Abstract
‘Two things emerged clearly even from Berg’s earliest compositions, however awkward they may have been: first, that music was to him a language, and that he really expressed himself in that language; and secondly: overflowing warmth of feeling.’ Thus wrote Arnold Schoenberg in 1936 in a memoir intended for, but not printed in, Willi Reich’s 1937 memorial volume for Alban Berg.1 And later, in 1949: ‘when I saw the compositions he showed me—songs in a style between Hugo Wolf and Brahms—I recognized at once that he was a real talent.’2
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Notes
This was later printed in a revised and abridged version of that memorial volume (see note 8): Willi Reich, Alban Berg (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1963); English trans. Cornelius Cardew (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), pp. 28–30.
Hans Ferdinand Redlich, Alban Berg: Versuch einer Würdigung (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1957), p. 328.
See Rosemary Hilmar, ‘Alban Berg’s Studies with Schoenberg’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, vol. 8, no. 1 (June 1984), pp. 7–29.
Willi Reich, ‘Alban Berg’, Die Musik, vol. 22 (February 1930), pp. 347–53.
Willi Reich, Alban Berg: mit Bergs eigenen Schriften und Beiträgen van Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno und Ernst Krenek (Vienna: Herbert Reichner Verlag, 1937).
Frida Semler Seabury, ‘1903 and 1904’, International Alban Berg Society Newsletter, no. 1 (December 1968), pp. 3–6; Donald Harris, ‘Berg and Miss Frida: further Recollections of his Friendship with an American College Girl’, Alban Berg Symposion Wien 1980: Tagungsbericht, ed. Rudolf Klein, Alban Berg Studien, vol. 2 (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1981), pp. 198–208.
Nicholas Chadwick, ‘Berg’s Unpublished Songs in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek’, Music and Letters, vol. 52 (1971), pp. 123–40.
Rosemary Hilmar, Katalog der Musikhandschriften, Schriften und Studien im Fond Alban Berg und der weiteren handschriftlichen Quellen im Besitz der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Alban Berg Studien, vol. 1 (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1980).
Alban Berg, Jugendlieder, vol. 1 [1901–1904] (Vienna: Universal Edition, no. 18143, 1986); vol. 2 [1904–08] (Vienna: Universal Edition, no. 18144, 1987).
See Mark DeVoto, ‘Alban Berg’s “Marche Macabre”’, Perspectives of New Music, vol. 22 (fall–winter 1983, spring–summer 1984), pp. 430–31, ex. 20.
Stuckenschmidt attempted to show a personal connection between Berg’s sequence of 1909 and Debussy’s use of the same sequence in no. 4 of his Six épigraphes antiques of 1914; see H.H. Stuckenschmidt, ‘Debussy or Berg? The Mystery of a Chord Progression’, Musical Quarterly, vol. 51 (1965), pp.453–9. A more likely antecedent, if there was any, for Debussy’s sequence would be Ravel’s Le Gibet (from Gaspard de la nuit) of 1909;
see Walter Piston, Harmony, fourth edition, rev. Mark DeVoto, (London: Victor Gollancz, 1978), p. 513.
Alban Berg, A. Schönberg: Gurrelieder: Führer (Grosse Ausgabe) (Vienna: Universal Edition no. 3695, 1913).
Quoted in Rosemary Hilmar, Alban Berg: Leben und Wirken in Wien bis zu seinen ersten Erfolgen als Komponist (Vienna: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachf., 1978), p. 97.
This piano-vocal score was reprinted in René Leibowitz, ‘Alban Berg’s Five Orchestra Songs’, Musical Quarterly, vol. 34 (1948), pp. 487–511. When the piano-vocal score of the complete cycle was published in 1953, the Menschen score, with some simplification, was incorporated into it. Berg’s draft for the Menschen score is in the Archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna.
J.B. Foerster, Der Pilger, quoted in Konrad Vogelsang, Alban Berg: Leben und Werk (Berlin: Max Hesses Verlag, 1959), pp. 17–18.
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© 1989 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Devoto, M. (1989). Berg the Composer of Songs. In: Jarman, D. (eds) The Berg Companion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09056-3_3
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