From Philosophy Lecturer to Advanced Student 209Helene Berg ‘sterilized a pair of scissors in boiling water and lanced
and drained the abscess herself’.^102 A few days after this reckless action
the first symptoms of blood poisoning appeared. During the night of
17 December 1935, Berg had to be admitted to the Rudolf hospital. The
blood transfusions he received there were in vain. His superstitious
hope that his condition would improve by the 23rd was disappointed.^103
‘About ten minutes after midnight, Helene Berg, her face distorted with
grief, came out with her sister, wringing her hands, while her sister
stood on the steps and announced [to Berg’s many friends who had
gathered]: “It is finished”.’^104 In the early afternoon of 28 December
Alban Berg, whose death mask had already been taken by Anna Mahler,
was buried in the cemetery in Hietzing. Only a few months before, he
had celebrated his fiftieth birthday. His second great opera, Lulu, a
musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s tragedies Earth-Spirit and
Pandora’s Box (a subject Adorno and, separately, Morgenstern had
drawn his attention to), remained unfinished.^105 Berg had completed the
composition, but had left the orchestration unfinished; the third act
existed in part only as a short score. In the year of his death Berg had
completed the Violin Concerto, a commission from the violinist Louis
Krasner which would now become his requiem. According to Adorno,
on their walks together, the composer had anticipated his own death
with a kind of playful self-irony by imagining different obituaries that
remember him as an ‘indigent, but significant composer’.
Having returned from Oxford, Adorno was spending the Christmas
holidays in Frankfurt when he learned of Berg’s tragic death from Ernst
Krenek. ‘I cannot tell you how this last blow has affected me’, he wrote
to his friend in Vienna. In view of the grotesque chain of events in
which a relatively harmless illness had led to sudden death, he found
the thought unbearable that
material circumstances were to blame for Berg’s death. We must
think of it in very concrete terms: if he had not wanted to save
on doctor’s fees, he would certainly have gone to consult one,
particularly since he tended to be rather over-anxious by nature.
The fact that he did not venture to do so and that he had to weigh
up the cost is what resulted in his death. The idea that the life of
a productive force like Berg depends on such considerations is
enough to drive one to the most radical conclusions about existing
society.^106The fact that Berg ‘succumbed to an illness he misjudged and neglected,
that he preferred not to see the danger or considered it exorcized by the
date of the 23rd, the fateful number of his eccentric mysticism, that was
the final melancholic subterfuge of an existence that for a half-century
(as the subterfuge of a desperate man) had been able to maintain itself
in music between sleep and death.’^107