June 23, 2022 33Alban Berg’s Dissonances
George B. StaufferBerg
by Bryan Simms and Charlotte Erwin.
Oxford University Press, 514 pp., $49.95On the day before Christmas in 1935,
the Austrian composer Alban Berg was
pronounced dead in a Viennese hospi-
tal for indigents. The cause of death
was blood poisoning from abscesses,
together with an immune system weak-
ened by powerful medications for
asthma and other ailments that he had
taken for years. Berg’s opera Wozzeck
(1925) had brought him fame through-
out Europe, but his much- anticipated
Lulu, based on Frank Wedekind’s
scandalous Lulu plays, lay incomplete.
After six years of labor, he had man-
aged to finish a short score of the entire
opera and to revise and orchestrate acts
1 and 2. But he had stopped at bar 268
of act 3, leaving a thousand measures
or so to be scored.
Berg’s publisher, Universal Edition,
had invested 14,000 schillings in Lulu
and was eager to see it completed. In
anticipation of a premiere in Zurich—
Berg’s music had been labeled “degen-
erate” by the Nazis, and Lulu could not
be performed in Berlin as planned—
the firm approached his teacher and
lifelong mentor, Arnold Schoenberg,
to finish act 3. Schoenberg initially
agreed but changed his mind once he
saw the score. Universal then reached
out to two other composers in Berg’s
circle, Anton Webern and Alexander
Zemlinsky, but they, too, declined.
Disappointed but not deterred, Univer-
sal moved forward with the premiere,
and on June 2, 1937, it unveiled Lulu
in truncated form at the Zurich Opera,
with acts 1 and 2 followed by two or-
chestral excerpts from act 3 that Berg
had arranged before his death as part
of a symphonic preview.
After hearing the performance,
Berg’s formerly reserved but sud-
denly empowered wife, Helene, force-
fully declared the opera complete and
proceeded to dedicate what turned
out to be an extended widowhood—
forty- one years—to making certain
that the unfinished act 3 remained
unfinished. And in this decision she
had the strongest support possible:
Berg himself, with whom she claimed
to be in continual contact through
anthroposophical conversations. He-
lene henceforth listed her profession
as Komponistenwitwe (composer’s
widow) and insisted that the room in
which Berg had composed Lulu re-
main, like the opera itself, untouched.
Thus began the Lulu Wa rs. A f ter
skirmishing with Helene on and off for
almost thirty years, the pro- completion
camp, led by the Austrian émigré con-
ductor and musicologist Hans Redlich,
finally established the International
Alban Berg Society in New York in
1966, with the covert goal of finishing
the opera. It boasted a distinguished
board that included the composers Ben-
jamin Britten, Darius Milhaud, and
Luigi Dallapiccola, with Igor Stravinsky
serving as president. Helene responded
by launching the Alban Berg Founda-
tion, a Vienna- based organization com-
mitted to preserving Lulu in its abridged
form. She reserved the right to preside
at all its meetings, select its board mem-
bers, and veto their decisions.Meanwhile, Universal secretly en-
gaged the Austrian composer Frie-
drich Cerha to finish act 3, a task he
completed in 1974. Yet the opera could
not yet be performed in its entirety,
since Helene, by then eighty- nine and
still insisting that she was constantly
in touch with her husband, stood in
the way. It was not until 1976 that
she joined him in death, at last mak-
ing possible a performance of the full
Lulu. It was finally presented with
Cerha’s third act at the Paris Opéra in
1979, under the baton of Pierre Boulez,
forty- four years after Berg’s passing.
Cerha’s scoring was deemed a success,
and the completed version of Lulu
has become the standard in modern
performances.
This and many other twists and turns
in the life and afterlife of Alban Berg
are covered in exacting detail in a new
biography by Bryan Simms, professor
emeritus of musicology at the Univer-
sity of Southern California, and Char-
lotte Erwin, former head of Archives
and Special Collections at the Califor-
nia Institute of Technology, published
as part of Oxford University Press’s
Master Musicians Series. As they stress
at the start, Berg lived through a pe-
riod of extraordinary social change.
He began his career in fin- de- siècle
Vienna at a moment of great optimism.
But he served in the Austro- Hungarian
army in World War I and experienced
its disillusioning outcome firsthand,
and he lived to see the debasement ofthe arts in Germany under the Nazi re-
gime. How he coped with these devel-
opments by creating an inner world of
fantasy and escape is one of the main
themes of Simms and Erwin’s book.Berg was born into an affluent Vi-
ennese family in 1885. He showed few
signs of musical talent as a youth aside
from informal piano lessons, reading
through the scores of songs and operas,
and playing four- hand arrangements
of orchestral and chamber works with
his sister, Smaragda. When he was sev-
enteen, he fathered a daughter with
Marie Scheuchl, a domestic servant al-
most twice his age. Berg sent her a re-
morseful letter but then took no further
responsibility for the child. Helene,
whom he married in 1911, learned of
her existence only on the day of Berg’s
funeral, when the thirty- three- year- old
Albine Scheuchl Wittula knocked on
the door of the Berg household and in-
troduced herself.
As a young man, Berg had few pro-
fessional ambitions. He was working
indifferently in a training program
for accountants in 1904 when his sib-
lings suggested that he respond to an
ad offering composition lessons by
Schoenberg. Thus began a compli-
cated teacher–student relationship that
ended only with Berg’s death. He stud-
ied formally with Schoenberg for seven
years, following a rigorous course of
instruction that started with traditionalharmony and counterpoint and then
moved on to the composition of small
forms: songs, piano pieces, and cham-
ber music. His “graduation pieces”—
the Piano Sonata, Op. 1; Four Songs,
Op. 2; and String Quartet, Op. 3, com-
pleted between 1908 and 1910 —were
cast in a late- Romantic mold, despite
their extended tonal language, with its
sharply clashing chords and unortho-
dox scales.
In the meantime, Schoenberg’s own
musical idiom evolved, moving more
and more toward atonality. His increas-
ingly abstract, dissonant writing was
picked up by Berg and his fellow stu-
dent Webern, and it strongly influenced
Berg’s Altenberg Songs, Op. 4, five or-
chestral settings of nihilistic postcard
aphorisms by Peter Altenberg. When
they were performed along with new
works by Schoenberg and Webern in
Vienna in March 1913, a riot broke
out and the police had to be called in
to stop the concert. (Stravinsky’s Rite
of Spring encountered a similar re-
sponse in Paris two months later.) The
so- called Scandal Concert marked the
start of the Second Viennese School,
with Schoenberg and his two disciples
as its leading representatives.
Berg still lacked widespread recogni-
tion, however, and his three- year stint
in the army from 1915 to 1918—one
year in active duty, two years at a desk
job in Vienna because of a severe respi-
ratory condition—did little to change
his prospects. Sensing that he had no
future as a composer, he took up free-
lance writing, which laid the founda-
tion for his subsequent lectures and
commentaries on his own music.
Berg’s fortunes changed drasti-
cally in 1922 with the completion of
Wozzeck, based on Georg Büchner’s
play about Johann Christian Woyzeck,
an impoverished former soldier who
stabbed his lover to death in a jeal-
ous rage. Berg’s musical setting of the
play, the first atonal opera, harnessed
the full expressive power of atonality
to portray Wozzeck’s degradation and
mental decline. Audiences were both
stunned and awed by the scenes of Ma-
rie’s murder and Wozzeck’s drowning
in the lake. The reviews of the 1925
Berlin premiere were mixed, but even
the attacks, such as this one cited in
Nicolas Slonimsky’s marvelous Lex-
icon of Musical Invective, made for
lively reading:As I left the State Opera last night
I had a sensation not of coming
out of a public institution, but out
of an insane asylum. On the stage,
in the orchestra, in the hall, plain
madmen. Among them, in defiant
squads, the shock troops of ato-
nalists, the dervishes of Arnold
Schoenberg. Wozzeck by Alban
Berg was the battle slogan.... In
Berg’s music there is not a trace
of melody. There are only scraps,
shreds, spasms, and burps.... I
regard Alban Berg as a musical
swindler and a musician danger-
ous to the community. One should
go even further. Unprecedented
events demand new methods. We
must seriously pose the question as
to what extent musical profession
can be criminal. We deal here, inHelene and Alban Berg; illustration by Grant ShafferStauffer 33 35 .indd 33 5 / 25 / 22 3 : 39 PM