Alban Berg and his World (review)

As the long-standing, monolithic certainties of twentieth-century musicology buckle and crack under the strain of recent scrutiny and scepticism, with some already in ruins and others teetering on the brink, Alban Berg’s place in the historical narrative has never seemed more problematic. Until recently it was reassuringly straightforward (for many) to pigeonhole him as a member of the Viennese triumvirate that led the modernist revolution in pitch organization, on the basis of his allegiance to, and development of, the compositional theories and methods of his mentor Schoenberg. As Christopher Hailey observes, however, in his preface to this welcome and valuable collection of essays and source materials, Berg ‘has never fit comfortably into the narrative of the “Second Viennese School”. His expressive Romanticism with its nostalgic references to tonality, his attachment to the preoccupations of fin-de-siècle Vienna, and the sheer sensual appeal of his music have always made him suspect to doctrinaire modernists’ (p. ix).

The crux of the problem lies in the restrictive way that this ‘narrative’ has been framed. Hailey argues that the post-war obsession with harmony and technical innovation has circumscribed research into Berg’s achievement. He seeks to distance Berg from Schoenberg’s propaganda and to reposition him within a broader and more illuminating cultural context. Describing him as ‘so very passive in his resistance’ to his teacher, Hailey claims that Berg should not be understood as a mere acolyte who played a supporting role in helping to realize Schoenberg’s vision. Much that is distinctive and significant about Berg’s music is rendered peripheral when set against the conventional (yet preposterously overstated) narrative of a historically necessary evolution from tonality through atonality to serialism. It makes more sense in historical terms, Hailey contends, to regard Berg as ‘the pivotal figure’ in a richer tradition of Viennese musical modernism that goes far beyond issues of pitch construction. Berg’s Wozzeck and Lulu, for instance, should not be defined primarily by their ‘atonality’ or ‘twelve-tone serialism’. As enduringly successful stage works they take pride of place in the last great flowering of commercially viable opera composition, which may be taken to begin with Strauss’s Salome and Elektra and to fade away with the arrival of ‘talkies’ during the 1930s. In this context Berg fits more convincingly into a lineage that includes Schreker, Zemlinsky, Korngold, and many other Viennese composers who managed to make a living out of opera during the Weimar Republic.

Hailey does not limit his revisionist project to opera. In the opening chapter, ‘Berg’s Worlds’, he reappraises the composer’s entire aesthetic outlook by examining his relation to the Viennese cultural luminaries of his youth. Especially revealing in this respect are twelve volumes of notebooks, entitled ‘Von der Selbsterkenntnis’ (On Self-Knowledge, 1903^7), in which the young Berg jotted down quotations and aphorisms from contemporary and classical literature. Over two hundred authors are represented, testifying not only to Berg’s bourgeois education and Innenstadt attitudes but also to the intellectual preoccupations and aspirations of his generation. His idols at that time were the satirical writer Karl Kraus, the modernist poet Peter Altenberg, the anti-ornamental architect Adolf Loos, and, above all, Gustav Mahler. It is Hailey’s task to demonstrate that these and other representatives of the fin de siècle conditioned Berg’s artistic Bildung for the rest of his life. He remained firmly attached to the wacky occult and erotic ideologies of his youth and to the hyper-expressive aesthetic of Gurrelieder and Mahler’s symphonies. In consequence, Hailey concludes, to understand Berg fully we need to construct a broader and more inclusive concept of early twentieth-century Viennese music:

It is a curse that harmonic language—the evolution toward atonality and serialism—has become such an exclusive arbiter of musical ‘progress’ and that this tonal/atonal divide has blinded—and deafened—audiences, critics, and historians to many more obvious shared relationships between Schoenberg...