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Alban Berg 1885–1935

by Willem Pijper (translated by Herbert Antcliffe)

With the untimely death of Alban Berg it would appear that the period of atonal composition is for the time being already concluded. The prospects for European music of our times had become, by this, still darker than they were already. The Schönberg group had at its disposition no single individual who could take the place of Berg. Even Anton Webern belongs, as a composer, to another category - his output so far showing only a few points of relationship. The superhuman power of conviction which made the work of Berg something so positive, is entirely absent from the works of Webern. There is no lack of capacity: but his creative manifestations are less convincing than, say, ‘Wozzeck.’

There is here in Europe no longer much prospect of progress, of recovery. German music is almost completely demobilised; France and Italy bring forward innocent little pieces and tame pasticcios; the music of the Russians fulfils, perhaps, cultural duties of significance, but it is, speaking from the point of view of musical history, continually ante-1914, to my thinking. The innovations of Arnold Schönberg and his group threaten, together with the death of the greatest talent in this group, to become petrified; and that already now, within twenty-five years. . .

Alban Berg was a great musician, and he was, before all else, a great musical dramatist. He was not primarily a composer of absolute music. If he had not become a Schönbergian, would he not have left work of greater significance in the form of orchestral and chamber music? One is sometimes tempted to think so. The musical doctrine of Schönberg, however, leads by direct ways to areas that are not by any means melodious. Schönberg himself, and Anton Webern, demonstrate this fact with unquestionable clarity in their compositions. One tone, one chord, a single movement, three, four notes in melodic succession, are in their musical apperception the substratum of such unutterable and intense musical emotion that it becomes practically impossible in these sound-areas to make music freely and completely in the manner of Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, or Palestrina. The musical interpreter Berg has been able to save his musicianship by becoming a musical dramatist; that is to say, by putting his inventive powers to the service of an idea in itself outside music. When the exacting and coercive (and there fore helpful), libretto failed him, when he wished to write a concerto or other piece of absolute music then he (even he!) began to grope and to hesitate.

The Double Concerto, for example, shows such a degree of bewilderingly complicated form and harmonic mechanism, that one begins to doubt the autonomy of the music actualised in this Concerto. One can say that Berg, the musical dramatist of Büchner and Wedekind, enjoys more freedom of musical handling than Berg, the free inventor, author of masterly conceived works of absolute music.

These remarks convey no belittling of Berg’s capacities. To become so great a musical dramatist as he was one must be a musician by the grace of God - one must be cast in the mould of a Verdi or a Wagner. There was a time when it was considered less distinguished to compose operas than to compose symphonies, quartets, or sonatas. That time is now well behind us. ‘Don Juan’ or ‘Die Zauberflöte’ are no longer considered inferior to the ninth Symphony or the Academic Festival Overture, and that is one of the very few reasons for satisfaction with the time in which we live. We are even in a position to account for the old misunderstanding. Actually ‘Fidelio’ is not so successful as the ‘Eroica’ or the ‘Pastoral’.

Alban Berg was therefore, it appears, in the first place a great opera composer. With his ‘Wozzeck’ he has changed the aspect of the musico-dramatic art. I have never been among those who nurse a blind admiration for the libretto of this opera, a compilation from a large number of heterogeneous and practically unrelated scenes. This expressionisme avant la lettre was, in itself, neither better nor worse than any arbitrarily chosen veriste book of words. Actually one can admire it only for its conciseness and sobriety - direct reactions from the measureless conceptions of Wagner, whose mythological and metaphysical elaborations formed the ideals of the generation of composers which preceded ours. At the same time one dare not think what a mediocre talent would have made of the material (as also of Berg-Wedekind’s ‘Lulu’ conception)! For Berg, with his hyper-sensitive and utterly analytical consciousness, these sketchy personifications of primitive passions were just the thing. ‘Wozzeck’ and ‘Lulu alike exist merely in completely uncomplicated data, which in their bare simplicity seem, as it were, predestined to serve as a screen for all the psychological particularisations which such a metaphysician of genius as Berg could project upon it.

This technique is entirely different from that of Debussy in co-operation with a Maeterlinck. With the French master it was a clarification, an efflorescence of an enormous number of psychological data already brought up for consideration in words and ideas. With Alban Berg, on the contrary, it is the bringing to the consciousness (Bewusstseinsfähigmachend) primarily through the music, of certain passions latent beneath the surface of the figures. Though this is at once evident why Berg, for the composition of such an elementary action, found so many more notes and formulae necessary than did Debussy for his relatively long-spun and utterly refined dramae lyrique.

Armed with these perceptions we again approach the frontier territory of music. One step further on the Maeterlinck-Debussy road and we have forsaken the opera and find ourselves in the domains of d’Annunzio and ‘Pirandello.’ And one step further along the road of Berg and we find ourselves in the middle of the completely incomprehensible.

Debussy has been repeatedly blamed for a subjectivism that is too completely carried out: ‘Pelléas’ should signify the utmost frontier which may never be crossed. One could say the same of Berg with equal justification. I cannot see, however, that this observation must necessarily be in the nature of a reflection. ‘Tristan and Isolde’ is an artwork of grandiose character, but it is not so because of the many followers of Wagner who have composed à la manière de ‘Tristan.’ Rather one may say that ‘Tristan’ is great in spite of the school.

Every great artwork occurs but once. Details, separate accessory matters of such a composition, may in their turn be the germs of other new artworks, which will be written by those who come after. But the essence, the principle, of a truly representative creation is susceptible neither to extension, still less to repetition.

The lesson of Wagner’s ‘Tristan’ did not lie in the terrain of ideas, but in that of harmonic differentiation - that is, in a mere concern of musical technique. ‘Pelléas’ has nothing to teach us in the manner of music-dramatisation, but from it we can learn much in the economy of sounds. It seems to me, therefore, quite unnecessary to bring forward ‘Wozzeck’ as an example in the matter of formal conception. (We know how Berg has cast various dramatic scenes in specific musical forms: rondos, variations, sonata form). I think that Berg’s influence will manifest itself via the opera ‘Wozzeck,’ not so much in the music-dramaticism, but in the domains of absolute music. Not yet, however, but when absolute music shall have drawn her logical conclusions from these musico-dramatic projected renovations.

For this opera is, after Schönberg’s older Fünf Orchesterstücke and his Drei Klavierstücke, the first convincing manifestation of the liberated harmonic consciousness. It was also the first time that a musical work of large dimensions and tension has been realised by the use of the ‘tonicless’ polyphony invented by Arnold Schönberg.

It is necessary at the moment to observe these facts very closely. After the death of Alban Berg there remains no other representative of the atonal persuasion who can properly be compared with him. The ‘younger men’ endeavour to use it with concessions. The musical consciousness of Schönberg himself has in the works which came into existence after ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ become constantly more hybrid, constantly more speculative. Webern’s tone is for the ordinary ear scarcely audible. But Hindemith romanticises loudly and unhindered, Stravinsky builds his hollow cubes of sound, Bartók’s music is dried to powder. It looks as though the Schönberg group is become an entity enclosed away from its surroundings, that the streams and maelstroms of present-day music flow round it without exercising any influence upon it. Perhaps all this is necessary. The principles of Schönberg himself, thoroughly thought out with regard to their subsequent consequences, are, without doubt, completely destructive for the European musical consciousness. The principles of Hába and Hauer are similarly destructive, but they were issued with less power and therefore cause practically no damage. It is well that from Schönberg’s school something so positive as the renaissance of the art-form of opera should have come. By the disappearance of its creator an era is suddenly formed, a ‘Wozzeck’ becomes something classic. Looked at from this standpoint this death has its significance.

With Alban Berg, also, one of the greatest musical thinkers of our time is gone. All that he wrote is notable for deep thought clearly expressed. His writings were sometimes polemic, but never, like those of Schönberg, merciless. Reading them, one is constantly reminded that writing about music and musical politics was to Berg a matter of secondary importance. He did not display Wagner’s need of testifying, nor the aggressiveness of a Hugo Wolf, nor the loquaciousness of a Schumann. He explained his standpoint and got on with his composing.

In his composition also he was similarly businesslike. Pieces such as the seried lyrical scenes from ‘Wozzeck,’ some songs, the quick movement from the Double Concerto, the Lyrical Suite, exhibit the magnificent tension which arises from the principle of ‘no single note too much.’ Alongside these stand fragments which, to others than Latins, seem heavy: the ensemble in the Beer Garden from ‘Wozzeck’ or the middle movement of the Double Concerto, for instance. However, this is not the time for criticism. What Alban Berg has composed will remain of importance, for us and for the generations that follow us. He has gained for himself undying repute in European music of his period.

Musical Times, May 1936