Berg's Time |
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John Covach |
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[A version of this article originally appeared as "Balzacian Mysticism, Palindromic Design, and Heavenly Time in Alban Berg's Music" in Encrypted Messages in Alban Berg's Music, ed. Siglind Bruhn (New York: Garland, 1998), 5-29.] To
Glenn Watkins Introduction Turn-of-the-century Vienna was an extraordinary place.
As the nineteenth century came to a close, the capital of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire was home to figures who would in many ways set
the intellectual and artistic agenda for the twentieth century--figures
such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Adolf Loos, Sigmund Freud, and Gustav
Mahler. Allan Janik and
Stephen Toulmin have written that this culture "is, or appears at
first sight to be, our own twentieth-century culture in its
infancy."[1]
Karl Kraus, in one of his many caustic moments, chose rather to
characterize this same Viennese culture as a "proving ground for
world destruction."[2]
Over the last three decades or so--a time in which this area of
inquiry has become a popular research topic--scholars writing on the Jahrhundertwende
have explored a Vienna rich in coffeehouse debates, concert-hall
scandals, political as well as psychological struggles, and Ringstrasse
promenades.[3] But
there was more to turn-of-the-century Vienna than sometimes meets the
scholarly eye. In addition to
the kinds of figures and topics that tend to reinforce
"legitimate" areas of investigation--philosophy, music,
architecture, and psychoanalysis, for instance--there was an occult
underground present in Vienna, as in much of the German-speaking world. This was a world in which Theosophy, Anthroposophy,
Pythagorianism, astrology, clairvoyance, numerology, and other forms of
occult belief played roles--and at times important roles--in the lives of
some of the same figures who appear so often in writing about fin-de-siècle
Vienna. This tendency of many
turn-of-the-century intellectuals and artists to take an interest in areas
that most scholars today would dismiss as "mere superstition"
has not gone completely unnoticed, however.[4]
It is, for instance, well-known and acknowledged that Freud was for
a time very much under the influence of Wilhelm Fliess's ideas about
numerology, and that he even kept an open mind to the possibility of
mental telepathy.[5] Perhaps the most conspicuous instance of occult influence in early twentieth-century German culture is Wassily Kandinsky's 1911 book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. While not strictly speaking a product of Viennese culture, Kandinsky's short book had great resonance among artists and composers in the Austrian capital. Arnold Schoenberg's admiration for Kandinsky's book has been documented.[6] and Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern were each represented in the Blaue Reiter Almanac of 1912.[7] Schoenberg not only respected Kandinsky's ideas, he also formulated some of his own in terms very like those Kandinsky employed. In his 1912 essay devoted to Mahler, for instance, Schoenberg writes: "And this is the essence of genius--that it is our future. This is why the genius is nothing to the present. Because present and genius have nothing to do with one another. The genius is our future."[8] While
the celebration of genius already had a well-established history in German
culture by the early twentieth century, Schoenberg's portrayal of the
genius as seeing into the future of mankind bears more than a passing
resemblance to Kandinsky's characterization of the genius in Concerning
the Spiritual in Art. Kandinsky
casts the course of the spiritual development of mankind as a large
triangle ascending slowly as it moves forward in time.
Most of mankind resides toward the lower, broader base of the
triangle, while those more spiritually enlightened reside closer ot the
top: "At the apex of the top segment stands often one man, and only
one. His joyful vision cloaks
a vast sorrow. Angrily they
abuse him as a charlatan or madman. So
in his lifetime stood Beethoven, solitary and insulted."[9]
For Kandinsky, Beethoven's genius afforded him a vision of
mankind's future that his contemporaries could not yet perceive.
And since the artist-genius has a vision of something that others
of his time cannot yet perceive in its purely spiritual state, art
undertakes the struggle to somehow bring this spiritual vision to physical
articulation. Kandinsky's book owes a significant debt to occult thinking;
at one point in the book he even praises the Theosophical Movement and its
founder Madame Blavatsky in the warmest of terms.
Working from documents in the Kandinsky estate, Sixten Ringbom has
argued that Rudolf Steiner's esoteric interpretation of Goethean science,
and especially Goethe's Farbenlehre, had a strong impact on
Kandinsky's thinking during the period in which his book was written.[10] Steiner lays special emphasis on an ability that might best
be termed "supersensory perception"--an ability to see the world
in its spiritual form by using the "spiritual eye" ("geistige
Auge"). But
while Kandinsky was writing in Germany, occult ideas were very much in the
air in Vienna, too. In her
memoires under the entry "1911," Alma Mahler recalls the
following incident: I
saw a lot of a young American woman who tried to imbue me with the occult.
She lent me books by Leadbeater and Mrs. Besant.
I always went straight to Mahler the moment she left and repeated
word for word all she had said. It
was something new in those days and he was interested. We started shutting our eyes to see what colors we could see.
We practised this--and many other rites ordained by occultists--so
zealously that Gucki [daughter Anna Mahler] was once discovered walking up
and down the room with her eyes shut.
When we asked her what she was doing, she replied: "I'm
looking for green."[11] In the case of this anecdote, the book in question is most likely
Leadbeater and Besant's Thought Forms, which discusses the
spiritual meanings of colors in enthusiastically Theosophical terms.
This same book, according to Ringbom, was also a central text in
Kandinsky's theorizing.[12]
The only correction one is tempted to offer to Alma Mahler's
recollections is that by 1911 occult trends were not so new in Vienna; the
circulation of such ideas had a history going back at least to the 1870s,
a fact of which her husband Gustav would have been well aware.[13] But Alma's entry confirms an important fact: by 1911 it was
easy to learn a great deal about matters occult in Vienna, and one seems
to have been able to become acquainted with occult ideas without
necessarily having to read the books themselves. The
influence of certain occult ideas can be detected in the writings and
remarks of the Second Viennese School composers.
I have argued elsewhere that Schoenberg's writing on the musikalische
Gedanke is indebted both to Steiner's esoteric interpretation of
Goethean science (the Farbenlehre especially) as well as to
Balzac's portrayal of Emanuel Swedenborg's mystical philosophy.[14]
I have also argued that the Viennese twelve-tone composer Josef
Matthias Hauer relied both on Steiner's interpretations of Goethe, as well
as on the writing of his close associate, the theologian Ferdinand Ebner.[15]
Webern's high regard for Goethe's Farbenlehre is well known,
though connections between his devotion to Catholic mysticism and occult
ideas are yet to be explored in detail. Into
this mix of artists, intellectuals, and occult philosophies in early
twentieth-century Vienna, the present study will add the music of Alban
Berg. There are a number of
features in Berg's music that suggest a fin-de-siècle penchant for
things esoteric: secret programs to important instrumental works (the Lyric
Suite, Chamber Concerto, and Violin Concerto);[16]
a deep involvement with number mysticism;[17]
and most important to this study, a fascination for palindromic procedures
and structures.[18]
Certainly these features are in many ways intertwined; the secret
programs reveal themselves, in part, through Berg's fascination with the
numbers 23 and 10--two numbers that had a great deal of personal
significance for him. Palindromes
can also participate in secret programs, as well as attain numerological
significance (as in the Chamber Concerto, for instance).
Despite
the interdependence of these three distinctive features in Berg's music,
this essay will focus primarily on Berg's use of the palindrome.
I will argue that Berg's use of palindromic structures is part of a
larger concern in his music for addressing an alternate mode of
temporality; this alternate temporal perspective is fueled by Berg's
interest in occult philosophy, and especially in Honoré de Balzac's
portrayal of Swedenborg's mystical philosophy in his novel, Séraphita.
In order to pursue this interpretation of "Berg's time,"
I will first survey the use of palindromes in Berg's music.
This will be followed by a discussion of Balzac's novel, and then
by a close investigation of Berg's Chamber Concerto. This study will conclude by considering Berg's exploration of
temporal modes with similar features in the music of Schoenberg and Hauer,
placing Berg's compositional concerns within the broader contexts of both
early twentieth-century Viennese music in particular, and fin-de-siècle
Viennese culture in general. My End is My Beginning Berg's use of the palindrome in his music is perhaps one of its most
well-known features, and, as Douglas Jarman has noted, "all Berg's
mature music, with the exception of the Violin Concerto, includes
large-scale palindromes."[19]
Mischa Donat writes that "Berg's music is indisociable in the
listener's mind . . . from its strong element of mathematical mysticism,
which more often than not takes the form of a pervasive use of mirror
structures and retrograde formations."
He goes on to remark that "In Berg, retrograde movement
represents almost a view of life . . . ."[20]
Reflecting Berg's more general concern for formal symmetry in his
music, Pierre Boulez writes: "Berg's taste for formal symmetry showed
itself very early, but the more his work progressed, the more this mere
interest took on the character of a fundamental obsession."
Boulez warns us not to exaggerate the importance of the principle
of symmetry, but then hits on something that is, I will argue, very
important about Berg's music; in a brief discussion of the palindrome that
occurs in the sextet in Act I scene 3 of Lulu (mm. 1177-1203,
midpoint in m. 1190), Boulez remarks that the section "forms a small
parenthesis in the general movement of the scene, a kind of bubble
suspended in time [my emphasis]."[21] This echoes the view of Theodor Adorno, who finds that Berg's
"propensity for mirror and retrograde formations may, apart from the
twelve-tone technique, be related to the visual dimension of his
responses; musical retrograde patterns are anti-temporal [my
emphasis], they organize music as if it were an intrinsic simultaneity."[22] Perhaps
the most obvious palindrome associated with the disruption of temporal
succession occurs in the very heart of Lulu (1929-35), the Film
Music. In Act 2 Scene 1 Lulu
shoots and kills Dr. Schön (who is, at this point in the opera, her third
husband). Berg's instrumental
interlude links the end of Scene 1 with the beginning of Scene 2, and this
music was intended to accompany a film depicting Lulu's arrest, trial,
imprisonment, illness, and escape. Figure
1 shows George Perle's transcription of Berg's own notes on how the music
and the action of the film ought to be coordinated; beginning at m. 656,
the palindrome proceeds to its midpoint at m. 687 (marked by a fermata),
and the music folds back on itself in retrograde up to m. 718.[23]
While on its surface the dramatic action of the film seems to press
forward chronologically, Berg's coordination of each event in the first
half of this short narrative with a corresponding event in the second half
signals an underlying temporal disruption.
As one can see readily by comparing the two halves as represented
in Figure 1, events after the midpoint reverse those that occur before it;
this reversal undercuts the sense that events have moved forward,
suggesting instead that things have merely returned to the point at which
they began. The
Film Music is positioned at the midpoint of the opera, occurring midway
through the second act of a three-act work.
There are large-scale correspondences that occur on either side of
this instrumental interlude; stated briefly, characters from the first
half of the opera come back as different characters in the second half
(and are played by the same singers). As a result of this kind of doubling, events in the second
half of the work take on, as Perle puts it, "a sense of déjà vu."[24]
These transformed returns create an over-arching structural
symmetry that governs much of the work as a whole.
Douglas Jarman has suggested that the Film Music palindrome thus
constitutes the "crux of the opera," viewing it as "the
focal point of the symmetrical dramatic structure" of the work.[25]
Jarman's notion that the Film Music stands as a kind of symbol for
the large-scale symmetry of the opera is further reinforced by the fact
that Berg himself referred to the interlude--though during its planning
stages--as "the focal point for the whole tragedy" that
"marks the beginning of the retrograde."
Berg also originally planned to bring the doubles back in the
second half of the opera in retrograde order, though this plan was
eventually abandoned.[26] Berg
composed his concert aria Der Wein in 1929.
Considering the fact that Berg was already well into the
composition of Lulu, which he interrupted to write this three-part
orchestral song, it is perhaps not surprising to find that a palindrome
figures into the structure of Der Wein.
The work sets three poems by Charles Baudelaire (drawn from his Le
Vin and translated by Stefan George), and divides roughly into three
large sections according to these texts.
The palindrome begins in the last two stanzas of the second poem,
at m. 112. It proceeds to its
midpoint at m. 141, marked, as in the Lulu palindromes, by a
fermata. The retrograde
continues to m. 172 without the voice, that part being taken over by the
clarinet. Measures 112-172
thus function as both a closing of the second large section of the work
and as a bridge between the second and third poem.
This palindrome is especially noteworthy for the striking visual
layout of its midpoint in the score: m. 141 stands in the center of the
page, buttressed by harp figures on either side in mm. 140 and 142 and
phrase marks that further reinforce the visual symmetry in mm. 137-145.
Berg was concerned that the copyist at Universal Edition be certain
to arrange these measures on the page to visually project the structural
symmetry at this point in the work; he was, in fact, generally concerned
that all of his palindromes be visually symmetrical in this manner.[27] The
three palindromes discussed thus far can be classified as strict
palindromes: with only minor modifications, the music is literally played
backwards.[28]
The palindrome that occurs in the third movement of the Lyric
Suite (1925-6), however, is somewhat freer in the return of material
in retrograde. The
forward-running portion of the palindrome runs from m. 1 to m. 69; the
retrograde of this material occurs at mm. 93-138.
As can be gleaned from comparing the number of measures for each
section (69 and 46), some of the material from the first section is
omitted in the retrograde repeat.[29]
Most of the material is present however, and the important
sectional divisions maintain the integrity of the palindrome effect.
The beginning of the retrograde section, for instance, does
literally and very audibly bring back the end of the first section in
reverse, and the end of the retrograde section (mm. 109-38) brings back
mm. 1-29 in literal retrograde. Thus, the audible impression of the retrograde is not
attenuated much, even if the palindrome is not strict in the same sense as
the ones discussed above. Another
important difference in the Lyric Suite palindrome is the way it is
set in this Scherzo movement; rather than pausing at the midpoint under a
fermata, an entire Trio is inserted between the two sections, causing the
abbreviated retrograde to be cast in the role of Scherzo da capo.
If in the Lulu and Der Wein palindromes the fermata
at their center can be thought of as a moment out of time--perhaps as
Boulez's "bubble suspended in time," poised in the balance
between forward and backward--then here that moment is exploded to contain
a short Trio estatico. Again but in a different way, the palindrome participates in
a disruption of chronological time. Certainly
the three strict palindromes were written after the one found in the Lyric
Suite. But the
large-scale palindrome in the second movement of the Chamber Concerto
(1923-5) was composed before Berg's Scherzo movement.
Interestingly, the Chamber Concerto palindrome incorporates
features found both in the strict palindromes as well as in the free one
from the Lyric Suite: it is, for instance, even freer in its
retrograde section than the Scherzo, while its midpoint is very similar in
its symmetry to those found in Lulu and Der Wein.
The structure of the Chamber Concerto, and its second movement
especially, will be explored in greater detail below.
Having briefly surveyed a number of palindromes in Berg's mature
works and suggested that they engage issues of musical temporality, I
would now like to turn to the issue of temporality as it may have been
understood within the Schoenberg circle.
For if Berg's use of palindromes constitutes a reflection on time,
we might well wonder what some of the issues surrounding temporality might
have been. Balzac's Heavenly Vision As discussed above, occult ideas circulated widely in early
twentieth-century Vienna, and I have referred to the circulation of
esoteric writing and thinking in the Austrian capital as the Viennese
occult underground. This
distinction is helpful inasmuch as it points to a body of ideas and
attitudes that have been largely overlooked in writing on fin-de-siècle
Vienna; but the occult underground was not clearly separable in many
instances from what might be considered more legitimate--or at least more
culturally sanctioned--bodies of knowledge.
Certainly there were members from the occult community who
positioned themselves at or beyond the margins of Viennese culture, and
the stories of Friedrich Eckstein concerning the cast of characters who
turned up at the vegetarian restaurant at the corner of the Wallnerstrasse
and Fahnengasse provide a colorful glimpse of such activity.[30]
But the thinkers who exercised the most influence on the Second
Viennese School were cultural crossover figures--writers who could claim a
place in both the mainstream intellectual traditions as well as in those
occult. Rudolf Steiner is a
good example of such a writer; his occult mysticism is always cast against
the background of nineteenth-century German philosophy and literature.
Steiner had a wide knowledge of these intellectual traditions, and
as an acknowledged expert on Goethe's scientific writings early in his
career, could weave occult ideas seamlessly into the fabric of the German
tradition. This was, in fact, the key to his appeal; occult notions
became an extension of the writing Goethe, Kant, Schopenhauer, and
Nietzsche.[31] Balzac
was also such a figure for both Schoenberg and Berg, and it was especially
his philosophical novels that held both composers' fascination.
Balzac's Séraphita was the most important novel for the two
composers, and each considered setting the climactic final chapter,
"The Assumption," as part of a large-scale symphonic work.[32]
Schoenberg mentions the novel at various points in his own writing.[33]
He opens his 1946 essay "Heart and Brain in Music," for
instance, with a passage drawn from Séraphita describing one of
the novel's main characters Wilfred.
Schoenberg and Wilfred have a certain amount in common: not only is
Wilfred of medium height "as is the case of almost all men who tower
above the rest," but he was one of those men "whose heart must
be within the domain of his head."[34] The most famous reference to Balzac's novel, however, is in
Schoenberg's twelve-tone lecture of 1941; discussing sometimes hidden
motivic connections in music, he writes: But
the validity of this form of thinking is also demonstrated by the
previously stated law of the unity of musical space, best formulated as
follows: the unity of musical space demands an absolute and unitary
perception [Schoenberg's emphasis]. In this space, as in Swedenborg's heaven (described in
Balzac's Séraphita) there is no absolute down, no right or left,
forward or backward.[35] Karl Wörner has argued for the significance of Balzac's novel in
Schoenberg's libretto to his unfinished oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter,
and I have elsewhere argued for its value in understanding the mysticism
at the heart of Schoenberg's notion of the musikalische Gedanke.[36] Berg
mentions Séraphita in a letter to Webern of 29 July 1912, and both
Séraphita and Louis Lambert in a letter to Schoenberg dated
21 December 1912;[37]
this is precisely the period during which both composers were making their
respective plans to set "The Assumption."
According to Hans Redlich, Berg's inclination to mysticism
"increased with advancing years," and Redlich believes Berg's
strong Roman Catholic upbringing explains "his predilection for
Balzac's mystic novel Séraphita," as well as "for the
works of Swedenborg."[38] Wolfgang Gratzer has made a compelling case for the high
regard in which Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern held Balzac's novel, as well
as for Berg's own intense interest in the book and its ideas.[39] And one of the central ideas of the novel, especially in the
final chapter than so intrigued Berg and Schoenberg, was Swedenborg's
description of heaven. As
Schoenberg's remarks above begin to indicate, space and time in
Swedenborg's heaven are different from the way they are in the physical
realm. I will focus on how
this conception of otherworldly time and space can be seen to influence
the temporality of Berg's music below; for present purposes it will be
useful to consider what Balzac and Swedenborg have to say about time and
space in heaven. Balzac's
novel is set in a small Norwegian village at the turn of the nineteenth
century and revolves around a mysterious figure Séraphita/Séraphitus.
This mysterious being is given to long hours in solitude rapt in
intense prayer and devotion. There
is a young couple named Wilfred and Minna who befriend this strange
figure; Séraphita/Séraphitus seems throughout the story to be
androgynous, appearing to the young man Wilfred as a woman and to the
young woman Minna as a man. In
fact, each is strongly drawn to this mysterious person in a very gendered
manner: to Wilfred, Séraphita is the perfect woman, alluring yet
virtuous; to Minna, Séraphitus is a wise and couragious man.
But Séraphita/Séraphitus is in fact of neither gender, but is
rather an ungendered being--or perhaps better, a
"beyond-gendered" being--who is about to ascend into a higher
spiritual realm as an angel, and the story essentially takes place in the
final stages of this transformation.
At the climax of the tale, Séraphita/Séraphitus is transformed
into a purely spritual being in the presence of the two young people, and
it is in this scene that one reads about the nature of Swedenborg's
heaven. The reader hears much
about Swedenborg's philosophy before this dramatic final chapter, however;
in fact, chapter 3 is given over mostly to a summary of Swedenborg's life
and writings. It is possible
that neither Schoenberg nor Berg read much Swedenborg directly, and each
may have taken his knowledge of the mystic's philosophy mostly from this
novel, together with additional information gleaned from other sources.[40] In
the final chapter of the novel, Minna and Wilfred are present at Séraphita/Séraphitus's
moment of earthly death. This
brief moment is exploded outside of physical time as a long series of
events unfold for the trio in the higher spiritual realm.
As mentioned above, Séraphita/Séraphitus sheds its physical body
and ascends into heaven as a purely spiritual being.
The young couple experience this and much more in an extended
vision of heaven--an experience so powerful in its force that it threatens
to completely overwhelm the pair. As
their spritual journey concludes, they find themselves back in their
physical bodies next to the now-dead body of Séraphita/Séraphitus.
The story ends as Wilfred and Minna commit themselves to one
another and to a life of worship and prayer together. There
is a clear mention of the nature of time in heaven that occurs in this
final chapter; Balzac writes: "But the Spirit was in the infinite,
and they did not know that in the infinite time and space are not . . . ."[41]
A few pages earlier, in the penultimate chapter, we read: ". .
. in fact, to the spirit, time and space are not."[42] It is thus very clear how Schoenberg and Berg might have
gotten the idea that in Swedenborg's heaven time and space are unitary.
Balzac's rendering of this idea in these spots is not quite in
accordance with Swedenborg's actual meaning, however.
For Swedenborg, time and space in the spiritual realms were indeed
very different. Physical time
and space are reckoned from the movement of physical bodies (time is
measured by the rotation of the Earth and by its orbit around the Sun) and
by the location of bodies in physical space.
If there are no physical bodies, there can be no time or space in
the same sense. Swedenborg
asserts that time and space in the spiritual realms are reckoned instead
by "spiritual states," and does not in fact dispense with the
notion of events falling in temporal succession or things being ordered in
space; he only contends that this kind of time and space is not dependent
on the movement or location of physical bodies.[43] The notion that in Swedenborg's heaven time and space are
unified probably arises from reading Balzac in the context of early
twentieth-century claims by followers of Swedenborg; the Swedenborgians
claimed that Immanual Kant had gotten the notion that time and space are a
priori from reading Swedenborg. As
it turns out, Kant did read a siazable chunk of Swedenborg's writing,
producing a response in the form of his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer of
1766.[44]
But the key to understanding the interpretation that Schoenberg and
Berg took away from Balzac's novel is the idea that in the spiritual realm
time and space are very different from the way in which we typically
conceive of them: in heaven, there is an alternate time and space. It
is important that in the final chapter of Séraphita the extended
heavenly vision occurs in a mere moment of physical time, and at the
precise point of Séraphita/Séraphitus's death. The similarity between this aspect of Balzac's final chapter
and a very similar feature of Schoenberg's Erwartung (1909) and Die
glückliche Hand (1910-13) is unmistakable.
The action of both of those works unfolds inside of a single
moment: in Erwartung it occurs within the moment that the woman
finds her lover's murdered body; in Die glückliche Hand the moment
occurs around the appearance of the winged monster with its teeth in the
man's neck. According to
Adorno, these two Schoenberg pieces were Berg's "first loves."[45]
It thus might follow that, at least for Berg, Balzac's Séraphita
suggested to him that music concerned with evoking the higher spiritual
realms must also somehow disrupt our normal sense of temporal unfolding,
and Schoenberg's two stage works tended to confirm this. Time in the Chamber Concerto Considered in terms of the compositional desire to explode a moment of
physical time in order to evoke a timeless realm of the spirit, the
palindrome is an attractive music-technical solution: it starts out from a
particular spot, reaches a midpoint, and turns back on itself to return to
the place from which it began. Even
the progress of the palindrome up to its midpoint--a kind of progress that
could be thought of in conventional temporal terms--is undone by the
subsequent retrograde. If,
following Adorno, Berg's palindromes are anti-temporal, this resistance to
temporality has to be understood as a disruption to chronological time as
it is known in the physical realm; these palindromic structures are, of
course, not anti-temporal in any strict sense, since they ultimately must
unfold in chronological time no matter what one writes about them.
It is perhaps more fruitful to view these mirror structures as
resisting the inevitable forward progress of chronological time,
disrupting our normal temporal expectations as a way of suggesting an
"other" world--or even simply an "otherworldly"
state--in which temporality is transformed in a meaningful way. The
palindrome that occurs in the second movement of Berg's Chamber Concerto
is perhaps the most famous one in all of his music; this is perhaps
because he wrote about the piece at length, even providing a detailed
analytical diagram, in a widely published open letter to Schoenberg, to
whom the piece is dedicated in honor of his fiftieth birthday.[46]
The palindrome in the Chamber Concerto provides a strong example of
how such a mirror structure can disrupt musical temporality.
In addition, the three movements taken together contain a number of
other procedures that further suggest temporal disruption as one of the
work's basic premises. When
considered in light of Balzac's novel, these technical characteristics of
the piece also shed considerable light on the secret program of the
Chamber Concerto, as discussed by Brenda Dahlen.[47] As
mentioned above, the palindrome in the Chamber Concerto is freer than the
strict ones found in Lulu and Der Wein, though it is more
extended than any discussed thus far, comprising the entire second
movement. The movement begins
at m. 241, and the first half of the piece--up to the midpoint--is an ABA'
form with each subsection containing 42, 48, and 30 measures respectively.
At the juncture between measures 360 and 361, the piece turns back
on itself, producing an A'BA form with each subsection containing 30, 48,
and 42 measures respectively. Strictly
palindromic passages occur at mm. 356-60/361-65 (the midpoint), mm.
283-311/410-38 (in the B sections), and mm. 271-82/439-50 (in the A
sections); otherwise all important thematic and motivic material returns
in retrograde, but treated freely.[48] The
midpoint of the piece is arranged visually across two facing pages of the
score; there is no fermata but rather a tolling of twelve low C#s/Dbs in
the piano and basson--six on either side of the center--accompanied by
chords in the horns and trombones and a high, lyrical and sustaining line
in the solo violin. Redlich captures the mood of this passage nicely, citing the
"mystical mood" that precedes the midpoint and the "twelve
mysterious chimes given out by the piano and double bassoon, which ring in
the hour of musical ghosts . . . ."[49]
Working from Berg's sketches for the piece, Dahlen has been able to
determine that the notes sounded in the first horn, A-B-D-E (then in
retrograde), constitute a musical anagram for the name of Schoenberg's
first wife, mAtHilDE.[50]
Of course, the Chamber Concerto is well-known for its use of three
musical anagrams in the opening motto of the work: ArnolD SCHönBErG
(A-D-Eb-C-B-E-G in the piano), Anton wEBErn (A-E-Bb-E in the
violin), and AlBAn BErG (A-Bb-A-Bb-E-G in the
horn); and Dahlen has further shown that variations in the
theme-and-variations first movement were inspired by personal
characteristics of additional members of the Schoenberg circle (the use of
piano and violin as solo instruments in the piece already points generally
but clearly to Eduard Steuermann and Rudolf Kolisch, respectively).[51] Mathilde
Schoenberg died on 18 October 1923, and this loss affected her husband
Arnold deeply. Dahlen posits that Berg would already have begun the work by
the time Mathilde passed away, but altered the piece after Mathilde's
death to include her passing in the secret program to the work.
Dahlen reinforces her reading by showing that Berg also includes
references in the piece to Schoenberg's tone poem Pelleas und Melisande
(1902-3), which, following Maeterlinck, features a love triangle as a
central aspect of its plot. She
argues that Berg's quotations of Schoenberg's tone poem may refer to the
love triangle that developed when Mathilde had an affair with the painter
Richard Gerstl--an affair that ended with Gerstl's suicide and Mathilde's
subsequent psychological collapse.[52]
But as Dahlen remarks, it seems somewhat odd that Berg would hide
such references in a piece dedicated to Schoenberg in celebration of his
birthday. Indeed, such a
gesture might be viewed as cruel and mean-spirited.
Dahlen reasons that this might constitute one reason why this
aspect of the program remained secret. But
in light of Balzac's novel, another reading is far more plausible: the
midpoint of the second movement represents Mathilde's moment of death and
ascent into heaven. As in the novel, horns resound--in Séraphita they are
trumpets--at the moment when Mathilde is admitted to this highest
spiritual realm. The
references to Pelleas may indeed signal a love triangle as Dahlen
suggests, but if so, it is one that ends--like the one in Séraphita--in
spiritual transformation, or perhaps more in the Schoenbergian spirit: a
spiritual transfiguration. The
midpoint of the piece thus becomes a moment out of which the rest of the
movement expands outward in opposite directions, simultaneously toward its
end and beginning. Such a
reading not only comports better with Berg's stated intention to honor his
teacher, but also turns out to resonate sympathetically with the rest of
the work. The
formal design of the first movement also reflects an attempt to evoke the
Swedenborgian-Balzacian vision of heaven.
The movement is a theme with five variations.
After the statement of the motto for the work as discussed above, a
theme is presented that consists of six different melodic passages in
succession (mm. 1-30); in the first variation (mm. 31-60) the solo piano
reprises these six passages in the same order in which they were initially
presented. The second
variation (mm. 61-120), however, reworks each passage in free retrograde
and presents the original succession in retrograde order.
The third and fourth variations (mm. 121-150 and 151-180) continue
this practice by bringing the thematic material back in inversion and
retrograde inversion respectively. The fifth variation (mm. 181-240) reprises the original prime
forms. Certainly there is
more at work in this movement than the large-scale repetition of thematic
material according to Schoenberg's four forms of twelve-tone
transformation. The movement
can also be seen, for instance, to unfold a sonata form in which mm. 1-60
comprise the exposition, mm. 61-180 make up the development, and mm.
181-240 form the recapitulation. Further,
the inscription above the initial motto of the piece reads "all good
things . . . " (come in threes), and the number of measures found in
each subsection is divisible by three.
But in light of Schoenberg's supporting the four standard
twelve-tone transformations with the idea of a unitary conception of
musical space drawn from Séraphita, and considering the palindrome
in the second movement and the preceeding discussion of it, this first
movement can also be seen as a further working out of the mystical idea of
time and space in the spiritual realm.
Here however, it is not so much temporal disruption that occurs;
rather, the movement works out Schoenberg's notion that a musical object
retains its identity under retrograde, inversion, or retrograde inversion.
By bringing the material from the theme section back under these
transformations in the context of a theme-and-variations movement, Berg is
making the unitary conception of musical space the basis for the operative
large-scale structure of the movement. If
the first movement is devoted to the issue of heavenly space, and the
second attempts to evoke heavenly time, the third combines both of these
ideas together in a remarkable way. The
third movement recapitulates the first two movements simultaneously;
material from both the first and second movements is brought back, in the
original order, in an elaborate formal scheme that further extends the
idea of evoking the higher spiritual realms through music-technical
procedures.[53]
By placing both movements together in a single movement, Berg
disrupts temporality by having both pieces, in a certain sense, sounding
at once. There is a
fascinating kind of recursiveness at work here in that the two movements
that are recapitulated together in the service of disrupting musical time
and space are already, taken separately, involved in the same kind
temporal-spatial disruption. Berg's
manipulation of the temporal and spatial domains in this movement
anticipates developments in composition that are more usually associated
with the post-World-War-II avant garde, and with composers such as
Karlheinz Stockhausen and Elliott Carter; and his overall concern with
temporality in the service of religious mysticism anticipates in some ways
the same sets of concerns in the music of Olivier Messiaen.[54]
While there are clearly additional compositional strategies
unfolding throughout the Chamber Concerto, one central concern of the
piece is pursuing various means of evoking the unitary time and space of
Swedenborg's heaven. The Aesthetic of Temporal Disruption There is nothing new in suggesting that Berg's music tends to be
concerned with temporality. In
his "The Eternal Return: Retrograde and Circular Form in Berg,"
Robert Morgan demonstrates in a compelling manner that palindromic
structures in Berg's music are just one technical symptom of the
composer's larger obsession with musical temporality.
Morgan also examines retrograde procedures and symmetrical
structures generally in the music of Berg, finding that Berg's fascination
with such techniques and structures not only extends across his output,
but that it can be traced back to many of his earliest pieces as well.
Morgan generalizes Berg's practice in terms of what he calls
"circular recurrences," which can culminate in formal structures
"in which an opening gesture returns at a composition's close,
thereby joining the music's temporal extremes."[55]
Indeed, Morgan finds Berg's concern with musical temporality
ubiquitous to the composer's work: Musical
time, turned back on itself, circle-like, reattains its point of origin,
collapsed into an instant by having gone forward only to end where it
began. The remarkably
consistent appearance of such circular motions in Berg, achieved through
both "progressive" and "retrogressive" means, suggests
that they formed an essential component of his basic compositional
orientation.[56] Morgan's
characterization of Berg's practice adds a crucial factor to the
discussion of palindromic and retrograde structures in this music.
Morgan's use of the word "circular" here is meant to
capture the sense that Berg's music does not simply turn back on itself;
rather, it drives forward to return to the place from which it began.
And for Morgan, Berg's music drives forward according to a
traditional tension-release pattern inherited from nineteenth-century
music. Berg's strict
palindromes, for instance, do not achieve their effect by sounding as if
they turn around and go backward (though Morgan would admit that the sense
of reversal is audible immediately surrounding the midpoint); instead,
Morgan argues, "Berg applies an innovative technique--retrograde--to
achieve an essentially traditional result."[57]
It is in this sense, then, that Berg's music tends--as enigmatic as
the idea may seem--to drive forward to its beginning, tracing a circle in
one direction only. Morgan's
emphasis on the forward-directed character of the retrograde halves of
Berg's palindromes offers a corrective to the readings that tend to
privilege the mirror aspects of the structure (and my descriptions above
are a good example of this latter tendency).
But Morgan's reading of Berg's procedure tends to overcompensate
somewhat for other authors' emphasis on the static nature of Berg's
symmetrical structures; for if we follow his metaphor of the circle
strictly, one is largely unaware of a temporal disruption until the
beginning material mysteriosly reappears at the end of a work.
Because he privileges the forward-directed quality of the circular
motion, the static reading of symmetrical structure tends to be replaced
with a dynamic (though enigmatic) one. Morgan
suggests that Berg's thinking about circular form may have been influenced
by Nietzsche's writing on the eternal return, an idea that first arises as
a "thought experiment" in The Gay Science (1882) and
plays a crucial role in his later philosophy, and in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (1883-5) especially.[58]
Morgan argues that for Nietzsche time itself is a circle, and the
relevance of this view for Berg's music is "its close affiliation
with the belief that everything is in a state of constant change and
mutation, of 'becoming' as opposed to 'being.'
It is precisely because all things are in flux, undergoing
continuous metamorphosis, that the idea of eternal recurrence acquires
significance."[59]
The eternal return requires an affirmation of the moment,
"wrested from the constant, whirling passage of life, offering a
measure of stability for a world otherwise condemned to unmediated
transience and change."[60] Morgan
puts his Nietzschean reading forward as a positive one, setting it in
contrast to the more "negative" one of Douglas Jarman.
In his discussion of Wozzeck, Jarman writes: "The
musical palindromes stand as a symbol of predestination and of man's
inability to affect the course of events.
Like the circular images in the text, the palindromes, returning to
the point at which they began, closing the circle and thus symbolically
negating their own existence, represent the eventual and inevitable end of
these predetermined events."[61] He goes on to write that "the inhuman mechanistic
universe depicted in Wozzeck represents Berg's own view of the
universe, a natural world governed by uncaring, mechanical, predetermined
processes which operate irrespective of the fate and feelings of the
individual."[62]
As Morgan points out, Jarman interprets the palindromes, and
retrograde generally, as symbols of negation, "their reversal of
musical time mirroring a desire to erase temporal passage and its
inevitable consequences."[63] Berg's
symmetrical structures are not circular in precisely the way Morgan
argues, nor are they representative of a melancholy worldview as Jarman
would have it. They are,
rather, part of a central concern in Berg's music: to evoke Swedenborg's
heaven as described in Balzac's Séraphita.
The three movements of the Chamber Concerto provide a strong point
of departure for testing this interpretation; for in this piece, as I have
argued, Berg evokes the spiritual realm as part of the secret program for
the work. The other
palindromes tend to support this Swedenborgian-Balzacian reading.
The palindrome in Der Wein, for instance, comes at the end
of the setting of the second Baudelaire poem.
This poem, unlike the the other two, could almost pass for a
description of the otherworldly experience of Wilfred and Minna in the
novel. In discussing the
work, Berg all but confirms this: in a letter dated 19 January 1932
Schoenberg asks Berg about the meaning of the retrograde at m. 142; Berg
reponds on 16 February 1932 that "the return of the retrograde
repetition after the IInd song is supposed to correspond to the
return from the realm of this song to that of the IIIrd
song, which is the same as that of the first.[64]
In other words, the first and third songs are in the earthly realm,
the second is in the heavenly one. The
palindrome of the Film Music from Lulu could also be viewed in
terms of the same general kind of mysticism: the events in the film could
be seen to play out Lulu's rebirth--her retreat from life and return to
it. This is, broadly
speaking, the same idea that lies at the heart of Schoenberg's Die
Jakobsleiter, in which disembodied souls wait in the spiritual realm
for rebirth in the physical one. Even
in Wozzeck, the work to which both Morgan and Jarman return so
often in their interpretations, it is possible to see evidience of
Balzac's novel. Besides the
opening scene with the Captain--in which the Captain seems to be even more
melancholy about the inevitable forward progress of time than Jarman would
have us believe Berg is--there are numerous references to Wozzeck's
"visions." If one
bears in mind that otherworldly visions can be both of heaven and of hell
(and Wilfred and Minna do visit hell at the end of their spiritual
experience), then Wozzeck can be understood not so much as hallucinating,
but rather as having uncommon access to the darker realms.
In almost every case Jarman presents, this reading is plausible if
one only allows that Wozzeck may really be seeing something; it may just
be that those around him are incapable of perceiving it.
Like a darker version of Gambara, Frenhofer, or Louis Lambert in
the Balzac novels, Wozzeck cannot get his head out of the sprirual world,
nor readily distinguish between this world and the other--a failing that
leads, as in the Balzac stories, to tragedy.[65] It
would be mistaken to argue, however, that every instance of a palindrome,
retrograde, or symmetrical structure in Berg's music offered a meaningful
interpretation in terms of Séraphita.
It is more likely that Berg had both a penchant for symmetrical
structures (as both Jarman and Morgan have shown) and a great love for
Balzac's novel. These two
tendencies may reinforce one another often in Berg's music, but they need
not do so in every instance to make the instances in which this does occur
meaningful; it is certainly possible that in one case a palindrome can
denote fate, while in another evoke the spiritual realm (or in the case of
the Chamber Concerto, both).[66]
Reading Berg's concern for temporality in his music in terms of Séraphita
tends to expand and reinforce Morgan's notion of circular form.
I remarked above that Morgan's emphasis on the forward drive of
many of Berg's retrograde sections unduly privileges the dynamic aspect.
If one posits that the dynamic drive that Morgan describes so
effectively constitutes the forward progress of chronological time, and
the symmetrical structures (the palindromes especially) constitute the
static, eternal temporality of heaven, then the dialectic played out
between the static and dynamic aspects of the music could be seen to
reflect the dialectic played out between the physical and spiritual realms
in Swedenborg's philosophy. If
symmetrical structures can be seen to evoke the spiritual realm at least
some of the time in Berg's music, then the question arises in regard to
exactly how it is that the notion of heaven is operative in the music
aesthetically. Are we to
understand Berg as representing heaven in his music? or are the pieces
constructed in such a way that they provide a vehicle for the spiritual
experience itself? When one
considers Berg's interest in mystical ideas along with the music and
theories of both Schoenberg and Hauer, it becomes clear that each composer
is fascinated with the spiritual realm while having a distinct manner of
invoking it.[67]
In the music of Josef Matthias Hauer, the twelve pitches of equal
temperament constitute a kind of twelve-tone universe; this twelve-tone
universe provides the only direct access to the spiritual realm.
Each piece of music for Hauer is a kind of contemplation of the
twelve-tone universe, and the value of a musical work is the spiritual
state it offers to the person engaging it as composer, performer, or
listener. For Hauer, then,
twelve-tone music does not represent the spiritual realm, it should
instead take one there. Schoenberg
had a similar conception of the role of music, but for him it was not the
twelve-tone universe that constituted the spiritual in music, but rather
the musikalische Gedanke. The
Gedanke resides in a realm outside of time and space--"as in
Swedenborg's heaven (described in Balzac's Séraphita)"--and
the composer, the genius who has the vision, is charged with rendering the
vision within the realm of the physical.
For Schoenberg, the Gedanke is not only outside of time and
space, it is also outside of style. Thus,
it does not matter whether the resulting music is tonal, atonal, or
twelve-tone; the only considerations in this regard are historical ones.
It is therefore just as possible for Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, or
Schoenberg to project the Gedanke of a work in whatever style is
historically appropriate. Unlike
Hauer, then, music that evokes the spiritual realm need not necessarily be
twelve-tone music. In
the context of the music and aesthetics of these two other composers,
Berg's fascination both with temporality in music and with the mystical
writing of Swedenborg is not exceptional.
What is different about Berg's music is that his music seems not to
be so much concerned with offering a vehicle for the spiritual experience
as much as representing such an experience.
It is the presence of secret programs in his music that set it
apart from the music of either Hauer or Schoenberg.[68]
For how is one to experience a spiritual realm in which characters
and their actions in the physical realm--incidents drawn from Berg's own
personal life--have already been placed?
If we return for a moment to the dialectic suggested above between
chronological, physical time and static, spiritual time, it is possible to
posit that Berg may in fact be offering us the representation of a world
in which time presses forward in the physical realm while the static
spiritual realm resides behind it. Considered from this point of view, the fact that unreal,
unlikely, and even grotesque events unfold in Lulu against the
backdrop of a structurally symmetrical design begins to suggest that
perhaps the opera is more optimistic about life than critics and scholars
have so far perceived it to be. No
matter how absurd the course of events in the physical realm may become,
Berg might be saying, the higher reality of the spiritual realm is always
there. Berg's
interest in general matters occult is also not exceptional for fin-de-siècle
Vienna, a culture in which occult ideas circulated widely.
Morgan's suggestion that Berg may have had Nietzsche's philosophy
in mind is probably accurate. But
Nietzsche's notion of the eternal return was likely blended with notions
of reincarnation, genius, and visions of the spiritual realm in ways of
which the philosopher would never have approved.[69]
As I have argued elsewhere, Schopenhauer's philosophy was
appropriated to mystical ends as well, and Wagner and Wagnerism played an
important role in promoting Schopenhauer's writing in Germany and Austria.[70]
Thus, embedded within the fin-de-siècle Vienna that usually
emerges from scholarly writing there is also another layer of cultural
activity, the sometimes even more colorful world of the Viennese occult
underground. Turn-of-the-century
Vienna was an extraordinary place . . . [1].
Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 13. [2].
Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 400 (Summer 1914): 2; cited in Janik and
Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna, 67. [3].
Along with the Janik and Toulmin book cited above, Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siècle
Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980) has
become a seminal work in fin-de-siècle Vienna scholarship.
Other important scholarly works include: William Johnston, The
Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press,
1972); William McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in
Austria (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972); and Edward Timms,
Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1986). A more
nostalgic picture of the period can be found in: Frederic Morton, A
Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1980) and Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989); Hilde Speil, Vienna's Golden
Autumn: From the Watershed Year 1866 to Hitler's Anschluss, 1938
(New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987); and Paul Hofmann, The
Viennese: Splendor, Twilight, and Exile (New York: Doubleday,
1988). [4].
Of the books cited above, for instance, only McGrath's mentions
Friedrich Eckstein. Eckstein
was a central figure on the Viennese occult scene and at various
points was in close contact with Freud, Mahler, Viktor Adler, and
especially Hugo Wolf. For
an account of Eckstein, see James Webb, The Occult Establishment
(La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1976), 41-47. [5].
Freud's relationship with Fliess as well as his interest in telepathy
are discussed in Peter Gay's biography, Freud: A Life for Our Time
(New York: Norton, 1988). [6].
The relationship between the two men is chronicled in Arnold
Schoenberg-Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures, and Documents,
ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch, trans. John C. Crawford (London: Faber and
Faber, 1984), see pp. 38-40. [7].
The Blaue Reiter Almanac, ed. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc,
new documentary edition, ed. Klaus Lankheit (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1974). Each
composer published a short song in the Almanac; Schoenberg's
famous essay, "The Relationship to the Text," was first
published in this volume as well. [8].
Arnold Schoenberg, "Gustav Mahler," in Style and Idea:
Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, rev. ed., ed. Leonard
Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1984), 471. Schoenberg
revised this essay somewhat in 1948. [9].
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, repr. ed.,
trans. M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977), 6. [10].
Sixten Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos (Abo: Academi, 1970). [11].
Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, 3rd. ed., ed.
Donald Mitchell, trans. Basil Creighton (London: John Murray, 1973),
188. [12].
Thought Forms was originally published in English in 1901.
Kandinsky worked from a German translation, Gedankenformen
(Leipzig, 1908); see Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos, 62-3 esp.
The Mahlers could easily have known this edition.
For the curious reader, there are six shades of green appearing
in a full-color chart that accompanies the book; the brightest green
represents "sympathy." [13].
Mahler's involvement in Viennese occult circles is discussed at some
length in McGrath, Dionysian Art; see especially Chapter Three,
"Aesthetes and Activists," 87-99. [14].
See my "The Sources of Schoenberg's 'Aesthetic Theology,'" 19th-Century
Music 19/3 (Spring 1996): 252-62 and "Schoenberg and the
Occult: Some Reflections of the Musical Idea," Theory and
Practice 17 (1992): 103-18. [15].
See my "The Music and Theories of Josef Matthias Hauer"
(Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Michigan, 1990).
Schoenberg and Hauer are considered together in my "The
Quest of the Absolute: Schoenberg, Hauer, and the Twelve-Tone
Idea," Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology 8/1
(Spring 1994): 157-77. [16].
See George Perle,"The Secret Program of the Lyric Suite,"
International Alban Berg Society Newsletter 5 (1977): 4-12;
Brenda Dahlen, "'Freundschaft, Liebe, und Welt': The Secret
Programme of the Chamber Concerto," in The Berg Companion,
ed. Douglas Jarman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990),
141-80; and Douglas Jarman, "Alban Berg, Wilhelm Fliess, and the
Secret Programme of the Violin Concerto," International Alban
Berg Society Newsletter 12 (1982): 5-11; reprinted in The Berg
Companion, 181-94. [17].
Berg's number mysticism has been dealt with in great detail in
Wolfgang Gratzer, Zur "wunderlichen Mystik" Alban Bergs:
Eine Studie (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 1993).
See also Peter Stadlen, "Berg's Cryptography," in Alban
Berg Symposium, Wien 1980, ed. Rudolf Klein, Alban Berg Studien,
Band 2 (Vienna: Universal, 1981), 171-80, and Jarman, "Alban
Berg." [18].
See, for instance, Robert Morgan's "The Eternal Return:
Retrograde and Circular Form in Berg," in Alban Berg:
Historical and Analytical Perspectives, ed. David Gable and Robert
Morgan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 111-49. Detailed discussions of palindromes in Berg's music arise
across the Berg secondary literature, but see especially Dave Headlam,
The Music of Alban Berg (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1996), Douglas Jarman, The Music of Alban Berg (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), and George
Perle, The Operas of Alban Berg: Volume One/Wozzeck (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1980) and Volume
Two/Lulu (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of
California Press, 1985). [19].
Douglas Jarman, Alban Berg: Wozzeck, Cambridge Opera Handbooks
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 63. [20].
Mischa Donat, "Mathematical Mysticism," The Listener
(2 April 1970), 458. [21].
Pierre Boulez, "Lulu," in his Orientations: Collected
Writings of Pierre Boulez, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Martin
Cooper (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 384. [22].
Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg, Master of the Smallest Link,
trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 14. [23].
See Perle's discussion of the Film Music in his Lulu, 150-57.
Figure 1 reproduces his Diagram 3, which appears on p. 152;
Perle reproduces Berg's original notes as Plate 7. [24].
Perle's discusses multiple roles in detail in his Lulu, 60-67. [25].
Douglas Jarman, Alban Berg: Lulu, Cambridge Opera Handbooks
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 56-7. [26].
See Berg's letter to Schoenberg of 7 August 1930, in The Berg-Schoenberg
Correspondence: Selected Letters, ed. Juliane Brand, Christopher
Hailey, and Donald Harris (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1987),
405-6. [27].
See Joan Allen Smith, "Interview with Eugene Wolf," International
Alban Berg Society Newsletter 13 (spring-summer 1985), 8.
As Perle has pointed out, the Lulu full score is
relatively successful on this count, though the Lulu Suite
score is even better while the Lulu piano/vocal score far worse
(see Perle, Lulu, 150). Of
the pieces discussed below, the palindrome in the Chamber Concerto is
visually symmetrical, that in the Lyric Suite (for perhaps
obvious reasons) is not. [28].
As Douglass Green has pointed out, the way in which the rhythmic
components are retrograded can be based either on a retrograde of the
durations themselves or on a retrograde of the attack points; see his
"The Allegro Mysterioso of Berg's Lyric Suite: Iso- and
Retrorhythms," Journal of the American Musicological Society
30 (1977): 507-16. With
regard to the palindromes considered in this section, Dave Headlam
observes that only the one from the Lyric Suite employs
attack-point retrograde; see his The Music of Alban Berg, 215. [29].
Robert Morgan gives a detailed accounting for these sections in his
"The Eternal Return," 125-28; see also Green, "The
Allegro Mysterioso." [30].
Eckstein's observations can be found in his Alte unnennbare Tage.
Erinnerungen siebzig Lehr- und Wanderjahren (Vienna, 1936), 105;
cited and excerpted in McGrath, Dionysian Art, 95. [31].
See my "The Music and Theories of Josef Matthias Hauer,"
83-98, for a more detailed treatment of Steiner's ideas and influence
in fin-de-siècle Vienna. [32].
See Gratzer, Zur "wunderlichen Mystik" Alban Bergs,
57-72, for an account of both composers' plans to write Séraphita
works. [33].
Schoenberg's copies of
Balzac in his personal library are preserved at the Arnold Schoenberg
Institute in Los Angeles. Séraphita
is contained in the volume Philosophische Erzählungen
(Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1910), which also contains Louis Lambert,
among other stories; see item marked B13 in the Institute collection. Schoenberg has underlined passages throughout Séraphita,
and a number of his crossings out and editing marks suggest that he
compared the German translation to the original French version.
There is a marginal note in Louis Lambert that indicates
that Schoenberg also read that stody very closely. [34].
Arnold Schoenberg, "Heart and Brain in Music," in Style
and Idea, 53. [35].
Arnold Schoenberg, "Composition with Twelve Tones (1)," in Style
and Idea, 223. [36].
See Karl Wörner, "Schönbergs Oratorium Die Jakobsleiter:
Musik zwischen Theologie und Weltanschauung," Schweizerische
Musikzeitung 105 (1965): 250-57 and 333-40; and my "Schoenberg
and the Occult" and "The Quest of the Absolute." [37].
An excerpt from the letter to Webern is given in H. F. Redlich, Alban
Berg: The Man and his Music (New York: Abelard-Schuman Ltd.,
1957), 65-6; the letter to Schoenberg appears in The Berg-Schoenberg
Correspondence, 134-6. [38].
Redlich, Alban Berg, 226. [39].
Gratzer, Zur "wunderlichen Mystik" Alban Bergs,
55-81. [40].
Gratzer suspects this of Berg (Zur "wunderlichen Mystik"
Alban Bergs, 76), and I have written the same about Schoenberg
("Schoenberg and the Occult," 106).
Gratzer is able to confirm that Webern did read some Swedenborg
directly, however. There
is a Swedenborg volume preserved in Schoenberg's personal library, but
many of the pages remain uncut. See
Clara Steuermann, "From the Archives: Schoenberg's Library
Catalog," Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 3/2
(1979): 218. [41].
Honoré de Balzac, Séraphita, trans. Clara Bell (New York:
Hippocrene Books, 1989), 147-8. [42].
Balzac, Séraphita, 143. [43].
See Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell [1758], trans. George
Dole (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1979), 129-32 and 145-8. [44].
Immanuel Kant, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, trans. and commentary
by John Manolesco (New York: Vantage Press, 1969).
Ernst Cassirer responded to such claims made by Swedenborgians
in his 1918 intellectual biography of Kant, Kant's Life and Thought,
trans. James Haden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). [45].
Adorno, Alban Berg, 23. [46].
Berg's open letter originally appeared as "Alban Bergs
Kammerkonzert für Geige und Klavier mit Begleitung von dreizehn Bläsern,"
Pult und Taktstock 2 (February/March 1925): 23-8.
It was republished in Willi Reich, Alban Berg: mit Bergs
eigenen Schriften und Beiträgen von Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno und
Ernst Krenek (Vienna: Herbert Reichner Verlag, 1937), 86-91.
English translations appear in Reich's, Alban Berg,
trans. Cornelius Cardew (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 143-48, as
well as in The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence, 334-7. [47].
Dahlen, "'Freundschaft Liebe und Welt.'" [48].
Headlam, The Music of Alban Berg, 226; see also Morgan,
"The Eternal Return," 132-33. [49].
Redlich, Alban Berg, 113.
While Redlich thinks of these repeated notes as striking the
midnight hour, Morgan might have taken the opportunity to support his
Nietzschean reading of Berg's palindromes by viewing these notes as
evoking the "Great Noontime," which arises in the
philosopher's later writings in connection with the eternal return. Morgan's reading is considered at length below. [50].
Dahlen, "'Freundschaft, Liebe, und Welt,'" 158.
Note that in German, the pitch B is called H, while Bb is
referred to as B; thus B here represents the H in the name.
Dahlen also finds most of the anagram SCHönBErG
(Eb-C-B-Bb-E-G) in the second horn and trombone parts, with B and E
from the first horn doubling for the required pitch classes. [51].
Dahlen, "'Freundschaft, Liebe, und Welt,'" 145. [52].
The details of this episode are recounted in H. H. Stuckenschmidt, Arnold
Schoenberg: His Life and Work, trans. Humphrey Searle (New York:
Schirmer, 1978), 93-97. [53].
The scope and format of this study does not permit me to present an
analysis of this movement in detail.
The reader is referred Dave Headlam's masterful analytical
description of this movement, and the piece generally, in his The
Music of Alban Berg, 217-41.
Headlam's Figure 5.1 (pp. 220-21) elegantly summarizes the way
in which Berg recapitulates material from the first two movements in
the third. [54].
For a magisterial survey of the role played by a rethinking of time
and space in music and the arts generally in the first half of the
twentieth century, see Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre:
Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists
(Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), 215-74
especially. [55].
Morgan, "The Eternal Return, 112. [57].
Morgan, "The Eternal Return," 133. [58].
Nietzsche refers this idea as "the greatest weight" in The
Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974),
273-74. Zarathustra, of
course, is the teacher of the eternal return; see Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books,
1961). [59].
Morgan, "The Eternal Return," 147. [60].
Morgan, "The Eternal Return," 148. [61].
Jarman, Wozzeck, 65-66. [62].
Jarman, Wozzeck, 68. [63].
Morgan, "The Eternal Return," 146. [64].
The Schoenberg-Berg Correspondence, 429 and 431. [65].
Dore Ashton has
written about the influence of these characters from Balzac's
philosophical novels--and especially those that appear in "The
Unknown Masterpiece"--on such as figures as Cézanne, Rilke, and
Picasso in her A Fable of Modern Art
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford, 1991).
The final chapter, "Arnold Schoenberg's Ascent,"
explores the composer's fascination for Séraphita. [66].
Dahlen writes:
"Both the large-scale palindromes in
Lulu
symbolize fate" ("'Liebe, Freundschaft un Welt,'" 147.
I have suggested above, however, that there may be more to the
Film Music palindrome that Dahlen indicates. [67].
The remainder of this paragraph briefly summarizes topics that are
dealt with at far greater length in my "The Quest of the
Absolute." [68].
With Hauer this is true without exception as far as I am aware; with
Schoenberg, it is accurate generally, since scholars have posited
secret programs for both the Piano Concerto, op. 42 (1942) and the
String Trio, op. 45 (1946). See,
for instance, Walter B. Bailey, "Oscar Levant and the Program for
Schoenberg's Piano Concerto," Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg
Institute 6/1 (1982): 56-79; and Willi Reich, Schoenberg: A
Critical Biography, trans. Leo Black (New York and Washington:
Praeger Publishers, 1971), 219, for an account of the relaltionship of
Schoenberg's near-fatal heart attack to the Trio. [69].
See McGrath, Dionysian Art, 87-99. [70].
See my "The Sources of Schoenberg's 'Aesthetic Theology.'"
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