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| The first performance of the Lyric Suite was on 8 January 1927 in Vienna. Seven of Berg's early songs, composed in the years 1905-8, were revived as a song cycle now known as the Seven Early Songs, and were first performed 6 November 1928. On 26 October of that year Berg met with Frank Wedekind's widow to discuss the composition rights to the Lulu plays. Berg had already made a commitment to Wedekind's drama as the libretto of his own opera, having composed 300 bars of music. Der Wein was commissioned in Spring 1929 by the soprano Ruzena Herlinger. The work was completed between May and August of the same year. The single movement contains settings of three poems. These are drawn from a collection of poems by Charles Baudelaire translated by Stefan George, Die Blumen des Bösen. The secret text of the Lyric Suite was also from this collection. Baudelaire wrote five poems for his cycle Le Vin, and four of these were translated by George. Berg uses three of the latter and reorders them to suit his work. The poems are "Die Seeles des Weines," "Der Wein des Liebenden," and "Der Wein des Einsamen." In his art, Berg had "the will to objectify irrational subliminal enervation in a work of art through the rational energy of the ego" (Adorno 114). He found a precedent for this phenomenon in Baudelaire, for whom it was the "first operative" (ibid.). Baudelaire, though he was the originator of the "ivory tower" concept, wished in addition to unite with the masses. This unity is achieved in Der Wein, where we find the following pairings: "Allegorical melancholy and trivial frivolity; the laboriously invoked spirit of the bottle and the impudent, importunate musical commodity of the tango" (Adorno 113). "In the first and last poems, wine claims to bring hope to the disinherited or lonely man" (Simms 237). The central poem is only "deceptively optimistic, [having] a sense of impossibility, unreality, and disappointment" (ibid.). In Der Wein, Berg uses a set that "suggests certain characteristics of diatonic tonality" (Perle 1985: 29). As can be seen from the above diagram, the prime row at the second transposition contains a portion of the D minor scale, a portion of the F# major scale, and a V7 type chord. The work contains implications of tonality, and these occur in "an enormously extended post-Wagnerian chromatic context" (ibid.). While this context is very freely derived from the set, the latter "performs an important formal function as a consistent source of thematic details" (ibid.). In general, Der Wein is inconsistent with the rules of Schoenberg's formulation of twelve-tone music. The formal plan of the work is "a combination of sonata-allegro and ternary [three-part] design" (Perle 1985: 31): For Berg, the retrograde section (diagrammed above as "forward:backward") is unusual in that it "does not represent a self-enclosed formal unit but is embedded within the larger structure, cutting across one of the work's major structural divisions" (Gable and Morgan 131). The forward section begins after a climax in the vocal setting, and serves to "reduce tension" (ibid., 132); the midpoint of the palindrome is a low-point in the piece. The backward section should lead to a climax, since the forward one comes out of one. Because Berg wants to lead into the calm of the third song, however, the last measures of the backward section are altered. The 9 bars that led up to the first entry of the voice are recapitulated in the bars leading up to the last song. At the end of the work, the music becomes more and more like the seven bars that began the work, until it is "almost identical to its source" (ibid., 145). Thus, the ending is not an ending as such but brings us back to the beginning. "The close of Der Wein sounds as if it could easily continue, recycling itself into eternity" (ibid.). Der Wein was first performed 4 June 1930. Lulu shares many characteristics with the songs, and the latter can be seen as a preparation for the former. However, Der Wein must be appreciated as an achievement in itself: "the themes emerging from the Baudelaire text show [Berg] to be grappling with the same conflicting issues as in some of the earlier works, including isolation, illusion, and despair" (Simms 238). next................................Lulu |
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