210 Part III: Emigration Years
In his letter to Krenek, Adorno referred to their joint knowledge
of ‘the darkest secret’ associated with Berg’s death. He recalled the
confidential conversations of summer 1935 in Oxford when Krenek was
spending some time in Britain.^108 In his reply in January 1936, Krenek
responded to Adorno’s allusion, relating this secret to Lulu. He spoke
of the fateful nature of female beauty and its seductive power, the
destructive force of the femme fatale. ‘She was created’, he said by way
of summarizing the Prologue of the opera, ‘to bring disaster, to entice,
to seduce, to poison – and to murder, without its being noticed.’
The secret surrounding Berg’s death was the criticism that Morgen-
stern voiced three decades later, that it was partly Helene Berg’s fault
that her husband had contracted blood poisoning after her home-made
operation with the pair of scissors.^109 The other secret was the long-
lasting and passionate love affair between Berg and Hanna Fuchs, a
sister of Franz Werfel, who had been married to the Prague industrialist
Herbert Fuchs-Robettin since 1917. The affair had been marked by the
lovers’ self-denial, and this had resulted in great unhappiness. Berg
had left his secret mistress a meticulously annotated printed copy of
his Lyric Suite, dedicated to her. This was a piece of music he had
composed for her in 1925–6. In the passionate letters Berg wrote to her
between 1925 and 1934 he expressed his growing despair at their being
prevented from living their love for each other. In a letter in December
1928, he wrote: ‘And I feel ever more clearly, particularly in recent
times, how I am going downhill. In every respect! Or at least in all those
respects that might make life bearable for the likes of us. It would
be unnatural were it otherwise: we know precisely when my life came
to an end – to obtain a continuation by force was no more than
an experiment.’^110
According to Krenek, this secret love was already embedded in
motifs in Wozzeck, but it became much more pronounced in Lulu. With
Berg’s death it stood revealed: it was the impossibility of living a life
based on renunciation. Berg had spoken frankly enough in this letter to
Hanna of the hopelessness of his situation. He writes, for example, that
he is lying ‘buried’^111 in his flat in Trauttmannsdorffgasse. Both Adorno
and Krenek were familiar with these gloomy moods.^112 Both were
convinced that, in addition to the Lyric Suite, both the great operas
represent in different ways Berg’s attempts to express his loneliness and
despair. For example, Adorno’s first discussion in 1936 of the Lulu
Symphony in the music journal 23 refers to the retrograde form of the
ostinato: ‘Time passes and revokes itself and nothing points beyond
it but the gesture of those who love without hope.’^113
When Adorno started to come to terms with his loss of a teacher and
a friend, he did so, needless to say, in the form of a written reminiscence
of Berg as a man as well as an interpretation of his music. Scarcely
had he started this process than he wrote to Krenek with a remarkably
aggressive justification of his highly personal obituary of Berg.^114 He