A Schubert/Berg Journey
A Schubert/Berg Journey
Franz Peter Schubert was born on January 31, 1797, in Liechtenthal, then a suburb of Vienna (now incorporated into the city), and died in Vienna on November 19, 1828. He composed his A major Rondo for Piano Four-Hands, D.951, in June 1828 and his D major Rondo for Piano Four-Hands, D.608, in January 1818. We lack information about the early performance history of these pieces.
Schubert composed his A major Rondo for Violin and Strings, D.438, in June 1816. We lack information about its early performance history. His song for voice and piano with obbligato clarinet, “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen,” D.965, to a text that conflates poems by Wilhelm Müller and Helmina von Chézy, was composed in October 1828 and was premiered in March 1830, in Riga, by the soprano Anna Milder-Hauptmann.
Albano Maria Johannes Berg was born February 9, 1885, in Vienna and died there on December 24, 1935. He composed his Five Orchestral Songs after Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg (the “Altenberg Lieder”) in 1912. Two of the pieces (“Sahst du nach dem Gewitterregen den Wald” and at least some of “Nichts ist gekommen”) were premiered March 31, 1913, in the Musikverein in Vienna, with Arnold Schoenberg conducting, but the complete set of five was not performed until January 24, 1953, when Elsa Calvetti sang them in Rome with Jascha Horenstein conducting. The voice-and-piano reduction was published in 1953, the full orchestral score in 1966. These are the first San Francisco Symphony performances. In addition to the solo soprano, this work calls for two flutes and piccolo, three oboes (third doubling English horn), three clarinets (third doubling E-flat clarinet) plus bass clarinet, three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, four trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drum, triangle, xylophone, tam-tam, harp, three keyboards (piano, celesta, and harmonium), and strings.
Berg’s Piano Sonata, Opus 1, dates from 1907-08 and was premiered April 24, 1911, at a concert of the Viennese Society for Art and Culture at the Ehrbarsaal in Vienna. The pianist was Etta Werndorf.
Berg worked on his opera Lulu from 1928 to 1935 and left it incomplete at his death. In 1934, however, he created a five-movement concert suite of music from the score, which was premiered in Berlin on November 30, 1934, with Erich Kleiber conducting. The first US performances were given in March 1935 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Serge Koussevitzky conducting, and with soloist Olga Averino. The San Francisco Symphony’s first performances were presented under the direction of Seiji Ozawa, with soprano Marian Marsh, in April 1972; the only subsequent performances were given in April and May 1982 with Edo de Waart conducting and with soprano Kathryn Wright. The Lulu Suite requires three flutes (each doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), three clarinets (both doubling E-flat clarinets) plus bass clarinet, alto saxophone, three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, large and small tam-tams, snare drum, triangle, vibraphone, harp, piano, and strings, in addition to a soprano singer.
The Vienna into which Franz Schubert and Alban Berg were born—Schubert in 1797 and Berg in 1885—was accustomed to thinking of itself as peerless among Europe’s musical capitals, and with good reason. Its history ran deep and ancient, and its location at the heart of Mitteleuropa encouraged a musical life spiced by the cultural variety that flowed through as a matter of course—from Austria and Germany to the west, from the Czech Lands to the north and east, from Hungary and the Balkans to the south and southeast, and from Italy to the southwest. The University of Vienna was established in 1365—universities almost always boost a town’s musical life—and with the reign of Emperor Maximilian I (from 1493 to 1519) several composers of enduring fame became associated with Vienna, including Heinrich Isaac and Ludwig Senfl. During the Baroque period Vienna continued to enjoy a favorable musical climate that was increasingly enriched by a flow of talent from Italy, particularly from Venice (which sits only 270 miles from Vienna, the same distance that separates San Francisco from Santa Barbara). In the mid-seventeenth-century Vienna became the hub of the Hapsburg Dynasty, and the multi-tiered aristocracy surrounding that royal house created a hothouse environment for the lineup of composers who contributed to the city’s peerless stature in late-eighteenth-century musical life, a roster that included Gluck, Haydn, Salieri, Mozart, and Beethoven.
It was at the end of this succession of the Viennese Classical School (as it is often called) that Schubert entered the picture. He had the good fortune to be born into a musically inclined family, one that was attuned to signs of his exceptional musical instincts. When he was seven years old he was granted an audition with Salieri, the city’s Court Music Director, who authorized him to sing for services at the Imperial Court Chapel. A year later Schubert received his first violin lessons from his father, and at about the same time he began instruction in organ, counterpoint, thoroughbass, and singing from his local parish organist, who reported that, “Whenever I wished to impart something new to him, he always knew it already.”
Music-making was an indispensable pastime in the family’s household, and Schubert both heard and participated in chamber music from an early age, playing through the quartet repertory with his schoolteacher-father and brothers. In 1808 he was officially admitted to the Choir of the Court Chapel, a prestigious appointment that carried with it a full scholarship, including room and board, to the Imperial and Royal City College, which offered the best education available in Vienna to youngsters from non-aristocratic families. Schubert stayed there for five years, taking an active role in the school’s musical life, getting good grades in all his academic courses, and writing his first compositions (some of them benefiting from corrections by Salieri himself). In the summer of 1812 his voice broke, but even though his usefulness in the choir evaporated he was allowed to remain at the school for a further year. By this time he was entirely engrossed in music, and his grades in other disciplines began to falter. The school invited him to stay longer with the proviso that he pay closer attention to his overall education. Schubert, however, decided to leave in November 1813. He moved back to the family home and enrolled at Saint Anne’s Normal School for a ten-month course (six days a week) leading to certification as a schoolteacher—a move that conveniently exempted him from military service. Following his certification he followed his father’s footsteps into the classroom, but he ended up disliking the profession and after a couple of years left in favor of a financially perilous existence as a freelance musician-composer.
Schubert was therefore an entirely Viennese musical product, and in certain ways he grew to embody what the world embraced as the Viennese ideal in music, which tethered together exorbitant talent and technical facility with a measure of ineluctable charm. Of Schubert’s talent there is no doubt. It is curious that his name rarely surfaces when music-lovers speak of prodigies, for he doubtless qualifies as a prodigy composer, having begun to write music at an early age and having achieved undying masterpieces of lieder by the time he was seventeen (“Gretchen am Spinnrade”) and eighteen (“Erlkönig”). Nor was he lacking in musical charm, and more precisely in that peculiarly Viennese attribute known as Gemütlichkeit, which embraces not just charm but also a sense of coziness, familiar acceptance, and unpretentious well-being. In fact, his principal musical milieu was domestic, from his familial string-quartet sessions to the semi-professional orchestra of amateurs that read his symphonies, to the circle of devoted friends—poets, artists, musicians, and enthusiastic hangers-on—who witnessed the premieres of the vast majority of his compositions at the musical parties that became known as Schubertiades, after the composer at their center.
We strongly sense the domestic Schubert in several of the works performed this evening. The Rondos for Piano Four-Hands offered in the pre-concert recital are two from the composer’s very considerable catalogue of pieces for two to play at one piano. They span his entire composing career: “D.1,” the very first entry in Otto Erich Deutsch’s chronological catalogue of Schubert’s works, is a Fantasy in G major for Piano Four-Hands composed in three weeks during 1810; and the final year of Schubert’s short life includes four such pieces, including one of his great masterworks, the F minor Fantasy for Piano Four-Hands, D.940. We do not know much about the two played here. The earlier is the Rondo in D major, D.608, written in January 1818 but not published until May 1835, when it was issued under the curious title Notre amitié est invariable (Our Friendship is Unswerving, Opus 138). The title of this polonaise-rondo was almost certainly an invention of the publisher, but at least one commentator (Hans Költzch, in his 1927 Franz Schubert in seinen Klaviersonaten) maintains that the amitié refers to Schubert’s friendship with the pianist Josef von Gahy. Schubert often played four-hand music with this friend, including his own compositions and four-hand reductions of Beethoven symphonies. Many years later Gahy told a Schubert biographer: “I count the hours I spent playing duets with Schubert among the most enjoyable of my life, and I cannot think back on that period without being overcome by the most profound emotion.” In one of two variant versions of this piece the players’ hands cross at the end, possibly significant as a form of musically enforced physical closeness.
A rondo generally suggests lightness. Its recurring main section, with more or less contrasting episodes interspersed between its repetitions, is easy to follow, and its use for the finales of symphonies or chamber pieces often qualified as musical dessert. Still, there’s nothing inherent in the form that requires that a rondo be cheerful, and a work such as Schubert’s A major Rondo, D.951, traverses dramatic terrains. Schubert wrote it in June 1828 at the request of the Viennese publisher Domenico Artaria, who issued it on December 11, 1828—less than a month after the thirty-one-year-old composer’s death—as a “Grand Rondeau.” The Schubert scholar Alfred Einstein called this work “the apotheosis of all Schubert’s compositions for four hands,” and a listener is tempted to agree when marveling at this late work’s subtle melodic manipulation, its wide-ranging harmonic wandering, and its quintessentially Schubertian spirit, in which overriding amiability is punctuated, and sometimes briefly controverted, by an overlay of dissonance.
Rondos return in the main program, in works by both Schubert and Berg. From Schubert comes the little known and rarely played Rondo in A major for Violin and Strings, D.438, written in June 1816. Because Schubert had hardly any recourse to professional orchestras (or, for that matter, concert halls), he produced little music in the concerto vein—only one so-called Concertstück (for Violin and Orchestra, also in 1816) and the following year a Polonaise for the same forces. It’s a pity, because those three concerted works display considerable ability in handling the sense of contrast that lies at the heart of concerto-writing, an art Schubert had no practical reason to explore further. If this Rondo was performed when it was new, it must almost surely have been played by a solo violin and a string quartet rather than a string orchestra; that is the instrumentation assumed in the work’s first publication, which appeared in 1897 in the complete edition of Schubert’s works. Here we find the composer looking backwards to the structural models of Viennese Classicism; he uses the simple layout of an Adagio introduction followed by a duple-time allegro rondo, but the melodic and harmonic touches are nonetheless distinctive.
The clarinet had grown popular during the Viennese Classical period, most memorably through its embrace by Mozart, and by Schubert’s time it had become a standard instrument with a substantial solo and chamber repertory. This was the era of nascent Romanticism, and the Romantics found in the timbre of the clarinet, and also that of the French horn, a tone quality ideally suited to the veiled pathos and naturalistic mystery that stood at the heart of their expressive goals. Among the approximately 650 lieder Schubert composed we find only two in which an obbligato instrument assists the singer and pianist. It’s entirely true to the aesthetic spirit of the moment that on one occasion (in “Auf dem Strom”) that obbligato instrument was the horn, in the other (in “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen”) the clarinet.
Both were products of his final year. In fact, “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen” was the last piece Schubert completed, in October 1828, a month before he died. He wrote it expressly for Anna Milder-Hauptmann, who had created the title role of Beethoven’s Leonore (the 1805 version) and Fidelio (in 1814). Schubert was smitten with her voice and she with his music. Oddly, they never managed to meet, a fact they bemoaned in their correspondence to each other, although she was one of the most important and internationally acclaimed musicians to champion his lieder during his lifetime. She repeatedly asked him to write a Goethe setting for her, but instead she got “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen,” the text of which Schubert cobbled together from two disparate poems, “Der Berghirt” by Wilhelm Müller (the poet of Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise) and “Liebesgedanken” by Helmina von Chézy (for whose play Rosamunde Schubert had composed incidental music). It’s an anthem to the Romantic sensibility, evoking such central concerns as singing in nature, the vastness of the picturesque landscape (replete with highest rock, distant vale, and the chasm’s echo), lovers desolate in their separation, and images of forest, night, springtime, and wandering.
Milder-Hauptmann didn’t receive this song until September 1829, when Schubert’s brother Ferdinand copied it out and had it delivered to her by the composer’s good friend Johann Michael Vogl (an acclaimed baritone who had sung Don Pizarro to Milder-Hauptmann’s Leonore in the 1814 Fidelio). She sang its premiere a year and a half later, in Riga, and also is known to have programmed it in Berlin in December 1830, by which time the piece had already appeared in print.
That none of the Schubert works performed this evening were published during the composer’s lifetime should not be taken as confirmation of the widely circulated belief that he passed his thirty-one years ignored by the public. Indeed it is tragic that his large-scale compositions did not make it into print while he was alive—none of his symphonies, for example, and only one of his string quartets. But from 1821 through his death in 1828 about a hundred of Schubert’s compositions were published, mostly in Vienna, which is a considerably larger number than any of his Viennese contemporaries, including even Beethoven. Though this represented less than a quarter of his output, it was nonetheless remarkable and it underscores that Schubert—at least the Schubert of the lieder and piano pieces—was considered noteworthy quite beyond his circle of friends. If later generations might choose to bathe his memory in sentimentality, at least the musically attuned, even during Schubert’s lifetime, were exposed to his distinctive style, in which Gemütlichkeit is often joined with startling effect to expressivity that can be poignantly personal, deeply moving, and even raw.
Between the time of Schubert and that of Alban Berg no city rivaled Vienna for the consistent high quality of its musical life, not in terms of the number of distinguished musical institutions, not in terms of philanthropic or commercial support, not in terms of the concentration of essential composers, which during that span included such full-time residents as Johannes Brahms, the Johann Strausses (father and son), Anton Bruckner, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg.
Alban Berg began life with more material advantages than Schubert had had. His father was a successful Viennese businessman in the export trade, and for his first fifteen years Berg enjoyed his creature comforts and felt no compulsion to excel at anything. He was a poor student and had to repeat a year at school on two separate occasions. His father died in 1900, which considerably reduced the family’s circumstances. Soon an interest in music began to dawn. Alban had been unremarkable in his piano lessons with the family’s governess, but in 1901 he began writing songs and piano pieces for performances within the familial circle. Still, he was in no way on a professional musical path, and when he was seventeen he got himself into more trouble, fathering an illegitimate daughter with a maid at the family’s country estate. He took a position as an unpaid intern in the civil service and seemed headed nowhere until 1904. That autumn, Arnold Schoenberg advertised that he was accepting private students, and Berg signed up, as did Anton Webern, with whose name Berg’s own would be linked in posterity.
Schoenberg, who was a little more than ten years older than Berg and was not yet famous, stopped offering formal classes after a year, frustrated that most of his pupils showed no aptitude for composition. But the talented students, including Berg and Webern, stuck with him. It seems that Schoenberg did not mandate that his students adopt his own compositional methods; indeed, both Webern and Berg developed strikingly individual voices, though the two of them, along with Schoenberg, would be bound together in history as the Second Viennese School.
Berg made immense progress during his formal studies with Schoenberg, which continued from 1904 to 1911. There was much work to be done. Like Schubert, Berg was preternaturally drawn to lieder, to the extent that, towards the end of Berg’s studies, Schoenberg wrote to his own publisher: “Alban Berg is an extraordinarily gifted composer, but the state he was in when he came to me was such that his imagination apparently could not work on anything but lieder. Even the piano accompaniments then were songlike. He was absolutely incapable of writing an instrumental movement or inventing an instrumental theme.” Schoenberg accordingly stressed the instrumental side of composition, and in 1907-08 we find Berg working on no fewer than five piano sonatas. He completed none of them, but they all helped propel him towards his Opus 1 Sonata, which he composed on his own, not as an exercise for Schoenberg, even if his teacher did keep a watchful eye on its finer points. He finished it in the summer of 1908 and published it, at his own expense, in 1910. It stood as a sort of graduation piece at the end of his studies with Schoenberg, being premiered on April 24, 1911, in a concert that also included his String Quartet. The only known review of the concert was not particularly encouraging: “Under the cloak and name of ‘String Quartet,’ this genre is maltreated at the instigation of Mr. Alban Berg. The same Mr. Berg has written a piano piece (boldly entitled ‘Piano Sonata’) which shows t-r-a-c-e-s of talent and musicality.”
The Piano Sonata is cast in a single movement. For a while Berg seems to have felt this was a bit stingy and voiced a desire to add further movements to it. The problem was that no compelling ideas came to him about how to expand the piece, which Schoenberg seized on as evidence that the composition must therefore be complete as it stood, that Berg had indeed said all that he needed to say in this work. The Piano Sonata demonstrates Berg’s mastery of Schoenberg’s principle of “developing variation” (a nod to both Brahms and Wagner), through which an entire piece should be seen as growing—both creatively and inevitably--out of a single cell of musical material. We find Berg richly versed in last-gasp post-Wagnerian tonality, with its incorporation of fourths-based harmonies and whole-tone progressions moving in the direction of what would be considered atonality, though still within the essentially classical framework of a recognizable sonata form. And yet, the musical material is constantly evolving. Where a classical sonata composer would have basically laid out his musical material in the exposition section, worked out its implications in the development, and then revisited it in the recapitulation, Berg hits the ground running so far as developing his material is concerned. He is poring over the implications and possibilities already as the exposition unrolls, he keeps his “official” development section brief (since the music has been developing all along), and his recapitulation does not revisit the basic thematic material at all literally. Years later he would pass along the precept to one of his own students who had made the grave mistake, in the recapitulation of a sonata movement, of literally repeating a theme from the exposition. “How can you do this?” protested Berg. “Think of what your themes and motives have meanwhile ‘experienced’!” For all its technical accomplishment, the most impressive achievement of Berg’s Piano Sonata is its emotional impact. It’s a fundamentally tragic piece, troubling in tone, a reflection of the anxiety, uncertainties, and alienation that fed into the Austrian Expressionism that would come to dominate all the arts at this time in Vienna.
Berg’s Piano Sonata displays an entirely mature voice. Schoenberg’s formidable discipline had wrought its magic in Berg’s life quite as much as in his music. Nine days after the premiere of the sonata, Berg married Helene Nahowski, who would play an essential role until his death and considerably beyond. Shortly Berg embarked on the work that would be issued as his Opus 4, the Five Orchestral Songs after Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg (Altenberg Lieder), for soprano and orchestra. Peter Altenberg (1859-1919; his name was a pseudonym for Richard Engländer) was a writer in Berg’s artistic circle. Although he worked in various literary genres, he became most admired for his aphorisms and other short prose poems, some of which he wrote on postcards (which he would mail to his friends) or scraps of paper. Berg began his setting of five of these prose poems in 1912, possibly at the suggestion of Schoenberg, who, having built up Berg’s instrumental chops, felt it would now be all right for his erstwhile pupil to “go ahead and write at least a few songs.”
“It’s good to let poetry lead you back into music,” Schoenberg wrote, “but then, turn to the orchestra.” The Altenberg Lieder, Berg’s first published symphonic works, are as brilliant and experimental in their use of the orchestra as they are in the effectiveness of their tone-painting, which is to say very brilliant and experimental indeed. (It is also ironic and perhaps even musically naughty to use such a large orchestra for such tiny pieces.) In the first song Berg evokes snowfall through tintinnabulations that range from delicate jingling to strident clashes, and in the second the purifying effect of rain is evoked through a severe slenderizing of the instrumentation. When Berg wrote this set of orchestral songs Schoenberg was well along the path towards formalizing his system of dodecaphony; it is perhaps not such an exorbitant surprise, therefore, to find a twelve-note chord standing as the basis of the third song. A pared-down texture again informs the fourth song, while the set closes with a passacaglia that (thanks to its classic form, based on the repetition of a five-note motif) builds on ancient tradition while looking forward to the language of Berg’s operas, Wozzeck and Lulu. If the Altenberg Lieder are brief, Berg nonetheless expressed himself in large gestures: song bordering on opera.
Two of the Altenberg Lieder (the second and fourth) were premiered on March 31, 1913, in the large hall of Vienna’s Musikverein. Arnold Schoenberg conducted the program, which also included pieces by Alexander Zemlinsky, Webern, Mahler, and Schoenberg himself. The event became famous as “the Skandalkonzert,” Berg’s songs drawing scorn and the whole performance breaking down in a brawl.
Not long thereafter, Schoenberg himself lit into his pupil over what he considered the insignificance and worthlessness of his recent pieces, and this led to a crisis of confidence in Berg. He dropped the idea of having the complete Altenberg Lieder published or even performed, and as a result the full set was not heard until 1953.
Berg was not prolific, although he wrote more than is suggested by the highest opus number in his catalogue, Opus 7, the opera Wozzeck. He attached no opus number to anything he completed after 1923. Wozzeck, premiered in 1925, brought him widespread critical acclaim and much-needed financial security. He almost finished a second opera, Lulu, which he began in 1928 and on which he worked steadily until 1935, when the death of Manon Gropius (the daughter of his architect-friend Walter Gropius and the former Alma Mahler) inspired him to interrupt his opera to compose his Violin Concerto in Manon’s memory. Shortly after finishing it, Berg was annoyed by an abscess on his back, presumably the result of an insect bite. Treatment proved ineffective, blood poisoning ensued, and the composer died at the end of the year.
Berg had become interested in the Lulu story in 1905, when he attended a Vienna production of Frank Wedekind’s new play Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box). Years later he would fashion the libretto himself from that play and an earlier one, also by Wedekind, titled Erdgeist (Earth Spirit). The story centers on a morally derelict woman, Lulu (a soprano), who brings about the downfall of various parties attracted by her charms, principally Dr. Schön, his son Alwa (a writer as Wedekind created him, but Berg tellingly changed him into a composer), and the lesbian Countess Geschwitz (mezzo-soprano, the only one of the three who really loves Lulu). Lulu is sent to prison for killing Dr. Schön, but Countess Geschwitz helps her escape to London, where she gets on by being a prostitute, only to be murdered by Jack the Ripper, who also dispatches Countess Geschwitz when she tries to defend Lulu.
Berg completed two acts of Lulu entirely, as well as part of the third and final act, which in any case he had finished in an ostensibly complete (unorchestrated) short score. He also inscribed a dedication to Schoenberg in honor of his sixtieth birthday. Berg’s widow, Helene, approached Schoenberg about orchestrating the last act. He consented, but after perusing the score he reneged. Webern also declined. Appreciating that heaven was in the details, Helene accordingly declared Act Three off limits, although she did allow Erwin Stein, another Schoenberg pupil, to prepare a piano-vocal score. The two completed acts of Lulu were given in staged productions, beginning in 1937 at the Zurich Opera, and some companies went so far as to present the piece even including the portions of Act Three that Berg had finished in full score, although obviously neither solution was dramatically satisfying. Not until after Helene died, in 1976, was the way cleared for companies to begin presenting the opera in its entirety, using an Act Three orchestration by Friedrich Cerha that had been lying in wait.
Before all these problems began, some of the music from Lulu had already been heard in concert. In 1924 Berg had crafted a suite of three orchestral episodes from Wozzeck, apparently to rouse advance excitement about that yet-unproduced opera. In 1934 he did the same thing in anticipation of Lulu, assembling five movements from the opera, this time including some singing from the title character and just a bit, at the end, from Countess Geschwitz. His selections allude to all four of the principal characters and might serve, as the composer explained, as “a program for the whole work.” The opening section revisits the classical structure of the rondo, in music that in Act Two of the opera is associated with Alwa; the suite assembles music that in the full opera is dispersed through the act. Next (here separated on the program from the opening Rondo) comes an orchestral interlude that was composed to accompany a silent film to be shown between the two scenes of Act Two, a sequence that would portray Lulu’s trial, conviction, and escape; here Berg, in a strategy that surely pleased Schoenberg, patterned his score as a musical palindrome. At the Suite’s center is “Lulu’s Song” (also from Act Two), a portrayal of the title character; in this intense aria she defines herself with searing honesty. The fourth section is an orchestral interlude (Variations, on a song by the playwright Wedekind himself, heard in forthright form only at the end of the variations) separating the two scenes of Act Three, music meant to introduce the locale of London, where Lulu will meet her demise. The final part of the Lulu Suite depicts Countess Geschwitz and includes her final adoring outburst (which, in performances of the Suite, is normally rendered by the same singer who is portraying Lulu).
It was, of course, an unpropitious time for such an opera to be produced in Germany, given the strictures recently imposed by the National Socialists. “I am now making a suite out of Lulu which will last approximately twenty-five minutes,” wrote Berg to the conductor Erich Kleiber. “Do you have the desire and the opportunity and the courage to do the first performance?” That Kleiber did, on November 30, 1934, in Berlin; and a few days later Kleiber resigned his position as General Music Director of the Berlin Staatsoper and fled Germany. On December 11, 1935, the Symphonische Stücke aus der Oper Lulu (as the Lulu Suite was then billed) was finally performed in Vienna. Not quite two weeks later Berg was dead, eight weeks short of his fifty-first birthday.
—James M. Keller
More About the Music
Further Listening and Reading
A Schubert/Berg Journey
Schubert
Recordings: Rondo in A major for Piano Four-Hands, D.951—Christoph Eschenbach and Justus Frantz (Brilliant Classics) | András Schiff and Imre Rohmann (Hungaroton) | Duo Tal & Groethuysen (Sony Classical) | Maria João Pires and Ricardo Castro (Deutsche Grammophon)
Rondo in D major for Piano Four-Hands, D.608—Martha Argerich and Alexandre Rabinovich (Philips/ArkivMusic) | Duo Tal & Groethuysen (Sony Classical)
Rondo in A major for Violin and Strings, D.438—Paul Guggenberger with Ensemble Wien (Sony BMG/ArkivMusic) | Nigel Kennedy with Jeffrey Tate conducting the English Chamber Orchestra (EMI Classics/ArkivMusic)
“Der Hirt auf dem Felsen”—Arleen Auger with pianist Graham Johnson and clarinetist Thea King (Hyperion) | Benita Valente with pianist Rudolf Serkin and clarinetist Harold Wright (Sony Classical) | Elly Ameling with pianist Jörg Demus and clarinetist Hans Deinzer (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi)
Reading: Schubert: The Music and the Man, by Brian Newbould (Gollancz) | Schubert: A Documentary Biography, by Otto Erich Deutsch (Dent; reprinted Da Capo) | Schubert: Memoirs by his Friends, also by Deutsch (Adam and Charles Black) | The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, edited by Christopher H. Gibbs (Cambridge University Press) | Schubert’s Vienna, edited by Raymond Erickson (Yale University Press) | Schubert in the European Imagination (Volume 1: The Romantic and Victorian Eras; Volume 2: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna), by Scott Messing (Eastman Studies in Music, University of Rochester Press)
Berg
Recordings: Altenberg-Lieder—Margaret Price with Claudio Abbado conducting the London Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon)
Piano Sonata, Opus 1—Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Teldec) | Mitsuko Uchida (Philips) | Nikolai Demidenko (Hyperion)
Lulu Suite—Simon Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, with soprano Arleen Auger (EMI Classics) | James Levine conducting the Met Orchestra, with soprano Renée Fleming (Sony Classical) | Margaret Price with Claudio Abbado conducting the London Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon)
Reading: Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, by Theodor W. Adorno (Cambridge University Press) | Alban Berg, by Willi Reich (Harcourt, Brace & World; reprinted Vienna House) | The Music of Alban Berg, by David John Headlam (Yale) | The Berg Companion, edited by Douglas Jarman (Northeastern University Press) | The Cambridge Companion to Berg (Cambridge University Press) | Alban Berg, by Karen Monson (Houghton Mifflin) | Alban Berg: The Man and his Work, by Mosco Carner (Holmes & Meier) | The Operas of Alban Berg: Volume Two / Lulu, by George Perle (University of California Press)