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Twelve Ways of Looking at Alban Berg

All prose passages quoted from Christopher Hailey, “Berg’s Worlds”, in Alban Berg and His World, Princeton University Press (2010).

1

Berg was a child of an age in which home libraries, the clutter of treasured possessions, and the admonitory gaze of hallowed figures peering down from walls or bookcases reflected a world of interdependent, overlapping social, cultural, and historical sureties. Berg’s social psyche was predicated upon the pervasive imbrications of this collective order; his moral compass was set by figures who challenged its authenticity. (6)

2

He himself was not a scintillating conversationalist, but was content to sit listening in the background, a tendency exacerbated by his physical self-consciousness. His height was an embarrassment in a world of short men. Moreover, vain as he was, he spent a lifetime cultivating a sensitive, sensuous mouth, whose half-closed lips concealed an awkward and silly gap between his front teeth that undermined his studied likeness to Oscar Wilde. To the acute awareness of his size and appearance were added a perception of internal frailty: he had chronic bouts with asthma and was firm in his belief that his heart was weak and undersized. (7)

3

If the “memory” of Vienna’s Innenstadt was the past on display, a feast for the eye and the imagination upon the fullness of time, there was in the Vororte, those districts beyond the outer perimeter, a different kind of memory, less public, less constructed, shot through with those little anachronisms from the living past that anchor recall in the particularities of place. Here everyday experience offered a refuge for memory under siege from those insistent abstractions and agendas of modernity. Here those barriers of class, culture, education, or generation so carefully cultivated in the Innenstadt melted away in daily interactions in shops and markets, on park benches or in trams, among neighbors, in social and family circles, through myriad religious, cultural, or civic affiliations. Compared to the outsized scale of the Ringstrasse, the outer districts represented a parallel universe from another age, still cut to human dimensions and flowing at a slower pace. (7–8)

4

Like so many of his Viennese contemporaries, Berg was obsessed with the issue of social morality. He had absorbed the sexual theories of Kraus, Freud, and Otto Weininger, and had read the works of Altenberg and Arthur Schnitzler in which sexual hypocrisy and complex gender relationships are constant preoccupations. It is a world that Berg knew well, having fathered an illegitimate child with a servant girl at the age of eighteen. Moreover, his sister was an outspoken lesbian and his mother-in-law was once the emperor’s mistress. Berg loved the role of confidant at the center of these liaisons dangereuses.

Berg’s capacity for excusing human foibles, his own and those of others, reflects the moral largesse of an avowed sensualist. This is readily apparent in his attention to his appearance and dress, as well as his tastes in food and drink, art and literature. In his youth his favorite painting was Correggio’s highly charged Jupiter and Juno [recte Io] and throughout his life he retained an aesthete’s tactile delight in handicrafts and graphic design, for which he himself showed a decided flair. This is not to say he did not love technology and modern gadgets. He went regularly to the cinema, was inordinately pleased with his first typewriter, listened with delight to the radio and the phonograph, and took childlike glee in owning his own automobile. But he was devoted to the refined sensibilities of another age, to the aesthetic pleasure and meticulous pride one takes in slow, careful craftsmanship. (9)

5

The gravitational pull of [Berg’s] music reflects a weariness that could never rouse itself to the kind of breakthrough one finds in the finale of a Mahler symphony, a weariness that has never known the bristling, jittery energy of a Schoenberg quartet. Mahler and Schoenberg likewise knew states of weariness—in Das Lied von der Erde or Gurrelieder, for instance—but it is the weariness born of a long, hard journey. These are composers whose music is of a piece with their restless worldly wanderings across cultures and continents. Berg, however, was no seeker of adventure, but a creature of habit who preferred a settled life. One is struck by the contrast between the serenity of Berg’s Trahütten idyll and the raw emotion of his opera [Wozzeck], but in this country environment Berg held both worlds, the vistas and the abyss, within himself. (14)

6

[I]t was less Berg’s harmonic language [in Wozzeck] than his use of closed vocal and instrumental forms to shape his scenes and acts that caused the most immediate stir, provoking comparisons with such works as Busoni’s Doktor Faust and Hindemith’s Cardillac. And it is this aspect that Berg himself, for varied and complex reasons, would continue to emphasize—almost to the exclusion of all else—in his articles and lectures on the opera. It was in part a strategy to undercut his growing reputation as a “Romantic,” just as his elaborately constructed serial relationships would later serve to offset his music’s pervasive references to tonality. (17)

7

[Berg] avoided overt engagement with politics or issues of social justice. His sympathies with Red Vienna, the Socialist regime that governed the city during the 1920s and early 1930s, had more to do with personal loyalties and the largesse of its progressively minded cultural policies, of which he was a beneficiary. Before 1918 he had been a monarchist, and following the brutal civil strife of 1934 he became a committed supporter of the Austrofascism of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg. However, as a disciple of Kraus he maintained his right to an oppositional stance—on principle—which was easy enough from the privacy of his study in Hietzing. (19–20)

—

Berg was fully aware of the racial policies of National Socialism. He had already seen its consequences for Schoenberg and Schreker and received heartrending letters from Jewish friends and colleagues such as Jalowetz, who faced summary dismissal from his conducting position in Cologne. Yet at no time could he bring himself to take a public stand against anti-Semitism… It is anybody’s guess how Berg might have responded to the events of 1938. He would never have lapsed into Webern’s naïve patriotic jingoism, but it is highly unlikely that this deeply rooted Lokalpatriot would have chosen exile or resistance. (22–23)

8

Berg himself, like his protagonist Lulu, was an enigma to those who knew him, or, rather, he was all things to all people. (24)

9

Part of the hagiographic tone of much of the writing about Berg springs from a desire to bask in the glow of the “magic of his being.” He was no doubt gentle, kind, and caring, and countless letters and drafts bear witness to his solicitous sense of occasion for a birthday, an anniversary, a death. But there is always something unverbindlich, noncommittal, about his sincerely expressed concern, a politeness that is a form of self-protection, a surface geniality that bespeaks a profound reserve. Adorno said as much when he called Berg the “foreign minister of the land of his dreams” [der Außenminister seines Traumlands]. (24–25)

10

Berg was keen in his indictment of society’s hypocrisy, which concerned him far more than its injustice, but the true object of his concern was himself… In approaching these subjects of depravity and decay, Berg never abandons the vantage point of bourgeois moral privilege. Through careful dramaturgy and lavish compositional detail he invites his audience to view this world through the prism of high art. His is an empathy that at its deepest level bespeaks self-love and satisfaction with its own moral righteousness. This is why both operas, despite their subject matter, have entered so comfortably into the repertoire in a way that the far more radical works by Schreker have not. Schreker’s music eschews the comforts of “high art” and keeps its bourgeois audience off balance in a manner that oddly adumbrates the distancing effects of Brecht and Weill. (25)

11

Austria’s literary impressionists, including Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and especially Hermann Bahr, who were entirely attuned to the notion of modernity that Baudelaire had described as early as 1863 as “the fleeting, the ephemeral, the contingent.” It is the concept of a self that is wholly subject to time.

Everything in Berg revolted against this notion—his settled habits and sedentary life, his gravitation toward fixed compass points (though not of settled morality), his belief in overarching controlling forces, from numerological patterns to the alignment of the stars. He was a man of obsessive preoccupations with the hoarding instincts of a pack rat. Ironically, Berg read and set Baudelaire’s texts in Der Wein, but in his understanding time was not so much “fleeting,” “ephemeral,” or “contingent” as viscous, tactile, and even reversible. (26–27)

12

Contradiction and paradox are central ingredients of Berg’s persona and of his music. He was a man of open amiability and of many secrets; a faithful friend and an eager consumer of malicious gossip; a composer of fierce modernism who courted popular appeal. The elusive qualities of his character make it easy to be sucked into a vortex of eternal regress and self-absorption. Berg, the man, we follow at our peril. Berg, the composer, however, transformed the spinning vortex of his unknowable self into extraordinary music that reaches beyond the self toward a common understanding of the human condition. (28)