Sounding the Frauenseele : Gender, Modernism, and Intertextuality in Alban Berg's "Uber die Grenzen," op. 4, no. 3

When scholars describe societal and intellectual trends in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that affected musical modernism, they often include technological innovation, urbanization, and positivism, among other important factors.¹ Frequently omitted from musicians' experience of modernity, however, is the changing situation of women, an omission that can obscure the important aspect of gender discourse from our understanding of modern music.² In fact, shifts in the circumstances and societal perception of women arguably stand as one of the most significant changes of the modern era. A vociferous intellectual and literary debate had raged from the late nineteenth century onward over the idea of woman—issues ranging from her role in society to her effect on masculine identity and from the negative power of her "metaphysical essence" to her embodiment of Nature.³ In Germanic lands this discourse came to be known as the Frauenfrage, or "woman question," and in various artistic and musical works the character and nature of woman was a deep-seated, if not explicit, concern.⁴

How can one argue that gender discourse affected the changing musical aesthetic? Certainly, the characterization or description of woman in a song or opera offers symbolic material for analysis. But what can we say about how an ideological discourse inflects a musical sound and its expression? Alban Berg, through the record of his reading in his books and journals, offers an exceptional insight into one modernist composer's perception and negotiation of the discourse on woman. With a study of Berg's reading of the Frauenfrage I specifically discuss the intertextual impact of its ideology on the musical style of the third song of op. 4, "Über die Grenzen" (Beyond the Boundaries). The idea of intertextuality in music, or the interaction between language, music, and other expressive and symbolic forms, can illuminate complex strands of ideological production in a musical design. Intertextuality goes beyond questions of musical text painting, or the totality of a piece's narrative, and instead situates the local expression of musical gesture in response to the intellectual discursive environment that helped foster its inception, highlighting the interaction between rhythm, pitch, texture, and timbre. Why do particular sounds arise to fulfill the creative impulse of the composer? To study the possible impact of the Frauenfrage on this process, I look into Berg's discursive imagination.

Berg's confidence in his knowledge about woman is apparent in a letter he wrote to his American friend Frida Semler in July 1907 when he was twenty-two years old.⁵ In it he discusses his knowledge and expertise in judging a woman's character, and he assures her that despite his age he had already developed a discerning knowledge of the "soul of woman" (Frauenseele). Previous to the passage quoted here, Berg expressed his excitement about a play Semler had recently written and her other college experiences.

[Your personality] is far beyond the best of your female compatriots—and—I can calmly say—stands above the most noble (an expression from Altenberg) of your fellow women!! This looks like only idle flattery: but it is not. It is but a matter of experience. I imagine, and I know I am not wrong, that I know human nature in general, and the soul of woman in particular. This knowledge I have learned less from letters than from personal experience and perspective; and I can say, despite my youth with regard to these things that in these matters I have never been mistaken—on the contrary, I have always gotten it right.

[Die Sie weit über die besten Ihrer Landsmanninnen—und—ich kann ja ruhig sagen—über die edelsten (das ist so ein Ausdruck von Altenberg) Ihrer Geschlechtsgenossinnen stellt!! Das schaut nun aus als...