| Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6 |
| Alban Berg began his Op. 6 in late 1913. He had recieved harsh criticism from his former teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, about his previous two works in June of that year. According to Schoenberg, the Altenberg Lieder and the Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano were too brief and were lacking in thematic complexity. In response to these criticisms, Berg set out to compose "character pieces of normal length, rich in thematic complexity, without striving for something 'new' at all costs" (Berg to Schoenberg, November 1915). Berg achieved the first and second but not the third of these goals. The first and third movements (Präludium, Marsch) were completed 23 August 1914, weeks after the outbreak of the First World War (4 August). "Self-criticism and the outbreak of the war ('the urge "to be in it"...to serve my country') slowed work on the second movement" (Reigen) (Perle 12). The work was completed in August 1915. In addition to being an attempt at winning Schoenberg's approval, Berg's Three Pieces was "motivated by Berg's intense pre-occupation with and affection for the music of Mahler," especially his Ninth Symphony (Perle 1980:12). Adorno writes that, in his Op. 6, Berg "forgets all disciplining moderation and reaches towards chaos" (Adorno 72). The Three Pieces connect the Schoenberg school with the pioneering composers who were "external to Schoenberg's orbit": Mahler and Debussy (ibid. 73). In creating this connection, Berg draws a line between past and present musical language. He points to the future as a consequence of the development implied by that line (ibid.). Op. 6 became the composer's most complicated score ever, and this was because in it he responded to the mulitiplicity of Debussy's and Mahler's grand formal designs with the focus that was formerly reserved for the hyper-concentrated aphorisms of the Second Viennese School (ibid.). Mahler's Ninth Symphony contributed to the demise of the classical-romantic tradition, though it is itself a product of that tradition. Berg's Three Pieces make explicit reference to Mahler "while affirming the collapse of the musical language" upon which the tradition is based (Perle 12). Berg's work contends with different problems than those of Mahler's. "The articulative procedures that still serve in Mahler's Ninth to establish stable referential patterns, to differentiate these from subordinate and transitional material, and to limit the range of variational possibilities, are no longer available to Berg" (Perle 13). The harmonic language of the Op. 6 is "diffuse and ambiguous" (ibid. 14). In such a work, there are no restrictions on what the composer may do, so "chaos is likely to ensue" (ibid. 14). However, as in his Piano Sonata and String Quartet, Berg generates "a large-scale musical structure by means of complex thematic operations" (ibid. 13). Stravinsky commented that Berg "is the only [modern composer] to have achieved large-scale development-type forms without a suggestion of 'neo-classic' dissimulation" (quoted in Perle 16). Contrary to Stravinsky's statement, "there are idiomatic elements of waltz, Ländler, and March in the Three Pieces" (Perle 17). These are, however, "abstract, since they are removed from their conventional harmonic context" (ibid.). "In the passacaglia of the Altenberg Lieder, in Reigen, and in Marsch, Berg discovered the essential role that traditional forms and traditional stylistic details could play in restoring the possibility of coherent large-scale structure which the dissolution of the classical tonal system had destroyed" (ibid. 17). The thematic techniques that serve in the Op. 6 to integrate the three movements into a large-scale structure are derived from those used in the pre-atonal works of Schoenberg, specifically in Pelleas und Melisande, the 1st Quartet, and the 1st Chamber Symphony. These techniques are "complex transformation processes, germ motives, and the assignment of multiple functions to individual thematic elements (so that variants of a theme can be employed either melodically or as an accompaniment)" (ibid.). Of Schoenberg's atonal orchestral scores only the Op. 16 had been performed at the time of Berg's composition of his Op. 6. The first movement, Präludium, "begins with the gradual emergence of percussive 'noise' out of silence, followed by an equally gradual transformation of these sounds into pitched configurations, a process that returns, in reversed order, at the end" (Gable and Morgan 134). The middle portion of the movement "builds to a single climactic point before falling away quickly near the end" (ibid.). Thus a definite, if approximate, palindrome is formed. The Three Pieces differ from Berg's previous compositions in a special respect: "no longer are themes set down thereupon to have music created from them...[the work] allows the themes to be created by themselves" (Adorno 74). In Präludium, "the principal melodic idea, fully formed only at m. 15, gradually coalesces out of fragmentary motivic particles during the first 14 measures" (G+M 138). Marsch, the third movement, "was completed in the weeks immediatley following the assasination at Sarajevo and is, in its feeling of doom and catastrophe, an ideal, if unintentional, musical expression of the ominous implications of that event. Fragmentary rhythmic and melodic figures typical of an orthodox military march repeatedly coalesce into poyphonic episodes of incredible density that surge to frenzied climaxes, then fall apart" (Perle 18). Adorno calls Marsch a montage: "at the beginning of [this movement], four shattered old-fashioned march formulae are stitched together and reconstituted into form by the same force that had disintegrated them" (Adorno 74). Another description: this movement has a "veritable thicked of thematic relationships [that] stands perhaps unrivalled in all music" (G+M 138, n.27). "In the Altenberg Lieder and the Three Pieces for Orchestra Berg had brilliantly fulfilled the pre-requisites for the next project he boldly set for himself, composition of the first full-scale atonal opera" (Perle 19). next.............................Wozzeck continue reading biography |