4. The ‘Kammerkonzert’ and ‘Lyrische Suite’.

Though some of the themes in Wozzeck contain all 12 notes (the passacaglia of Act 1 scene v, for example, or the second theme of the variations of Act 3 scene i), the opera is not in any sense a 12-note composition. The two works that followed – the Kammerkonzert for violin, piano and 13 wind instruments and the Lyrische Suite for string quartet – are transitional, in that they mark Berg's gradual adoption of the 12-note system.

The Kammerkonzert, more than any other work, demonstrates Berg's love of intricate formal designs and his interest in using apparently abstract, mathematical schemes as structural determinants. It is, perhaps, both the most forbidding and one of the most fascinating works in his output. The scherzando first movement, for solo piano and wind, superimposes variation and sonata forms. A theme on the wind instruments alone is followed by a set of five variations: the first for solo piano is a reprise of the original theme; the next three, based on the retrograde, the inversion and the retrograde inversion of the theme respectively, constitute a development section; the last variation is a recapitulation of the original theme in canon. The design of the theme itself, with the harmonic structure of its constituent sections systematically based on chains of major 3rds, perfect 4ths, semitones, minor 3rds and whole tones, demonstrates Berg's abiding interest in interval cycles. (Material based on such interval cycles is a constant feature of his music from the op.2 songs to Lulu and the Violin Concerto.) The adagio second movement, for solo violin and wind, is based on a series of 12-note themes – employed as melodic elements rather than as 12-note rows – that determine the harmonic structure. Formally the movement consists of two halves, the first of which is an ABA structure (in which the second A is the inversion of the first) while the whole of the second half is the retrograde of the first. Despite their very different characters and forms (and indeed playing time) the first two movements have a number of proportional features in common, notably their overall number of bars and the structural break at the centre of each. The reasons for this structural relationship – which, as the profusion of formal and proportional sketches for the piece show, Berg went to enormous trouble in order to achieve – becomes clear in the finale.

In Act 3 scene iii of Wozzeck Berg had written a piece in which rhythm was the chief organizational feature and in which leitmotifs and material heard earlier reappeared rhythmically transformed by the application of a single ‘Hauptrhythmus’. The last movement of the Kammerkonzert radically extends this idea. In terms of pitch the movement consists entirely of simultaneous reprise of the first two movements; the thematic identity and the definition of the formal structure (a fusion of sonata and rondo) of the movement thus rest not on pitch but on rhythmic elements, most notably on the handling of three independent rhythmic patterns (one of which has already appeared as the ‘Hauptrhythmus’ of the second movement and now generates a variety of rhythmic cells) which are superimposed on the existing pitch material.

The Kammerkonzert is the first of Berg's instrumental works in which important structural elements are determined by extra musical programmatic considerations. Berg himself touched on some of these in his dedicatory ‘open letter’ to Schoenberg, in which he revealed that the motto theme which opens the work is built of the musical letters in the names ‘ArnolD SCHönBErG’, ‘Anton wEBErn’ and AlBAn BErG’, and that the number three, representing the three members of the Schoenberg school, was with its multiples a factor determining the length of sections, the metronome marks, the nature of the instrumental body and many other aspects of the work. Berg's own sketches, however, show that the programmatic elements in the work extend far beyond those discussed in his ‘open letter’ and that, among many other things, each of the variations of the first movement (entitled ‘Friendship’ in the sketches) depicts a different member of the Schoenberg circle, the second movement (‘Love’), with its quotation from Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande and its use of a musical cipher based on the name ‘Mathilde’, portrays the relationship between Schoenberg and his wife, and the kaleidoscopic last movement portrays ‘the World’.

From the Kammerkonzert onwards all Berg's works have such ‘secret’ programmes, by means of which private, subjective elements – most often numbers that he regarded as having a particular significance or musical ciphers derived from the letters in people's names – are transformed into objective compositional constraints. In this, as in other respects, Wozzeck had marked a turning-point in his career. In Wozzeck he had set himself the task of imposing ‘abstract’ instrumental forms on an existing narrative in such a way that those forms would embody the largest and smallest details of the drama while at the same time retaining their integrity and autonomy as self-sufficient structures. The comparable task in the post-Wozzeck, non-operatic works would be to devise ‘secret’ narratives that would give rise to and be compatible with similarly ‘abstract’ formal structures.

Thanks to George Perle's discovery in 1976 of a score in which Berg had annotated the details of the autobiographical programme, the Lyrische Suite, the work following the Kammerkonzert, is the most completely documented demonstration of the extent to which such extra-musical considerations act as compositional determinants. Scholars had known that some kind of programmatic reference occasionally occurred in Berg's music long before the publication of Perle's discovery – Willi Reich's description of the programme of the Violin Concerto and Berg's own ‘open letter’ on the Kammerkonzert had made that much clear – and such things as the sequence of tempo directions that head the movements of the Lyrische Suite (Allegretto giovale, Andante amoroso, Allegro misterioso and Trio estatico, Adagio appassionato, Presto delirando, Largo desolato) had suggested the presence of some extra-musical programme. As early as 1957 Hans Redlich had hinted at ‘the enigmatic undercurrents of Berg's life and the fascinating contradictions of his personality’ (Redlich, Eng. trans., 217), yet such speculation was, by its nature, unprovable. The publication of Perle's articles on the annotated score supplied, for the first time, concrete evidence of the programme of what Adorno had called ‘a latent opera’. The annotated score reveals that the six movements of the Lyrische Suite document the love affair between Berg and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the wife of a wealthy Prague businessman and the sister of Franz Werfel, from their first meeting (Allegretto giovale), through a portrait of Hanna and her two children (Andante amoroso), their declaration of love (Allegro misterioso – Trio estatico) and a subsequent Adagio appassionato, to a depiction of the ‘horrors and pains’ of the following days and nights (Presto delirando) and an acceptance of the affair's hopelessness in the final Largo desolato, a secret setting of Stefan George's translation of Baudelaire's De profundis clamavi.

The most remarkable aspect of Berg's secret programme for the Lyrische Suite is not so much the presence or the nature of the programme itself – Janáček's Second Quartet, written three years after the Berg, has a similar one – but the extent to which Berg transforms details of this programme into elements that determine not simply the mood and character but the technical and formal details of the music. Thus, as in the Kammerkonzert, the names of the main actors are converted into musical notation, so that the most important musical material of the work – a four-note collection consisting of the notes A, B , B, F – is derived from the initials of Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs, while both the formal proportions and the metronome markings of the whole work are based on the numbers 23 and 10, which Berg believed had a particular significance for himself and Hanna respectively.

The design of the Allegro misterioso, almost every aspect of which is determined by extra-musical considerations, may be taken as an example of Berg's methods. In the annotated score the movement is headed by the date ‘20.5.25’ – presumably the date when Alban and Hanna first declared their love. The choice of note row, row forms and transpositions in the outer 12-note sections is limited to those forms that keep the four notes of the A–B –B–F cell next to one another; the movement is an ABA structure in which the B section is a Trio estatico and the second A a shortened retrograde version of the first, the negation metaphorically associated with such retrogrades in Berg's music being explicitly indicated by the annotation ‘Vergessen Sie es …!’ (‘Forget it … !’) above the point at which the music starts to run backwards; the proportions of the movement are based on multiples of 23, Berg's fateful number, with the first Asection having 69 bars, the trio 23 and the reprise of A 46 bars, while the metronome marks are based on multiples of Hanna's number 10. Even the instrumentation, which requires the four strings to play muted throughout (even when playing fortissimo) as a symbol of the secret, repressed nature of Alban and Hanna's love for each other, is determined by programmatic considerations.

In form the work is, as usual with Berg, labyrinthine. The tempos of the six movements from a gradual expanding wedge in which fast movements, each faster than the last, alternate with slow movements, each slower than the last. Within this scheme each movement quotes (sometimes at length) from its predecessor. The sixth movement, which dies away into nothingness, quotes not only from the fifth but also from the first, and thus closes the circle.

Berg's earliest 12-note composition had been a setting of the short poem Schliesse mir die Augen beide, a text he had already set before and chose to reset using the row he was to use in the Lyrische Suite, whose first movement became his first extended 12-note composition. Though only the first and last movements of the quartet are entirely 12-note (the outer sections of the third movement and the central part of the fifth are also 12-note, the remainder being free), the work already demonstrates the features that distinguish Berg's handling of the 12-note system from that of Schoenberg or Webern. The first movement alone has what, in terms of interval sequence (that is to say, in orthodox Schoenbergian terms), are three different rows. All three are, however, related harmonically, in that their hexachords are identical in content. Each hexachord is a rearrangement of a segment of the cycle of 5ths, and as the work progresses these diatonic collections become increasingly chromatic as more notes are exchanged between the hexachords.

The third and fifth movements also continue, and expand into new areas, the rhythmic explorations of Wozzeck and the Kammerkonzert, the fifth by imposing on many passages a durational formula which determines the presentation of material in the tenebroso sections, the third by using, as the main rhythmic determinants of the outer sections, two rhythmic cells that arise from a particular method of partitioning the row according to its registral presentation. The use of more than one row and the derivation of both new rows and rhythmic patterns through registral presentation of a basic set were to be features of Lulu. Equally significant for Berg's later development is the large-scale temporal organization of the Lyrische Suite. The fact that the metronome markings of the different movements share a common numerical basis (as multiples of 23 or 10) is not simply a conceit but has the effect of interlinking the different tempos in the work. Berg had employed such interlinked tempos (which make it possible to move from one precise metronomic tempo to another by a process that has since become known as ‘metric modulation’) in sections of Wozzeck and had even, in sketches for the Kammerkonzert, experimented with the possibility which such relationships afford of having different layers of music moving at different tempos simultaneously. Such methods of organizing tempos, metres and rhythms underpin large sections, and even whole scenes, of Lulu.

Berg, Alban