“Alban Berg’s Homage to the Past in the Violin

Concerto”

Among the “Three Musketeers “ of 20th Century music known as

the Second Viennese School, Alban Berg receives a special spotlight

that differs from that of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg and friend Anton

Webern. Berg is hailed for his use of the 12-tone method and atonal

writing like his peers, but unlike Schoenberg and Webern, Berg could be

as tonal-sounding as he could be Serial. The marriage between the old

and the new in the music of Berg give way to his last yet powerful

magnum opus – the Violin Concerto (1935). In the Violin Concerto,

Alban Berg achieved his greatest triumph through the way he paid

homage to tradition by using musical and historical references and

perhaps by his will to leave his mark in the German tradition.

The Violin Concerto was born out of dire circumstances. In the last

few years of his life, Berg’s financial situation was precarious at best.

The rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party led to Berg’s work being
performed less and less in Germany and Austria. It was in this struggling

time that a commission came to Berg from the American violinist Louis

Krasner for a violin concerto. Krasner came specifically to Berg with the

idea that Berg’s lyrical style could produce a serial work that would be

expressive, not cerebral. Berg was rather reluctant at first about the

commission, and he only accepted it out of financial necessity. However,

the death of Manon Gropius, who Berg greatly adored, gave him the

impetus he needed to compose the concerto, which now bear the

inscription “Dem Andenken eines Engels” (In Memory of an Angel).

There is couple of distinct clues of musical reminiscences to the

past, the first of which is the tone-row which permeates the concerto.

Berg scholar Douglas Jarman observed that the tone row is built on

overlapping major and minor triads, and it finishes on a whole-tone

scale.1 The implied tonalities that Berg used, G minor, D Major, A

minor, and E Major, also correspond with the open strings on the violin.2

It is likely that the tonal implications appeal to the audience, and Berg

1
Douglas Jarman, “Alban Berg”, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, accessed October 11, 2017,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/02767.
2
Mosco Carner, Alban Berg, 156
took advantage of the tonal implications to allude to various sources,

such as the Carithian Folk Song and the Bach Chorale “Es ist Genug.”

Chris Walton also found musical links in the Berg concerto that tie

to Brahms. Schoenberg discussed in his 1933 lecture – often dubbed

Brahms the Progressive – the chain of interlocking thirds in the opening

theme in Brahms’ Symphony No. 4, which is similar to Berg’s use of

thirds in the tone row of his Violin Concerto. Berg may have been

inspired by his former teacher’s lecture to submit the tone-row of his

Violin Concerto to Schoenberg in a letter dated 28 August 1935. Walton

suggested that Berg may indeed took the lead from Schoenberg’s

lecture, as he had asked his former teacher a copy and Berg may have

heard the lecture in 1933.3

The whole-tone scale in the last few notes of the tone-row also

foreshadows the whole-tone passages that are throughout the concerto.

Whole-tones were not common to Austro-German music even in the

1930s as compare to the Russian and French music in Berg’s lifetime.

Schoenberg, however, had adopted it in his early works, like the tone
3
Ibid., 83
poem Pelleas und Melisande. Andrew Thomson found that in a section

of Pelleas und Melisande, Schoenberg used two downward whole-tone

scales in describing Melisande dying of a broken heart after Pelleas was

killed. The downward whole-tone scales played on top of a theme in E-

Flat minor are similar to Berg’s writing in the second movement of the

Violin Concerto, where the solo violin plays a downward whole-tone

scale on top of the clarinets playing the Waltz theme.4 The connection

between Melisande and Manon is striking in a poetic context.

Schoenberg’s downward whole-tone scale embodies the heartbroken

Melisande as she is dying in her room, and Berg’s serve as premonitions

to Manon’s tragic downfall in the concerto and also in real life. 5 The

striking similarity between Pelleas und Melisande and the Violin

Concerto could hardly be a coincidence, as Berg himself wrote a

thematic guide to Schoenberg’s tone poem in 1920.6

Another of Berg’s allusion to tradition is his quotation of the

chorale “Es ist Genug” (German: It is Enough) from the Cantata No. 60

4
Ibid., 56
5
Ibid., 57
6
Carner, Alban Berg, 300
“O Ewigkeit du Donnerwort” (O Eternity, You Word of Thunder) by J.

S. Bach. The opening notes of the chorale also happen to correspond

with the last notes of Berg’s tone-row, which Berg scholar Mosco

Carner noted that it was coincidental. Achim Fiedler, however,

disagreed with Carner about Berg’s quotation of Bach being a

coincidence, as he discovered in Berg’s letter to Schoenberg in 10 April

1914. Berg told Schoenberg in this letter about a concert of Bach

Cantatas he attended, which included “O Ewigkeit du Donnerwort”, and

that served as his true inspiration 20 years later.7

Walton noticed the similar treatments of Bach quotations taken by

both Brahms and Berg in the final movements of Symphony No. 4 and

the Violin Concerto respectively. Brahms also referred to a Bach Cantata

in his final symphony, and both composers incorporated their Bach

quotations in a set of variations; Brahms composed a Passacaglia on his

Bach theme, while Berg wrote two “Chorale Variations” on his. Brahms

and Berg used their themes as cantus firmi “that is sounded in different

7
Arthur Fiedler, “Is This Enough?: Achim Fiedler Introduces Another Twist in the Berg Violin Concerto
Story”, The Musical Times 134/1806 (Aug 1993), 444
registers — at times in the bass, at others in the treble”8 Berg was

probably acquainted with the Passacaglia of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony

since his student years, as the Passacaglia would “have featured in

Schoenberg's composition classes for even longer”.

The form Berg used in the final movement of the Violin Concerto

also recalls an earlier work by a contemporary of Berg – the Second

Violin Sonata in E minor by Ferruccio Busoni. As if predicting Berg’s

concerto 30 years before, Busoni used a very similar structure and idea

in the third movement of his sonata, especially with the quotation of the

chorale melody “Wie wohl ist mir” (How Good I Feel) by Bach. The

resemblance between the Busoni Sonata and the Berg Concerto is rather

uncanny; the final movements of both works follow a movement of

drama and power, the quotation of Bach chorales, the chorale melody is

hinted at before the full quotation, variations set on the quoted melody,

and a climax reached towards the end. Thomson also notices a certain

“fortuitous correspondence between the two works” on a personal level.

Both works serve as in Memoriam to friends of the composers – Busoni

8
Walton, “Bach, Brahms, Schoenberg”, 83
dedicated the Second Sonata to the late violinist Ottokar Nováček, and

Berg paid tributes to Manon in the Violin Concerto.9

The subject of Manon loomed large over Berg as he was

composing the concerto, but the force of circumstances at that time also

influenced him and his concerto. The rise of Hitler in the 1930s brought

on severe burden on Berg financially and musically. The Nazi party

declared on the onset that Germany is to be free of “cultural

bolshevism”, which Berg was unfairly included in. Carner noted that in

1935, the Austrian Education Minister dealt Berg a severe blow when he

announced a list of composers deemed truly native to be performed in

the Vienna Festwochen, and Berg was not included. The composer

subsequently wrote this to his friends: “…after fifty years which I spent

in my native city without interruption, am not a native composer.”10

Jarman stated that at this time of personal and political strife, the

references of the Austro-German tradition in his Violin Concerto is

Berg’s artistic and personal statement against the “narrow nationalism

which denied him and other composers a place in their tradition.” I

9
Ibid., 61
10
Carner, Alban Berg, 83
believe that Berg did intend these references in the Violin Concerto as

his personal and musical argument that the Second Viennese School has

a place in the continuum of German music.

Alban Berg never saw his Violin Concerto publically performed or

even hear a single note played. He never experienced the triumph his

concerto enjoyed. Despite it all, Berg’s Violin Concerto became a

milestone of the Second Viennese repertoire, and helped affirm the

Second Viennese School a seat in the musical tradition. Berg

successfully set about reaching to the past with references to previously

used form and ideas and moreover combining them with elements of the

new. They culminate as Berg’s personal and cultural statement against

the hate-baiting politics of his time, and also his in memoriam to what he

cherish the most, may it be Manon or the tradition of music. In my mind,

Berg had succeeded in the perspective of Louis Krasner, who believed

Berg’s lyrical and expressive style can defy the expectation of critics of

the Second Viennese School. However, beyond the visions of Krasner, I

really believed that Berg’s reference to the past in the Violin Concerto
made it all clear that the past and the traditional have a place in the

Second Viennese compositions, and the same is just as true if not more.