84 Part II: A Change of SceneKolisch Quartet in January 1927 in Vienna; and the Violin Concerto,
which he dedicated to the memory of Manon Gropius, a daughter of
Alma Mahler’s, who had died at the age of eighteen. The so-called Lulu
Symphony that resulted from the reworking of extracts from Act 3 of
the unfinished opera Lulu was performed for the first time in Berlin in
November 1934. Once again Kleiber conducted, and the performance
was a great success. The opera itself was not performed until June 1937
in Zurich. Its composer, however, had already died of blood poisoning
on 23 December 1935, at the age of fifty.
The intensity of the relationship between Adorno and Berg can be
seen from their extensive correspondence (amounting to 136 letters)
between 1925 and 1935. An exemplary passage illustrating the rever-
ence Adorno felt for Berg can be found in the letter of 30 March 1926:
‘You must be aware that there is no one to whom I feel more deeply,
definitely and gratefully attached than to you; and I could not imagine
anything, absolutely anything, that would make me wish to part from
you.’^4 After studying for six months in Vienna, Adorno had taken to
addressing Berg with the words ‘Dear master and teacher’.^5
Adorno had met Berg in person in the early summer of 1924, at
a time when he was completing his doctorate. The occasion was the
premiere of Berg’s Three Fragments from Wozzeck, op. 7, for voices
and orchestra, in the context of the Frankfurt Festival of the Allgemeiner
Deutscher Musikverein. The concert was a success, as was a perform-
ance of the entire opera some time afterwards, something that caused
Berg some unease. According to Adorno, Berg had said that, if a mod-
ern piece of music could win the audience over so directly, there must
be something wrong with it.^6
The Frankfurt performance of the Fragments was conducted by
Hermann Scherchen, who was always eager to promote modern music
and whom Adorno already knew well.^7 So Adorno asked Scherchen
to introduce him to Berg. ‘Within minutes’, he reported later, it was
arranged ‘that I would go to Vienna to study with him; I had to wait
until after my graduation in July. In the event, my move to Vienna was
delayed until the beginning of January 1925.’^8
A few months after making Berg’s acquaintance, Adorno wrote
a brief study occasioned by the premiere of Wozzeck. After his first
extended stay in Vienna, his review was published in the December
issue of the Musikblätter des Anbruch. This was his first attempt to
discuss Berg’s music as a highly individual continuation of the type of
composition created by Arnold Schoenberg. Before he put pen to paper
Berg had asked him ‘not to write in a difficult manner, but in a gener-
ally comprehensible way.’^9 In vain: in a linguistically complex text,
Adorno interprets the particular motives and symphonic scope of Berg’s
music by providing an account of his entire extant output; the early
piano sonatas, the String Quartet, the Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, as
well as the Three Pieces, op. 6, and the Chamber Concerto. Although,