Alban Berg wrote little: some fifteen works in all.¹ Slow perfectionist that he was, he left behind nothing minor. Wozzeck and Lulu, the two operas he composed, went on to become the emblematic atonal works in the operatic repertoire (Lulu is even serialist). For the young Boulez and his fellow composers at Darmstadt, the entire genre of opera became defunct in the post-war era — and, really, post-Berg.

Points of reference

Berg was applauded enthusiastically at the end of Wozzeck, manifest encouragement that was decisive for him. Without it, he may never have embarked on this other major project, Lulu. Adorno notes that “Schoenberg envied Berg his successes, while Berg envied Schoenberg his failures.” Berg interpreted obscurity as proof of radicality — something he feared he had lost in Wozzeck.² It is certainly true that when compared to that of his two associates in the Second Viennese School, the musical language in Berg’s compositions offers relative points of reference. The first among these are its scattered tonal “respites.”

Berg would allow triads to shine out into the expressionist darkness into which the public so often complained it had been plunged (as Esteban Buch recounts³) — providing a link back to tonal music, in other words. These triads, however, rare as will-o’-the-wisps, were misleading and varied: were they the reassuring echo of our predecessors — or their ghosts, haunting us? Berg’s quotations function as anchor points for musicians, and encourage, even possess, his listeners. Examples abound: the Tristan chord at the end of his Lyric Suite, evocations of jazz and tango in his concert aria Der Wein, Bach chorales during the marquis’ attempt to blackmail Lulu or in the finale of his violin concerto To the Memory of an Angel,⁴ wisps of the Viennese waltz and Carinthian folk songs in this same concerto or in the rondo of Three Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6. A similar point of reference can be heard in the fairy tale told to the child in Wozzeck, which presents a clear F minor tonality, illustrating the passage’s fairylike, illusory quality.

Berg’s use of tonal language actually began to break apart, little by little, starting in 1907-1908, with Sonata, op. 1, for piano. Although it has been thoroughly roughed up, the D-minor tonality of the piece remains evident. This clear use of tonality would continue until 1913, ending with Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, op. 5, which are strictly atonal. Subsequent to this, Berg maintained an elastic relationship with inherited musical language, embodied in his music by an ambiguous to-and-fro. His Concerto for Violin, which he composed in the last year of his life, represents a (final) relative return. Lulu, which was written during the same period, also contains a few more tonal ghosts than his earlier works.

Teaching

“An artistic genius is a natural teacher,” wrote Berg.⁵ If one was to reach for the romantic utopia of genius, certain “arrangements” would be necessary for the public. Well before he applied Schoenberg’s serial technique (or adapted it for his own purpose), he brought in tone rows vertically, one after the other, from low to high at the beginning and at the end of the third of his Five Orchestral Songs After Picture Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg, following the arc form prized by the Second Viennese School. Here, he was teaching total chromaticism, or subtly demonstrating it as mysterious (it was served by a flattering, romantic echo). Accusations of intellectualism against expressionism, which were still bothering Adorno in the 1940s,⁶ thus seem to have been anticipated and parried thirty years prior.

Similarly, the famous tone row that opens To the Memory of an Angel could be said to be stacking thirds (which are the focus of tonal music and the building block of all its chords) in the way a music theory professor might arpeggiate an aggregate to ensure the students have heard each note.

Romanticism

This passage will not discuss Berg’s physical resemblance to Oscar Wilde, or his dreamy attitudes, or the Schumannesque fervor that characterized his romantic life. Instead, we will be focusing on his music’s instrumentation and pacing. Stravinsky laughed about Berg’s music as if it were an old lady: “How pretty she must have been when she was young!”⁷ His comment referred not to Berg’s melodic and harmonic language (which were generally atonal), but to the orchestra’s seemingly unbroken breath, tinged with the midnight blues of the nineteenth century.

It is tempting to write that Berg cracked the vertical edifice while maintaining a horizontal continuity. Like the other two members of the Second Viennese School — though perhaps less frequently — and unlike Bartók, who was more prudent in this regard, Berg’s approach to vertical breakdown is evident in his use of often dissonant and disjointed melodic intervals. This was the critique Julius Bistron leveled at him during a radio debate broadcast in 1930, for example.⁸ Berg did not use horizontal breaks, as Webern had, layering his work with silences. To the contrary, his orchestra carried over from romanticism its spirit of horizontal, temporal continuity and flow. Adorno, who studied composition with Berg, called this the “infinitesimal variation” through which his teacher managed to “savor chaos.”⁹

Thus, Three Pieces for Orchestra and the Concerto for Violin seem almost never to stop for breath. Wagnerian chromaticism lives on in bursts: for example, in the French horn solo at the end of the violin concerto’s first movement. This conjunct character culminates in a modern use of the glissando, preceding Varèse and Bartók, heard in the Altenberg Lieder (1912), where the strings and, more noisily, the trombones, play harmonic glissando chords. Berg’s orchestra is not yet as dry as the large chamber ensembles used in 1950s serialism. This Boulez, speaking of Berg (and Schoenberg), reproved as “too much romanticism, too much tradition.”¹⁰

In a sense, new excesses such as Lulu’s scream of agony, the famous prolonged crescendo on unison B in Wozzeck, or the Mahler-esque hammer blow at the end of Three Pieces for Orchestra advanced Romanticism. These moments are still a long way from the curious, drier inventions of Varèse in Ionisation or even of Stravinsky more generally after 1914. Berg’s cries, comparable to Edvard Munch’s scream (1893), carried a kind of lyricism that was, at heart, familiar. It generated the lyric sounds of the violin in the solo passages of the concerto, of the singers in many of his lieder and his two operas (even in their atonal language), and of the strings of his two quartets, particularly the second — the aptly named Lyric Suite.

Berg’s Chamber Concerto for piano and violin was thus showcasing the Romantic era’s defining instruments just as Varèse was telling his students to “forget the piano.”¹¹ Certainly, here was a work that was suddenly more “objective,” according to Adorno, in the spirit of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.¹² For the first time (and this time after Bartók and Varèse), Berg had written a work that contained particularly tight and dissonant sound clusters. These stilled his flow somewhat, as epitomized by bar 630, which is entirely silent. But the emphatic end (which Adorno notes is rare in an atonal piece) and the pianism remain romantic.

Ultimately, Berg rarely halted his breath-like flow, a descendant of Wagner’s “endless melody.” His Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, op. 5, were exceptions, if small ones, in terms of their brevity and performing forces, as Berg was exploring short-form composition. This work was also Berg’s first strictly atonal piece. It approached the foundational minimalism of Webern, and yet — again according to Adorno — “the Clarinet Pieces are the most Schoenbergian” of Berg’s work.

One chord symbolizes the universe, and, ultimately, Berg’s relative accessibility. The only seventh chord not recognized in tonal music (and therefore “new”) is the minor major seventh: split (and therefore expressionist?), its triad is minor and its seventh is major, but it is nevertheless still a seventh (and therefore “old”). Berg used it in many ways, notably to close the first movement of To the Memory of an Angel, one of his final works. This chord would go on to become one of the twentieth century’s emblems of mystery. With its dark jazziness, it in some ways encapsulated the most accessible facet of expressionism. It would feature in the soundtracks of detective films and of James Bond. Bernard Hermann used it in the opening credits of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), looping it in descending and ascending arpeggios.

Finely wrought form and burgeoning symbolism

The avant-garde had to conquer, had to convince. Its formal arsenal had to be irreproachable, totalizing. Wozzeck incorporated a wide range of phonation, as did Lulu perhaps even more extensively — blending speech and song in ways that were both more naturalistic and more sophisticated than Schoenberg’s Sprechgesang, alongside untrained singing, bel canto, and more. Commentators have described the remarkable formal scope of Berg’s works. Each scene in Wozzeck, for example, follows a different vocal or instrumental form, including suite, rhapsody, military march and lullaby, passacaglia, fantasia and fugue, scherzo and trio, rondo, inventions, and sonata-allegro form.¹³

Berg, no less than Schoenberg, would seal what became a long tradition in the twentieth century requiring works to respond to the history of their genre, form, or material. In this way, To the Memory of an Angel narrates the history of the violin. It starts from nothing, with open strings: pedagogy, once again. The instrument then slowly moves away from established forms, as if rediscovering or improvising its own lyricism.

Similarly, the beginning of Three Pieces for Orchestra starts from noise (unpitched percussion instruments), then reinvents sound, notes, melodic instruments. Berg’s work progresses by recounting progress itself, including aesthetic progress: perfectly embodying the aims of the Second Viennese school. This kind of work within a work is more explicit in Berg’s operas. Wozzeck is peopled with musicians and composers. Above all there is Alwa, the young composer and Lulu’s lover, Berg’s double, who, in Act I, Scene 3, imagines writing an opera about his mistress. Indeed.

Commentators also point out the more esoteric symbolism that fills Berg’s work. Numbers, first of all, according to Alain Galliari¹⁴ and Mosco Carner: 3 for the Chamber Concerto, 7 for Wozzeck, 23 as Berg’s favorite number, 10 for his supposed mistress, Hanna Fuchs. The notes A-B and H-F, in German, form the warp and weft of the Lyric Suite, as if he were graffitiing initials to immortalize the couple Alban Berg + Hanna Fuchs.¹⁵

Berg, dramatic by nature, injected theatrical elements into every aspect of his work. The culmination was Lulu, his final project, where flashes of tonality, each carrying its own connotation, are intentionally made more distinct because of their contrast with the surrounding atonal language. Countess Geschwitz, an endlessly dissatisfied character, is never granted resolution; Berg thus assigns her the chord E-A-B, a perfect chord whose third is ornamented by an appoggiatura (A) that never resolves. The indestructible Schön is the A major chord; his son, Alwa, darker and more sensitive, is thus (of course) A minor. This kind of symbolism weaves together with the twelve-tone technique to create deeper narrative layers. Thus, when Lulu vanquishes Schön by killing him, her set absorbs his.

Such remarks have their limits. For example, Dominique Jameux (among others) attempts to show that the serial themes in Lulu are all derived from a single fundamental series.¹⁶ However, there is no simple or unique operation; instead, each of the twelve tones can have its own distinct fate (in this way, any series can be derived from any other series). More subtly powerful is the impulse motif that opens the opera: a perfect fourth, minor second, perfect fourth, from low to high as prescribed by Berg’s pedagogical approach, but also symbolizing erection. This motif recurs throughout the opera, including in the vertical aggregate that accompanies the scream of the dying heroine.

Paradoxically, attention to detail flourishes at a large scale in Three Pieces for Orchestra, the violin concerto, and the operas. Adorno’s explanation for this is mathematical: “The integral is part of the differential.”¹⁷ At the same time, he cautions us to be wary of undue reverence for pure form: “Generating, according to Schoenberg’s idea, a maximum of shapes from a minimum of elements is just one level of Berg’s compositional technique; the other lies deeper: that music, by its very process, dissolves.”¹⁸ He underlined a generative paradox: “Berg’s dynamic nihilism,”¹⁹ which he compared to “a living being that sustains itself by gradually dissipating.”²⁰

Dark operas: the twentieth century

For Adorno, Wozzeck’s darkness is the “unfathomable sadness of the sound, characteristic of Austria and Southern Germany.” This same darkness would later be found in writers like Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, but already, Wozzeck stands as the quintessential Viennese expressionist work — a reflection of an Austria diminished by the Versailles Treaty, overflowing with lingering Romanticism, and unsettled by Freud’s meta-psychology, which at the time fed the unsettling notion that anyone could fall into “psychosis,” a concept not yet understood with any distance.

Wozzeck follows in the wake of Henrik Ibsen’s dark plays (notably A Doll’s House, 1879) and August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death (1900-1901) and Inferno (1897), works that Berg admired. It anticipates the American thriller genre, to which it ultimately owes a debt. Wozzeck was, in this sense, pre-cinematographic and signaled the arrival of a popular art form Alain Badiou would call “impure.”²¹

Like Georg Büchner’s nearly eponymous play, Woyzeck, the opera’s libretto is based on a sordid and historical true crime. The work is brief for an opera: around an hour and a half, the efficient length to which talkies would be cut in the future. Indeed, the sharp contrasts of the opera’s scenes “cut” in a manner that resembles film narratives. And of course the opera is a thriller, culminating in the horror of Marie’s murder and the unison B crescendo, which is sustained — and thus memorialized in history — by a canon of winds and strings.

How successful the opera was remains an ambiguous question: in principle it was well-received musically by the broader public, which had been far more critical of works by other composers of the Second Viennese School, but there was the lingering possibility that they enjoyed it as a scabrous stage play that happened to be set to music (Berg was also a gifted playwright).

Berg himself referred to Wozzeck as “a piano opera with explosions,” and indeed the music is not only dependent on the text; it is, in a sense, the text’s backdrop. In such a work, atonal music risks becoming not the music of progress, of “better tomorrows” — that was Schoenberg’s project, according to Adorno. It risks becoming a simple negative imprint (and thus with no tomorrow?) of the hero’s madness. The score is ideally fitted to its libretto. But was it not also Schoenberg’s aim to use musical expressionism to invent the music of the unconscious (notably that of another woman going mad, of worry, in Erwartung), just as their friend Kandinsky sought to paint the abstraction of repression? The unconscious haunted Berg’s city and his era, shared with Freud.

Lulu comes even closer to our time. Its title is a woman’s nickname, drawn from popular culture. It was simpler for Zola to give Nana its pointy title in 1880, under cover of social inquiry. In Berg’s second opera, the compassion of Wozzeck gives way to black humor — what Adorno called the grotesque.²² Sex and violence show up in a highly seductive way, a parade of murder, suicide, venereal disease, heart attacks, and disemboweling (Salomé and Electra, however monstrous, remained elegantly cloaked in legend). Before Countess Geschwitz, lesbian characters had never been portrayed in opera, beyond cross-dressing in comic operas. If, at the time of the opera’s début, Josef Polnauer huffed, “We don’t need the filth of Act III,”²³ our own era is less intolerant. Berg’s innovation is Shakespearean: a radical contrast between the slow decay of the plotline and the extreme refinement of the genre’s goals, making it possible to depict humans in all their contrasts and contradictions — fully, in other words. Here, then, is a summation of the paradigm of art. The glamorously dressed Lulu flounders in this bloodbath with her smile and her coloratura. Muck may ooze from the considerable gap this opens (a gap someone such as Schoenberg, who was in this sense more puritanical, had never thought of), but it is rendered in the scientific sophistication of twelve-tone composition. Here, as in Der Wein (after Baudelaire’s poems), which Berg wrote at the same time as the opera, he communes with the French poet: there is no better embracing a venomous subject such as La Charogne (“The Corpse”) than through perfect classical form.

And Berg had chosen his subject well. A femme fatale had already made musical drama history in the form of Carmen (1875), a record-breaking success that Nietzsche attended twenty-three times. Perhaps it was that music itself could be amoral in the same way a femme fatale could. Berg thus needed a Dionysian heroine in that image (and indeed an Apollonian one, to return to young Nietzsche’s typology²⁴): Carmen, Lulu, Salomé (or, with a softer personality, the courtesan Violetta in La Traviata), or the shockwave of Don Giovanni, which Kierkegaard considered to embody music in the sense that it personified the “immediately sensuously-erotic.”²⁵

The seeds of the terrifying humor in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1992) were already planted in Lulu: before stabbing Lulu and then Countess Geschwitz, Jack reveals his burlesque stinginess to the audience, bargaining outrageously over the price of a night with Lulu, who has been reduced to prostitution. After the murders, the bellowing of the brass section seems to mock the corpses, or perhaps the whole of humanity. Jack’s baritone, too, makes a mockery of deep voices, painting the filthy depths of human nature. The trumpet snaps off a sawtooth pattern of melodic thirds, which Berg savored elsewhere as well. They close his Lyric Suite as a figurative representation of a discourse — and therefore of a humanity — that is dying. In Lulu, they are deployed as if to depict a prosody of childlike, grating mockery. Elsewhere in the opera, the harmonic density reaches its zenith when, paradoxically, the chords loosen up (in relation to their predecessors in other works).

Again predating Ellis and the autofiction of the 1990s, Berg introduces personalities that were famous in his time, such as Jack the Ripper, albeit with anachronism, since the killer operated in London in 1888. Berg mixed the “real” Jack into his own fiction. Poetry was more real than reality. It reinvented reality, in Lulu as in Baudelaire.

Lulu presents the ultimate rendition of the femme fatale and thus of music itself. Carmen’s audiences might have clung to the belief that the heroine was less dreadful because she was a gypsy, a person from another culture, loyal to her own minority group. Salomé might yet have been seen as a devoted daughter (to her mother, Herodias). Lulu, by contrast, cares only for herself. In this, we are led to understand that beauty itself is what leads to pain. For Adorno, suffering inevitably “overcomes us when we see beauty.”²⁶ Anton Chekov speaks of sadness in this same vein, in The Beauties.²⁷

Lulu also prefigures what Guy Debord would, in 1967, call “the society of spectacle.” It is a vast circus — as are relationships of seduction, and indeed sex itself. The opera opens with an animal trainer, who, from his circus tent, presents his menagerie, each of which is one of the characters in the opera. Stanley Kubrick would return to the message that “everything is circus” in his last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1998), which is based on A Dream Novel (1926), a novella written by Berg’s contemporary and fellow Austrian, Arthur Schnitzler, a friend of Freud’s. The circus aesthetic with which Lulu opens is not merely the legacy of Frank Wedekind. It transcends the early twentieth century’s enthusiasm for carnival folk and their imagined freedom, particularly in the realm of sexuality. Circus resonated with the humor and the voluntarily childlike stance of twenty-first-century art.

Berg’s opera stands out not only because he was such an extraordinary dramaturge, who, like Wagner before him, wrote his own libretti (indeed, Wagner worked in theater before even thinking of pursuing music, just as Berg dreamed of becoming a writer before taking up a career as a composer). In the twentieth century, it was possible to free oneself of the status of Musikant to join the ranks of the artist. Berg rarely engaged with the same musical genre multiple times (with the exception of the quartet), as if each work exhausted him.

The central ostinato of Lulu symbolizes the knife edge of fate, in the moment that Lulu murders Schön and her ruin begins. Berg originally planned for a film sequence showing Lulu’s trial and imprisonment to be projected during this instrumental passage. In his fusion of artforms and interwoven references, he was doing more than simply continuing Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk or following the example of his teacher Schoenberg, who was a historical thinker, musician, and painter. He was asserting himself as an artist whose main medium — music — became one means among others to capture the human experience. Perhaps, he was making an attempt to become a part of history before even becoming a part of music history. He paved the way for the poetry of John Cage and his organizing interdisciplinary happenings at Black Mountain College, as well as for the omnipresent multimedia art installations filling galleries at the close of the twentieth century.

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^{1. This is not counting the arrangements and works of his youth; when included, they bring the number to sixty-one, as catalogued by Universal Editions (Vienna). ↩}

^{2. Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg: Le maître de la transition infime, Paris, Gallimard, 1989, p. 60 [p. 29]. (English version: Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, translated by Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.) Page numbers in brackets refer to the English translation. ↩}

^{3. Esteban Buch details this recurring and historic — not to say constant — divide between the Viennese avant-garde and its public in Le Cas Schoenberg (Paris, Gallimard, 2006). ↩}

^{4. The choral piece Es ist genug comes from Cantata BWV 60. ↩}

^{5. Alban Berg, “Le maître” (1911), Écrits, Paris, Christian Bourgois, 1985, p. 22. The text was originally published in a collection of tributes to Schoenberg written by his students and published by Piper und Co. (Munich) in 1912 (the same year the publisher released Almanach du Blaue Reiter). ↩}

^{6. “Among the reproaches most obstinately repeated by these critics, the most widely spread is that of intellectualism: modern music has its origins in the brain, not in the heart or the ear; it is in no way conceived by the senses, but rather worked out on paper. The inadequacy of these clichés is evident.” Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster, New York, Continuum Publishing, 2004. ↩}

^{7. See for example Mosco Carner, Alban Berg, Paris, Lattès, 1979, p. 16. ↩}

^{8. During this interview, whose exact date has been lost, Berg denied that voice in modern music was afflicted by particularly “instrumentally chromatic, distorted, jagged, wide-leaping” intervals. He asserted that the same could sometimes be said of tonal music. This interview was first published by Willi Reich in 23 – Ein Wiener Musikzeitschrift, 26-27 (8 June 1936). For an English translation see Pro Mundo – Pro Domo, The Writings of Alban Berg, translated by Bryan R. Simms, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 52. ↩}

^{9. Adorno, Alban Berg, op. cit. (note 2), p. 52. ↩}

^{10. Cited in Buch, Le Cas Schoenberg, op. cit. (note 3), p. 276. ↩}

^{11. Cited by Michel Rigoni in “Fantaisie, fugue et variations sur Musique fugitive pour trio à cordes,” Les Cahiers du Cirem, 12-13 (1989), p. 22. ↩}

^{12. Citations of Adorno without page numbers are taken from Alban Berg, op. cit. (note 2), and can be found in the chapters on the works to which they refer. ↩}

^{13. See works on Wozzeck by Patricia Hall or Pierre Jean Jouve and Michel Fano, or by Dominique Jameux in Alban Berg, Paris, Seuil, 1980, p. 103-107. ↩}

^{14. See the discussion of the use of number symbolism in Alain Galliari, Concerto à la mémoire d'un ange: Alban Berg (1935), Paris, Fayard, 2013. ↩}

^{15. This question is examined in depth in George Perle, Style and Idea in the Lyric Suite of Alban Berg, Stuyvesant, Pendragon Press, 1995. ↩}

^{16. Jameux, Alban Berg, op. cit. (note 13), p. 159. ↩}

^{17. Adorno, Alban Berg, op. cit. (note 2), p. 89. [p. 48] ↩}

^{18. Ibid., p. 75. ↩}

^{19. Ibid., p. 153. ↩}

^{20. Translated from the French: “un être organique qui se maintient en se dilapidant” (ibid., p. 77). ↩}

^{21. “Le cinéma est un art impur. Il est bien le plus-un des arts, parasitaire et inconsistant. Mais sa force d’art contemporain est justement de faire idée, le temps d’une passe, de l’impureté de toute idée.” Alain Badiou, Petit Manuel d’inesthétique, Paris, Seuil, 1998, p. 128. ↩}

^{22. Ibid., p. 202. ↩}

^{23. Ibid., in the section that discusses Lulu. Translated from the French. ↩}

^{24. As he described it in the beginning of his first work, which was doubtless strongly inspired by Wagner’s thinking, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), translated by Reinhardt Biedermann, Weimar Press, 2023. ↩}

^{25. Søren Kierkegaard, Ou bien… ou bien…, Paris, Gallimard, 1943, p. 54. ↩}

^{26. Adorno, Alban Berg, op. cit. (note 2), p. 195. Translated from the French. ↩}

^{27. Anton Tchekhov, Œuvres complètes, vol. II, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1970, p. 573. ↩}