Concerto Guide: Alban Berg, Violin Concerto

There are just a few concert works for orchestra that have an element of dramatic choreography. The most famous is Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 45 that I have posted about here. Among many unusual musical elements in the score is the added stage direction at the end that instructs each musician, as his part ends (the last section, one by one, eliminates all the players and ends with just two violins) to blow out the candle on his music stand and steal offstage. Read my post for the details. The only other piece that I can think of that does something similar is the Violin Concerto by Berg. But this aspect is largely unknown.

Let me start at the beginning. According to Wikipedia, Berg was commissioned to write this concerto by Louis Krasner but he didn't start on it for some months because he was writing the opera Lulu. When the daughter of Alma and Walter Gropius, Manon Gropius, tragically died at age 18 of polio, he set aside the opera and began to write the Violin Concerto as a homage to her. It was completed in August 1935 and was Berg's last completed composition. He died four months later of blood poisoning.

The Violin Concerto is a very rich and complex piece that has attracted criticism for that very reason. The complexities come both from the inspiration for the piece, which led Berg to attempt to

translate the young girl’s characteristics into musical characters (Berg, from a letter to Willi Reich)

There are also several elements that are problematic for a serial composer. Here is the row of the piece:

Normally, one of the functions of a row is to avoid tonal references, but this one strongly suggests them. As Wikipedia notes:

the first three notes of the row make up a G minor triad; notes three to five are a D major triad; notes five to seven are an A minor triad; notes seven to nine are an E major triad; and the last four notes (B, C♯, E♭, F) and the first (G) together make up part of a whole tone scale.

While the piece is certainly not tonal in a very definite way, tonality seems to hover over it and there are several sections that do have the feeling of a tonal center, especially the end that has the strong feeling of a cadence in B flat:

Two other elements that appear are the interweaving of a Carinthian folk tune into the second part of the last movement:

Finally, also in the second part of the last movement, Berg quotes and does variations on the Bach chorale "Es ist genug" from Cantata 60:

The interesting thing to note here is that the first four notes of the chorale melody are a whole-tone scale, which overlaps with the last four notes of Berg's row.

So, from the point of view of serial theory, there are all sorts of problems with this piece! But for the same reasons, it is a favorite with audiences.

The music is enormously complex and in this post all I can do is give a brief introduction. But I want to go back to that dramatic element I mentioned before. Towards the end of the piece there is a climactic passage in which the solo violin begins a plaint (Klagegesang) in which it is joined by another violin, then the rest, then the violas and so on until all the strings are united in this melody before separating into their individual parts. Here is how the beginning of that section looks in the score:

Click to enlarge

This section has been described (in the liner notes to the Pinchas Zukerman recording conducted by Pierre Boulez) as follows:

Employing quasi- dramatic elements, Berg in the score instructs the soloist to take over the leadership of the violins and violas “audibly and visibly.” These are to join him gradually, only to break away from him again “in just a demonstrative a manner.”

I wrote a paper on this in graduate school that, alas, I no longer have. But my recollection was that a better interpretation of Berg's instructions are that the solo violinist enjoins the other strings to join in with him by gesturing for them to stand up as they play the plaint (with the exception of the cellos, of course. Here is the instruction from the score blown up:

Click to enlarge

Unfortunately, I can't make out exactly what the German says, so I am relying on my memory of the research I did for the paper. In the clip I am going to put up of a performance of the work, the soloist steps back, aligning himself with the section violins, which is, I think, the opposite of what Berg is asking for: they are to join him "audibly and visibly". That is, they join in with what he is playing and they stand up with him. This is never done, at least not that I have seen when I have seen this piece performed live. Here is a performance from the 2012 Proms with Frank-Peter Zimmerman, violin and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, Daniele Gatti, conductor:

The section that I have been talking about, with the instruction from Berg about the strings joining together in the plaint, comes at the 20:24 mark in the clip. As you can see, the soloist steps back and the concertmaster joins him in the melody followed by the other strings.

There are yet more complexities suggested by this section that I also explored in my (lost) paper. Adolf Hitler had come to power in 1933 and the Anschluss or annexation of Austria was looming (it took place in March 1938). Berg's teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, a Jew, had already emigrated to the US and had just won a teaching position in California. In correspondence with him Berg referred to people of like mind joining together to resist the Nazi takeover. Perhaps at that moment in time, that seemed like a possibility. In any case, I'm afraid I can't substantiate any of this as I no longer have my research materials. So feel free to ignore the suggestion!

The Jazz Version

I used to know a pianist who was a hit at parties. He could do variations on a well-known tune like "Happy Birthday" in the style of different composers: Handel, Brahms, Debussy, etc. A somewhat different phenomenon is jazz arrangement of other music. Of course, a lot of jazz is based on arrangements of "standards" in jazz style. But sometimes it goes beyond that. One famous example is Miles Davis' recording of an arrangement by Gil Evans of the middle movement of Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez. Here it is:

That is pretty interesting, but I think more limited musically than the original, which gets many, many performances every year.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there is an aesthetic principle involved here: as a general rule, arrangements are less substantial, aesthetically, than original versions. I have to be careful, because it is easy to overstate this. What I mean is that at the top of the aesthetic ladder, musically speaking, are certain works written for a specific instrument or instruments. The unitary aesthetic vision, in other words, includes abstract structural features but, since music is a concrete art form, also includes exact realizations in sound. Bach's music for solo violin or cello can be played on other instruments such as mandolin or guitar, but the original version takes precedence because it is the ideal realization of the idea. How do we know this? Because Bach made the choice. Even more pointedly, the piano sonatas of Beethoven are virtually never heard in any other medium because they are so perfectly written for the piano. He made one transcription of one sonata for string quartet, but the experiment was not repeated.

I said "at the top of the aesthetic ladder" and what I meant by that was that there are lots of pieces of music that are less specific. There are hoards of Renaissance pieces for any two melodic instruments that are quite nice pieces. In general, as you go back in music history, the specificity of instruments is less. A lot of Medieval music can be played by a wide variety of instruments. But more and more, from the Baroque on, instruments (and voices) are written for with great precision.

Alongside this there are always arrangements, of course, to fit the needs of special occasions. The harp player at the wedding plays the famous march by Mendelssohn even though it was written for orchestra. But as I said, at the top of the musical ladder, originals are preferred over arrangements. It is not just symbolic bowing to the composer's intentions--it is recognition that the composer's choice of instruments is very often a crucial part of the unitary aesthetic vision.

All this is prompted by the news that there is a new version of Lulu, the unfinished opera by Alban Berg, in which Lulu is a "black American freedom-fighter singing to a jazz score". Here is the link to the article in the Guardian. Responsible for this project is composer Olga Neuwirth. Here is a brief excerpt from one of her pieces, Hommage à Klaus Nomi. YouTube refused to embed for some reason, but here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2ctfocMqHs#t=59

Forgive me, but that sounds like Couperin being mugged, first by Pierrot Lunaire and then Miles Davis...

The Guardian has a paragraph that summarizes what is going on with this new version (arrangement?) of Lulu:

What's radical about Neuwirth's American Lulu isn't just that she has dared to finish what her countryman couldn't ('much of the orchestration and some of the composition of the third act of this luridly sensual and musically complex opera was incomplete by the time of Berg's death in 1935). It's the fact that Neuwirth sets the story of Lulu's manipulative rise and desperate fall not in the fetid European cities of Berg's original, but turns her into a freedom-fighting black woman amid the civil-rights struggle in 1950s New Orleans and 1970s Manhattan – and comes up with a new text in English to boot. She also arranges Berg's music for a glorified jazz band while compressing the opera's structure, throwing out much of Berg's score, and inserting an ending very different to what was originally envisaged.

"Throwing out much of Berg's score"? In that case, shouldn't Berg's estate or publisher be suing someone? Or at least demanding that Berg's name be taken off the publicity? After all, aren't we reading this article and aren't people attending these performances because Berg's name is up there? Please, Lulu is not a "sacred cow" as the article says, it is a justly famous 20th century opera. Famous because of the music written very specifically in a certain way for specific instruments, not for a "glorified jazz band". Therefore, we are, are we not, being sold a bill of goods here? Isn't this a kind of aesthetic fraud? Don't we need a forensic musicologist, stat?!?

Let's have a look at what is available online. Here is a French news item about the Berlin première of the "American Lulu":

Oh no, nothing exploitative there! Much more revealing is an advertisement for the production that, again, oddly, YouTube refuses to embed. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbNCa9DeGuo

Are we really that desperate to sell tickets to an opera? Or is it just that nothing matters except the vision of the arranger? My opinion is, if you want to do this, more power to you, just don't implicate Alban Berg.

It is a little disconcerting that the very people who should be promoting culture seem instead like barbarians, intent on stomping it into the ground.

UPDATE: It's nice to hear that my doubts about this production seem to have been quite justified. The Guardian just put up a review. This is a key sentence:

Of the sounds that linger in the memory from the Edinburgh performance, the most dominant is that of seats being upturned as members of the audience crept out.

Schoenberg, Berg, Webern

I left things hanging a bit with my last post on Schoenberg. Let me see if I can wrap things up, provisionally at least. My exploration of classical music in the early days was partly guided by reading some library books and the purchase of recordings. One led to the other, of course. For some reason, the tiny municipal library I had access to had several books on 20th century music. In retrospect the interesting thing about these books was their relatively uniform view on the ideology of 20th century music. From these books I took for granted both who were the important figures (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg) and the context for understanding why: technical progress in new ways of writing music.

I accepted this paradigm for a long time and only much later did I really started to doubt it. I think the first inkling of a problem came in undergraduate music when I was in the listening library one day sampling some new music recordings. I happened to put on a disc of some Stockhausen for multiple orchestras (Carré or something) and followed it with Drumming by Steve Reich. The Reich was much more interesting and made a larger impact for me because it was not maximalizing dissonance and complexity! Well, according to the aesthetic parameters that I had learned regarding 20th century music, that was just wrong!

Technical progress in writing music is a very problematical concept as soon as you start to unpack it. For one thing it tends to place music in the same realm as science: research and development of new musical ideas. Milton Babbitt is the locus classicus for this viewpoint; another prominent practitioner is Pierre Boulez. Let's listen to some Babbitt. Here is his Composition for Four Instruments from 1948:

How are you supposed to listen to that? Are you supposed to hear the structure? Do you have to listen with the score? Should you study the score first? What kind of aesthetic experience could you have? Also, I have to point out that, there are a distressingly large number of pieces in this genre that all sound the same to me: the disjointed, fragmentary rhythms, the wide leaps in the melody, the huge changes in dynamics, the chopped off phrases--it all adds up to the same aesthetic effect. For me.

This is music that seems to be focussed only on the process of creating it. The syntax of it. The aesthetic effect is somewhat secondary. But it wasn't always so. If we go back to Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, two of the three always seemed to have also have a semantic or content side as well. In his early works such as Verklärte Nacht or Pierrot Lunaire or even the Six Little Piano Pieces, op 19, Schoenberg has a great deal of 'content'. Later on, he seems to have less and less, though there are exceptions such as his unfinished opera Moses und Aron. Some of his content seems to be related to issues surrounding his Jewish identity and the rise of anti-semitism in Nazi Germany. In other words, extra-musical events.

Schoenberg's student Alban Berg seems to have even more leaned towards the 'content' aspect and away from the structural aspect. His Lyric Suite for string quartet, long thought to be simply abstract music, turned out to have a rather detailed secret program referring to an affair between Berg and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. Here is the first movement to give you a sense of the music:

While written using 12-tone procedures, that music certainly has an expressive 'content' in the sense I am using the word. Berg, as the author of two successful operas, Wozzeck and Lulu, has a strong sense of theater in his music. This has not ever been discussed to my knowledge, but his Violin Concerto contains instructions to the orchestra to perform certain actions onstage--again, the result is a kind of theatre. Mind you, I have not noticed any orchestras actually enacting these instructions! But they are there.

Anton Webern went in quite the opposite direction: he has the least 'content' of the three and his music seems to be the most concerned solely with the technical aspects of composition. It is hard to imagine a 'secret program' in any of Webern's pieces! Here is his String Quartet, Op 28:

I think you can hear how that is going to lead directly to Babbitt and Boulez. After the war the choice was made in places where composition was being taught, like Darmstadt, to follow the example of Webern and not the example of Berg. We might speculate that with the just past horrors of the war, the last thing anyone wanted was aesthetic content! On the other hand, this didn't seem to stop people like Shostakovich from writing content-full music after the war. But in Western Europe and North America, the ideology of music composition was to take Webern as a model and stress the syntax of music while ignoring the semantic. Even though this model has begun to break down there are still places that turn out composition students who seem to follow it.

If I might inflict on you a metaphorical way to distinguish Schoenberg from his students I could compare Schoenberg himself to a hearty dish like wienerschnitzel which would make Alban Berg a Sachertorte and Anton Webern, well, schnapps!

Unpopular Music

A lot of people in the classical music world are working on the problem of, as Greg Sandow calls it, the "future of classical music", that is, how can we bring in new audiences to symphony, opera and chamber music concerts? The statistics are unclear, but it seems as if audiences are declining and attracting more young people is a project a lot of musical organizations see as critical.

The massive place that popular music now occupies in the public consciousness is one major factor in the increasing pressure on the classical music world. The change has come in the last fifty or sixty years. If we go back to the fifties, a huge classical artist like Van Cliburn, the winner of the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, could sell more records than Elvis Presley. But with the coming on the scene of pop artists like the Beatles and the host that followed them, this changed and now classical sales are a tiny fraction of popular music sales. Popular music and the mass media have proved to be such a powerful partnership, as exemplified in the music video, that mere classical artists are forced to emulate them, just to be heard. I have posted a few times on this here and here.

So the question is, if popular music is what we mostly hear in the mass media, is classical music now "unpopular music"? In terms of sales? Sure. So administrators and promoters and artists are all working to make classical music more popular. There are a few problems, though. For one thing, popular music is popular because it is easy to listen to. Classical music is often not so easy to listen to. In fact, if you really want to enjoy all the glories of classical music, you need to investigate a bit, be curious, learn about it. Now mind you, classical music can have an immediate impact. Have a listen to this, for example:

For sheer musical power and glorious sound, this is pretty outstanding. I still get shivers every time I hear that theme in the French horns. Or listen just to the first couple of minutes of this:

Those horns again! But there is much more to classical music than just the orchestral showpieces. There are pieces of subtlety and sheer musical beauty such as this:

A piece like that is not going to overwhelm you on first listening like the first two did. No, you need to listen to it a few times. Each time you will notice something new and the beauty of it will grow on you. Some music makes very little impression the first time, but just sounds odd:

The first time you listen you might say "what the heck is going on there"? It may make little sense because of the big contrasts and may just sound confused. But then, after a few listenings, some things might suddenly capture your attention, and as time goes on it all starts making sense and a kind of sense that no other piece has. Other music is very challenging at first:

And may continue to be challenging, even after many hearings! Or you may start to pick up on the eerie floating harmony... One thing for sure, this music is very subtle and intricate: you must listen with your full attention and no distractions.

Classical music may be the "unpopular music" as compared to pop music. But it is not unpopular because it is bad music! It is unpopular because a lot of classical music does not give up its secrets and beauties immediately. You have to work at it a bit as a listener. Perhaps you might read a book on the composer, or at least look him or her up on Wikipedia. There is a wealth of information there. There are even individual articles on pieces. Here is the article on the 'Serioso' Quartet by Beethoven that is the fourth YouTube clip above. Here is another one on the Piano Sonata by Alban Berg that is my last example.

The neat thing about Wikipedia is that each article contains links to others. In the one on the Berg sonata there is mention of whole-tone scales which is linked to an article on them which explains what they are. If you follow those links you will start being knowledgeable about such things.

Most pop songs are just what you hear the first time, nothing much beneath the surface. But classical music is like an iceberg: what you hear the first time is just a fraction of what is going on. The more you dig, the more you will discover. Take my word for it, there are pieces of classical music that no-one has ever gotten completely to the bottom of: