The life of Alban Berg

Perhaps the most famous pupil of Arnold Schönberg was Alban Berg (nee Albano—the o was dropped when he was still very young), a striking personality who, despite having composed only a handful of works—fourteen published compositions—, is widely regarded as one of the leading composers of the first half of the twentieth century and definitely one who influenced many avant-garde composers. Pierre Boulez said that Berg had had the same relevance to music as writers like Marcel Proust and Robert Musil to literature. Among the triumvirate of the Second Viennese School, Berg is perhaps the one whose music, although for most of its part atonal, retains a lyrical dimension that continues to fascinate people a century on. His attention to critical societal issues so vividly exposed in his two operas has gained him an aura of being the most “human” among the atonal Viennese composers. In fact, one could say that it might well be his “lyricism within atonality” that represents the most captivating and endearing trait of Berg’s music.

Born in Vienna in the winter of 1885, he came from a relatively well-off family of merchants whose fortunes collapsed with the death of his father, Konrad Berg, despite the efforts of his mother Johanna to continue running the business. As he showed from very early on in his life, music wasn’t Alban’s only passion. During his stay in the family estate in Carinthia in the spring of 1902, he made one of housemaids, Marie Scheuchl, pregnant with a daughter, Albine, who was born illegitimate the following December. He only admitted to be the father of Albine a year later, in a letter.

That music was going to play a central role in life was clear since his adolescence, when he kept a bust of Beethoven along pictures of Wagner and Mahler in his room, all of whom he considered his heros. At school though, literature seemed to be the preponderant interest for the young Alban. His exceptional musical talent became nonetheless evident as he started composing, aged sixteen, songs that he would have his brother and sister sing with him at the piano. And it was his brother Charly in fact who sent some of this songs to Schönberg, asking the latter to take on his brother Alban on a course that the composer had advertised in the autumn of 1904 within the Neue Musikalische Presse. Schönberg approved and so the two met for the first time. This encounter was going to change the rest of Berg’s life.
Schönberg continued to teach Berg privately and free of charge after the course was over, as Johanna Berg could not possibly pay for the education of her sons and daughter, for the family’s income was reduced to a very meagre level by then.
In his classes with Schönberg Berg not only refined his compositional skills, but developed a reverence for Schönberg that was to deeply influence his style. Berg learned the dodecaphonic method and fully endorsed the mission of his mentor to define the guidelines and the intellectual milieu of a new music. His commitment and subservience to Schönberg’s ideas is vividly illustrated in the many letters that the pupil addressed to the master.

Berg’s first works reveal his passion for the human voice and the piano: A large collection of songs—some of which were to be published only long after his death as Jugedlieder, other remaining unpublished to these days—and the Sieben frühe Lieder, a set of seven songs on poems by various authors, that he originally composed for piano but then orchestrated in1928. Differently from the bulk of other songs composed for his siblings, the Sieben frühe Lieder show a new orientation from the young composer, where tonality progressively disappears without abandoning lyricism and a remarkable control in the direction of the musical phrase. In the same years, as a dedicated pupil of Schönberg, Berg produced some of the works that have now entered standard repertoire, the Klaviersonate (Piano Sonata) Opus 1 the Vier Lieder Opus 2 (Four songs for piano and voice) and the Streichequartett (String quartet) Opus 3. However these pieces were originally conceived as little more than compositional exercises, they showed Schönberg the remarkable talent of his pupil and defined Berg’s poetic style for the compositions that were to follow.
In 1906 Berg made the other most important encounter of his life, when he met Helene Nahowska, who was to become his wife five years later. Helene was the daughter of a high-ranking official of the Austrian army, Franz Nahowski, and his wife Anna, who had been the lover of Emperor Franz Joseph I in the 1880s. Although no official records exist about it, and neither Helene nor Anna ever admitted it, Helene was with high probability the result of the amorous intercourse between the Kaiser and her mother. It is said that Anna accepted financial compensation from the Kaiser to keep silent about their relationship.

Be Herr Nahowski the biological father or not, he opposed strenuously to the marriage, on the basis that Berg represented a dangerous choice for his daughter, due to his frail health—Berg suffered from asthma and insomnia, which required him to take regular drugs—and to his “pecuniary destitution”. On top of this, Berg’s sister’s (whose name was Smaragda) notorious homosexuality and suicide attempt following her divorce in 1908, drew a picture of a family context that to the eyes of a conservative Austrian official was degenerate, to say the least. However, similarly to what Schumann had done with his father-in-law for the hand of Clara, Berg fought forcefully for this marriage and his efforts eventually paid off.

Alban and Helene took an apartment in Vienna and started taking active part together in the ripe and fervent fin-de-siecle Viennese cultural life, a context that included people like the satirist Karl Krauss, the painter Oscar Kokoschka, the novelist Franz Werfel, the architect Adolf Loos and others. The financial circumstances now being less stringent thanks to Helene’s dowry, Berg dedicated himself to an almost obsessive refinement of his compositional skills.

The years between 1908 and 1914, although strikingly poor of musical output, consecrated Berg as one of leading figures in Vienna’s music scene. His language left behind any trace of tonality with the Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtkarten-Texten von Peter Altenberg (Five Orchestral Songs on Postcards Text of Peter Altenberg) or Altenberg-Lieder Opus 4 —as conventionally abbreviated— and the Drei Orchesterstücke Opus 6 (Three Orchestral Pieces). The Altenberg-Lieder were responsible of creating what went down in history as the 1913 Scandalkozert. The Viennese public, however societal status demanded a healthy balance between conservatism and avant-garde, was not always willing to accept experimental music without turning up their noses. The Vienna Music Society organised on 31 March 1913 a concert at the famous Musikverein concert hall: conducted by Arnold Schönberg, it featured, among other pieces, two of the Altenberg-Lieder by Berg. During the performance of the piece, the public broke off in a tumult and a riot ensued that caused the concert to be interrupted. In the general chaos the concert organizer Erhard Buschbeck is said to have slapped a concert-goer, a fact that was commented by Oscar Straus—definitely not a fan of Schönberg and Berg—as “das melodiöseste, das man an diesem Abend zu hören bekam” (loosely, the most melodic part of the evening).

Despite of the difficulty in making headways within the conservative Viennese cultural environment, Berg’s reputation as a composer continued to increase, arguably also thanks to his remarkable charisma and personal charm that mesmerised those who came into contact with him. He was curious, well-mannered and pleasurable and he enjoyed conversations on a variety of cultural topics, which also gave him the opportunity to showcase his broad cultural backbone.

Helene clearly played an important role in shaping Berg’s emotional maturity that led to his major compositions. He considered her as his inspiration and it was thanks to her that he could completely dedicate himself to music. It is evident from the many letters they exchanged that a true and solid love existed between the two up until Berg’s premature death in 1935. He asserted, in one of his letters, that his three passions in life were Helene, music and nature. “All paths to you are paths to heaven,” he wrote to her in 1922. Their union was one that went beyond a juvenile flirt or a fabricated relationship to serve social purpose. Helene wrote, after Berg’s death: “I have lived for 28 years in the paradise of Berg’s love and, if I had the strength to survive the catastrophe of his physical death, it was through the union of our souls, a bond forged long ago - beyond time and space.”

Berg was however too much of a socialite to fit comfortably within the boundary of a traditional relationship. With his growing fame and success, particularly after the appearance of his first opera, Wozzeck, completed in 1924, Berg developed a growing fascination for the promiscuous and hedonistic dimension that the Viennese middle-class offered to some of its members. A world that was quickly taking shape from the recent discoveries of psychoanalysis and the by-then indomitable momentum of the artistic avant-gardes.
It is alleged that he entertained several affaires, but the one that has been most clearly documented was the one with Hannah Fuchs-Robettin, the sister of the novelist Franz Werfel. Hannah was an exceptionally beautiful woman who had married the industrialist Herbert von Fuchs-Robettin, with whom she lived in Prague. Berg visited Prague in 1925 and, through the intermission of Alma Mahler, was invited to stay over at their sumptuous house. The two started an affaire that was only discovered many years later, after some letters were discovered among her papers as well as an annotated copy of the score of the Lyrische Suite, Berg’s second string quartet, that the composer worked on between 1925 and 1926. From these documents the musicologist George Perle concluded that the Lyrische Suite had Hannah as the secret dedicatee —although Berg officially dedicated the piece to Zemlinsky. The score is rich of annotations by Berg, some more candid than others in making clear his feeling for Hannah. Most importantly, Berg uses the motif ABHF—the initials of his name and that of Hannah’s, a technique that he had extensively rehearsed in his Chamber Concerto in 1923 - as a building block of the third movement.
There are no accounts of the affaire having extended much longer after Berg returned to Vienna from Prague. In the testimony of Theodor W. Adorno, who acted as the carrier of some of the letters the two exchanged, “the affaire was doomed from the start, as neither Berg wanted to leave his wife, nor Hannah wanted to leave her children.”

The third decade of the century represented the apogee of success for Berg and this was predominantly due to the completion of his first opera, Wozzeck, a work of great ambition and innovation inspired by a play by Georg Blüchner that Berg has seen in 1914. The opera, for most of its parts atonal, is a crude and unmediated representation of the social dejection and sadistic behaviours thriving in disadvantaged social contexts torn by war and lack of culture. It was premiered in Berlin in December 1925 in a production promoted by the conductor Erich Kleiber and, according to the critique, obtained overall favourable reactions despite its scandalous subject. With Wozzeck Berg not only showed that atonal music could be instrumental to extraordinary dramatic art, but he also addressed directly concrete social issues like war, prevarication and injustice. His concerns for the underdogs and the social outcasts that he had always been wanting to address, now found artistic form in a creation for the stage. The opera also incorporates some autobiographical elements from Berg’s own experience of World War 1. The story exposes the pettiness and abandon of soldiers in a small German town and how perversity of human deception and callousness can lead to tragedy. The opera is a big climax culminating in the murder scene of Act 3, where Wozzeck kills Marie on a surge of jealousy mixed with military pride, at the presence of a full moon. As the vapidness of the village life continues into the night, Wozzeck eventually ends up dying too, drowning as he desperately tries to make the murderous weapon disappear, like in the worst nightmare.

Beg spent the following ten years travelling to promote Wozzeck and starting works on his second project, Lulu, also dealing with the social issue of prostitution and women exploitation. He was fascinated by the underworld that a city like Vienna presented, the dark side of a society that only cared to present an artificial facade of past glory and decaying traditional values. The real world, Berg though, was one of perversion and dejection, with abundant cases of sadism and exploitation. This was the world he wanted to expose and to challenge the public to look at.

Lulu is a femme-fatale, a fictional character representing that stereotype of central European early-century mistress. Her story is a parabola of disgrace and decadence within a society that doesn’t grant salvation. She entertains a series of shallow relationships that cause dramas of escalating gravity, from the death of her husband caused by a stroke upon surprising her with another man, to being a murdered, to eventually being killed by Jack the Ripper in London, after having taken him home as she was working the streets. Berg masterfully uses the ambiguity and the lyric power of his own personal musical language to depict a doomed character whose fault can only be identified in her being alive in such merciless world, that requires an equal dose of victimhood and callousness.

The political tides in central Europe were in the meantime shifting towards extremism, with National Socialism voicing against modernity and targeting avant-gardes as dangerous and degenerate. Berg’s works were not spared the censorship and critics or public officials advocating them ran serious risk of being dismissed from their posts. Berg started working on an orchestral version for Lulu that was performed—again by the indomitable Erich Kleiber—in late 1934. The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler—also struggling to come to terms with the newly empowered Nazi regime—made clear to Berg though that producing the full opera would not be possible in Germany.

From 1932 on, Berg spent more and more time in the recently purchased Waldhaus on the shores of Wörthersee, a place that had inspired Gustav Mahler thirty years earlier, to dedicate himself to the completion of Lulu. These efforts were interrupted in the summer of 1935 after he received a commission from the violinist Louis Krasner to compose a violin concerto. Berg plunged himself into this new task, mostly because of the financial relief that the work would bring in, but also because of the attachment assigned to this piece after he decided to dedicate it to the memory of Manon Gropius, the daughter of the architect Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler, who died in April of the same year of polio. Differently from all his previous compositions, the Violin Concerto was completed promptly.

Berg’s health had started to deteriorate during the summer, mostly due to the considerable stress resulting from the effect that the deteriorating political situation in Germany was having on his reputation and his ability to continue life as a musician. Schönberg had left Europe in 1933 and Berg many others whose careers were all but destroyed by the regime were doing the same thing. He was hospitalised in late December 1935, only few days after the Viennese premiere of his Lulu suite as a result of the infection that had developed from a furuncle allegedly generated by an insect bite earlier in the autumn. He died of sepsis in the night between the 23 and 24 December, thus confirming fears he had developed as a young man that the number 23 would play a decisive role in his destiny.

Despite his minimal output, Alban Berg has left a lasting legacy to the history of music. His operas have entered standard repertoire and are produced every year across the world. His violin concerto is not only considered a masterpiece by most solo violinists, but is regularly included in the programmes of all major symphonic institutions.