Table Of ContentALBAN BERG AND HIS WORLD
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ALBAN
BERG
AND HIS WORLD
Edited by
Christopher Hailey
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
For permissions information, see page xv.
Library of Congress Control Number 2010925390
ISBN: 978-0-691-14855-7 (cloth)
ISBN: 978-0-691-14856-4 (paperback)
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This publication has been produced by the Bard College Publications Office:
Ginger Shore, Consultant
Christina Clugston, Cover design
Natalie Kelly, Design
Text edited by Paul De Angelis and Erin Clermont
Music typeset by Don Giller
This publication has been underwriten in part by a grant
from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.
Printed on acid-free paper. (cid:39)
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Dedicated to the memory of George Perle
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments xi
Permissions and Credits xv
Berg’s Worlds 3
CHRISTOPHER HAILEY
Hermann Watznauer’s Biography of Alban Berg 33
TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED BY NICK CHADWICK
A Descriptive Overview of Berg’s Night/Nocturne 91
INTRODUCTION BY REGINA BUSCH
TRANSLATED, EDITED, AND WITH COMMENTARY BY CHRISTOPHER HAILEY
Berg and the Orchestra 133
ANTONY BEAUMONT
“ . . . deinen Wuchs wie Musik”: Portraits, Identities, and 163
the Dynamics of Seeing in Berg’s Operatic Sphere
SHERRY D. LEE
“Remembrance of things that are to come”: Some Reflections 195
on Berg’s Palindromes
DOUGLAS JARMAN
1934, Alban Berg, and the Shadow of Politics: Documents 223
of a Troubled Year
INTRODUCTION, TRANSLATIONS, AND COMMENTARY BY MARGARET NOTLEY
Alban Berg zum Gedenken: The Berg Memorial Issue of 269
23:A Viennese Music Journal
TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED BY MARK DEVOTO
Alban Berg and the Memory of Modernism 299
LEON BOTSTEIN
Index 345
Notes on the Contributors 359
• vii •
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Preface and Acknowledgments
Alban Berg has never fit comfortably into the narrative of the “Second
Viennese School.” His expressive Romanticism with its nostalgic refer-
ences to tonality, his attachment to the preoccupations of fin-de-siècle
Vienna, and the sheer sensual appeal of his music have always made him
suspect to doctrinaire modernists. Part of the problem, of course, lies in
his devotion to Arnold Schoenberg, a figure who created a teleology of
musical progress so compelling and domineering that in the searing in-
tensity of its glare even Schoenberg’s own works—contradictory and
multi-faceted—have been bleached of their historical contingency. As for
Schoenberg’s students and followers, who among them is not first and
foremost a disciple, even when a renegade? All except Alban Berg—so
gracious and accommodating, loyal and devoted, and so very passive in
his resistance. He maintains a special place in that narrative because even
in its glare he managed to seek and find the shadows.
History is texture and texture loves a glancing light. This volume of
essays, a companion to the 2010 Bard Music Festival, is an attempt to
nudge Berg still further from the flattening perspective of Schoenberg’s
radiance by shining just such an angled light upon his music, his charac-
ter, and his relationship to some of the broader issues of Viennese and
European musical culture. If this carries with it more than a whiff of re-
visionism, it is a revisionism whose larger purpose is not to overthrow
established figures but to reconnect them to their times.
To regard Viennese musical modernism as a saga of harmonic evolu-
tion from late-Romantic chromaticism through atonality to serialism is to
dismiss nine-tenths of all that this rich musical culture produced. For
decades research has been driven by a preoccupation with the conse-
quences of the atonal and serial revolutions, a narrative that excluded, by
definition, all composers who pursued other paths. This preoccupation
encouraged a general cultural bias that also banished them from the con-
cert and recorded repertory, published music histories, classroom syllabi,
and academic research. In the 1960s and ’70s, a postwar generation of
composers, theorists, and historians was growing ever more conscious
of the ruptures caused by totalitarian ideologies, the Holocaust, and the
Cold War. It was a generation suspicious of dogma and teleology and
eager to poke around in the rubble in search of overgrown paths and dis-
tant sounds. For them the question of musical syntax was but one of many
contested legacies. Their interest in reviving forgotten figures and
obscured connections also reflected a gradual transformation of the com-
positional landscape in which minimalism, neotonality, and stylistic
pluralism were only the most prominent signs of the collapse of the
• ix •
Description:Alban Berg and His World is a collection of essays and source material that repositions Berg as the pivotal figure of Viennese musical modernism. His allegiance to the austere rigor of Arnold Schoenberg's musical revolution was balanced by a lifelong devotion to the warm sensuousness of Viennese mus
