenberg songs was preceded by compositions by Webern and Schoenberg: "Webern had written nothing since 1909 that was not [aphoristic], and Schoenberg himself had turned to "aphoristic form" in 1911, in his Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19, and again the following year in Pierrot Lunaire," Op. 21 (Perle 1980:8). However, "apart from their brevity, [Berg's] pieces have little in common with the aphoristic statements of Anton Webern" (ibid. 9). Webern's atonal (i.e. pre-12-tone) works are truly aphorisms in that they consist of very few notes; these few notes, similar to the few words found in a typical aphorism, are meant to tell the listener much more than their low quantity would suggest. The Altenberg songs are not aphorisms but miniatures: they are "remarkable for unfolding within such circumscribed durational limits an extraordinarily complex and extensive system of motivic interrelationships" (ibid.). Berg's Op. 4 was the first orchestral work he had ever composed. Adorno writes that "it is scarcely conceivable that in his first orchestral work...a composer could achieve such perfection and balance of sensuous phenomena" (62). Berg wrote to Schoenberg on 17 January, 1913, and stated that "every bar [of the orchestration] forced itself upon me with the intensity of something heard" (quoted in Perle 1980:7). The work is scored for large orchestral forces (tripled and quadrupled winds and brasses, a large percussion section, glockenspiel, xylophone, harp, celesta, piano, harmonium, and strings) and contains "excessive combinations" and as a result many dissonances (Adorno 63). These extravagances are, however, all for a reason: "nothing is simply set down, everything is derived" (ibid.). In addition, what were called tone-colours (klangfarben) by Schoenberg "are not just painted in as if pre-existent, they are developed; the process by which they are created becomes their justification" (ibid.). "The aural imagination, skill, and boldness that Berg had displayed in his first work for string quartet are equally evident" in the Altenberg Lieder. In the opening bars of the first song, "Seele" ("soul"), "six simultaneous ostinato figures [short figures that occur many times consecutively], no two identical in duration, create a dense and shifting chaos of sound" (Perle 1980: 9). "The first word of the vocal part, "Seele", is anticipated by two notes that are to be attacked and released 'like a breath'; the first, ppp, is hummed with the lips closed, the second, pp, with lips open" (ibid. 10). Berg "seems almost embarrassed to allow the voice to begin - as if song should not become audible with so little effort - [so] he must invoke it out of a pre-musical realm" (Adorno 65). "The first theme of the work (as distinct from its motives) is a twelve-tone series, the earliest example of an ordered twelve tone set in the history of music" (Perle 10). The first song as a whole is more of a retrograde than any row manipulation: it is "led from the amourphous to the articulate, then back to the indeterminate" (Adorno 64). The second song, "Sahst du nach dem Gewitterregen," has no obvious segmentation aside from a fermata on a chord at the midpoint (Adorno 65). The third song, "Über die Grenzen," contains two vertical twelve-tone sets (the twelve chromatic tones stated at the same time across the orchestra). Each set "serves...as a musical counterpart for the word "All" ["universe"] in the line that opens and closes the text" (Perle 10). The text of the song is as follows, with the lines in question translated: Über die Grenzen des All blicktest du sinnend hinaus; Beyond the bounds of the universe musingly you looked Hattest nie Sorge um Hof und Haus! Leben und Traum vom Leben, plötzlich ist alles aus - - -. Über die Grenzen des All blickst du noch sinnend hinaus! Beyond the bounds of the universe musingly you still look! The change in tense between the first and last lines is reflected in how Berg handles the vertical twelve-tone sets. The first, where the text is in past tense, is dissipated, "each note, from the highest to the lowest, dropping out in turn. The opposite procedure occurs in the concluding section [present tense]: the complete chord is built up through the accumulation, in ascending progression, of one note at a time" (Perle 10). (This write-up has been extremely quote-heavy, so now I will accept the temptation of interposing my own outlandish ideas.) I submit that Berg interpreted the first line of the poem as occurring after the last one; he would be inclined to do so because of his extremely sharp wit and because of Altenberg's strange arrangement of tenses: why should the subject of the poem be doing something after having discontinued the action? Berg decided that to break down an entity before it is created would be akin to what Altenberg did in his poem. Does this make the song retrograde or circular? (I put it to you, Robert P. Morgan.) The fourth song is "a prime example of Berg's extraordinarily dense, chromatically intertwined style with its exploitation of minimal motivic ideas" (Adorno 66). The last song is in passacaglia form an "makes clearer reference to tonality than do the other songs, as if the specifically expressive element...still demanded recourse to the conceptual vocabulary of tonality" (ibid. 67). Looking at the structure of the work as a whole, the outer two songs are far longer than the middle three, and are also more "dynamically expansive." Thus, the entire work has sonata form (Adorno 64). The Altenberg Lieder first reached the public on 31 March, 1913. This concert came after a very successful performance of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder (23 February). Schoenberg was to conduct this programme, which included, in addition to the second and fourth of the Altenberg songs, Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, Orchestral Songs by Zemlinsky, Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, and the premier of Webern's Six Pieces for Large Orchestra, Op. 6 (see poster). During Berg's songs, "a segment of the audience, determined to provoke a disturbance, succeeded in creating enough of a tumult...that the concert could not be continued. For Berg this was no succès du scandale like the riotous premièr of Stravinsky's [Sacre du Printemps, the Rite of Spring] in Paris two months later, but a humiliation" (Perle 1980:8). The riot at the Altenberg concert was caused by three factors: the first was the violent dislike of the "new music" by the Viennese public, the second was the shocking character of most of the work on display that evening. The third reason was the manner in which the Altenberg Lieder were performed. "It is [...] difficult to understand, in view of Schoenberg's invariably uncompromising insistence on the authentic presentation of his own works in performance, why he should ever have been willing to offer the Op. 4 in a partial performance that even under the best circumstances would have been a fatal misrepresentation of the work" (Perle 8). Only 2 of the 5 songs were sung, and, unbelieveably, the soprano part was sung by a tenor. In his extreme disappointment at the public's reaction to his music, Berg never composed any other works of the same character, and never attempted to bring the work to performance again. next.....................Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano |