Day Fifteen: Berg’s Violin Concerto
Alban Berg was one of the most influential composers of the Second Viennese School, a group of composers from the first half of the twentieth century that included Arnold Schönberg as the teacher and his many pupils and associates, Anton Webern included. His Violin Concerto was written in 1935 and premiered one year later by the American Violinist Louis Krasner. It was to be the last complete work that Berg wrote in his life and is a pertinent example of his extraordinary ability to combine the groundbreaking twelve-tone technique with elements of late romanticism, the work being such that is both technically and historically progressive whilst existing in the Halo of Mahler’s sound world.
Music has often been used, as with Dvorak from yesterday’s blog post, as a way for artists to express their feelings for the tragedies they experience in daily life. The case is also true with Berg and his Violin Concerto, the score engraved “To the memory of an Angel”, Berg choosing to dedicate the piece to Manon Gropius, the daughter of Gustav Mahler’s former wife, Alma Mahler, who died at the age of eighteen from polio.
The concerto lasts about twenty-four minutes and has only two movements instead of the traditional three. Furthermore, each movement has two parts; I. (a). Andante and (b). Allegretto, and II. (a). Allegro and (b). Adagio. The quotation that perhaps is most poignant with regards the dedicatee is at the end of the 2nd movement, in which Berg quotes J.S. Bach’s cantata “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort,” BWV 60. The cantata translates to “O Eternity, Thou Thunderous Word.”
As will be seen later with Berg’s use of harmony, the piece has many traditional aspects to it. The first movement begins with an Andante in sonata form followed by the allegretto which is a dance-like section. The beginning of the second movement is an allegro, the music more like a cadenza for the violin with highly virtuosic passages for the violin. The orchestration gets rather violent towards the climax which, in the score, is literally marked as “The high point of the Allegro”. (21:45) The fourth and final section of the work is an adagio, the music in a much calmer and contemplative place
It is worth mentioning Berg’s use of the twelve-tone technique, a technique in which all 12 tones of the chromatic scale were given equal importance based on their function in a row. Instead of the traditional hierarchy of harmony, ie the Tonic being the most important chord, followed by the Dominant etc and all of the rules that governed their relationships, what the 12 tone system did was emancipate each tone of the scale and give each one equal importance. In theory, one simply chose an order for the twelve chromatic tones of the octave scale in such a way that all twelve notes were “used up” before repeating themselves. Then, you simply kept to this order of tones in the course of your composition. Multiple variations were added, of course, such as retrograde (one plays the series backwards) and inversion, one playing the mirror image of the series, the intervals between each tone inverted along a central axis. There was also retrograde inversion which combined the previous two techniques.
Unlike Schönberg who used, generally, rather angular tone rows, Berg employed a highly interesting tone row in his Violin Concerto. The primary row that Berg uses is : : G-B-flat-D-F#-A-C-E-G#-B-C#-E-flat-F.
A closer look at this row sums up Berg’s culmination as a uniquely post-Romantic and modern composer. The first three notes, G-Bb-D form a minor triad, something which was rather unusual to be doing since the very purpose of the twelve tone technique was to avoid such obvious triadic harmony. Then, surprisingly, a second triad is seen with D-F#-A, and one more in A-C-E and finally another one, E-G#-B. The final four notes (B-C#-Eb-F) make up part of a whole tone scale. The harmonies of the first four triads imply the note sequence B (B♭) – A – C – H (B♮) which forms the BACH motif, thus connecting the piece to Johann Sebastian Bach, whose music, as mentioned earlier, plays a crucial role in this concerto. Thus, Berg has managed to make an almost tonal setting of the twelve-tone row, lending the concerto an element of its indisputable humanistic and heartfelt emotional charge.
