Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite is a source of wonder on many levels: biographical, symbolic, technical, and emotional even without decoding the layers of meaning woven into the score. When Berg wrote the Lyric Suite from 1925 to 1926, he was in the grip of passion for a woman named Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the wife of a Prague businessman and sister of Franz Werfel (who was married to the former wife of both Gustav Mahler and architect Walter Gropius, Alma).
Hanna and Berg’s paths crossed directly at least twice: when the Suite from Berg’s opera Wozzeck was played in Prague, and when Berg was the Fuchs-Robettins’ guest while in Berlin for the stage premiere of the same opera.
How far did their passion carry them? Only since the death of the composer’s widow, Helene Berg, in 1976, have cracks in the apparent constancy of the Bergs’ marriage come to light. From these insinuations of infidelity, the idea of Hanna Fuchs-Robettin as Alban Berg’s lover helps explain the depth and details about her in the musical texture of the Lyric Suite.
Originally written as a six-movement suite for string quartet, Berg soon arranged the second, third, and fourth movements for string orchestra. Like J. S. Bach and Shostakovich, Berg invented ciphers that embedded secret messages into his music. The first indication of these coded symbols comes in the tempo markings for all six of the movements, which immediately indicate the music’s subject matter: amorous, mysterious, ecstatic, passionate in the Three Pieces and jovial, delirious, desolate in the other three movements.
Most directly, a symbolic rendering of Berg and Hanna’s love affair is entwined in this music with their initials, AB and HF, carved into the score using German notation: A–B-flat (for Berg) and B-natural–F (for Hanna). Together as a four-note chord, these recur throughout, often at moments of crucial structural importance. Hanna’s daughter Dorothea also appears, signified as two notes of C (Do–Do) in the second movement.
Each two-note motif—Berg’s is a half-step on the musical scale, while Hanna’s is a leap of a tritone, or diminished fifth—also features significantly in the tone rows (12-tone scales) from which sections of the first, third, and sixth movements are constructed.
In addition, the lovers are represented by numbers: 10 for Hanna and 23 for Berg (a number he referred to throughout his life). Every metronome marking in the work is a multiple of 10 or 23, and every movement contains a count of bars (68, 150, 460, 138, etc.) derived from this underlying numerology.
Furthermore, the swift opening section of the third movement, marked Allegro misterioso, is reversed note for note later in the movement. Significantly, a single chord (of A–B–B-flat–F, Berg and Hanna intertwined again) is inserted at the point where the resulting musical palindrome is broken.
In more obvious ways, the third movement acts as a traditional symphonic scherzo, breaking the momentum and pace between the previous movement and the next. And the fourth is a deepening adagio, able to bring the Three Pieces to a suitably enigmatic ending. Throughout, the resourcefulness of the string writing is astonishing and still modern nearly a century later. Even without decoding Berg’s encryptions, many will easily hear the work as he intended: a passionately argued musical journey encompassing intense emotional expression and totally original sonorities.
—Hugh Macdonald and Eric Sellen
Schubert’s first six symphonies, written between 1813 and 1818, showed him completely at ease with all aspects of the form. But a few years later, he was leaving fragment after fragment, as if he no longer felt up to the challenge. The B-Minor Symphony is not the only work Schubert left incomplete. Others were abandoned even earlier in the compositional process: two symphonic fragments in D major (D. 615 from 1818 and D. 708A from 1820–1821) and a fairly complete sketch of a symphony in E major (D. 729 from 1821). Though all had been performed and/or “completed” by the 20th century, these interrupted projects point to Schubert’s growing dissatisfaction with the symphonic form and suggest that he was striving for something on a larger scale than his previous efforts. Both stimulated and discouraged by Beethoven’s formidable example (he once exclaimed: “Who can do anything after him?!”), he seems to have been searching for his own artistic response to Beethoven’s symphonies—a response that would match his predecessor in scope and dramatic energy, yet free from any direct stylistic influence.
With the B-Minor Symphony, Schubert came close to a solution. As Brian Newbould, a specialist on Schubert’s symphonies, explains, this work is not so much an unfinished symphony as a “finished half-symphony.” It is the only one of the uncompleted “fragments” with two movements that are fully written out and orchestrated, needing no editing whatsoever in order to be performed.
While Beethoven tended to construct his symphonic movements of extremely short melodic or rhythmic gestures, Schubert often started with full-fledged melodic statements that unfold like songs. In the first movement, song soon turns into drama when the second theme is suddenly interrupted by a measure of silence. This is followed by a few moments of orchestral turbulence, after which the previous idyll is temporarily restored but only with some difficulty. One particular harmonic turn in the movement’s development section even uncannily anticipates the music of Wagner’s groundbreaking Tristan and Isolde.
The second movement combines a peaceful and ethereal melody with a more majestic theme featuring trumpets, trombones, and timpani. A second melody is introduced in the new key of C-sharp minor, again with a dramatic extension. These contrasts in mood persist until the end of the movement, where “peaceful and ethereal” E major is finally reestablished after an exacting tonal journey through a number of different keys.
The manuscript score of the “Unfinished” Symphony was long in the possession of composer Anselm Hüttenbrenner, a friend of Schubert. Hüttenbrenner gave no one access to the work for decades, for reasons that are not well understood. Finally, the story goes, conductor Johann Herbeck, who directed the concerts of Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of the Friends of Music), essentially bribed Hüttenbrenner by offering to perform one of his own works in exchange for Schubert’s score. Thus released, the “Unfinished” was premiered in 1865 and quickly became a popular and lasting hit.
—Peter Laki
Franz Schubert’s Mass in E-flat Major, written in the last year of his life, offers keen insight into this composer’s musical world—how he created music and viewed life here on earth. Just as we find in Schubert’s “Great” C-Major Symphony, and in many of his other late works, the music of this Mass expands to “heavenly lengths.” This is how Robert Schumann described Schubert’s extraordinary ability to create a kind of stasis or suspension in which time seems to stand still. In this state, he removes us from our everyday cares and allows us to contemplate our lives more deeply and intimately.
By the time he was 19 in 1816, Schubert had already composed four Masses built upon the Catholic liturgical traditions of the time. In many respects, Schubert’s two late Masses—the German Mass (D. 872) and the Mass in E-flat Major (D. 950) written in 1827 and 1828, respectively—are in part reflections of the social, religious, and philosophical upheavals ignited during the Age of Enlightenment. These works also give voice to Schubert’s own maturing worldview about music and life.
Looking at his music, Schubert seems to have taken the liturgical Mass from off its high pedestal and placed it squarely on earth amidst people. Rather than express subservience to God, this music focuses on individual devotion, human emotion, and our own relationship with the divine.
This focus on humanity starts with the choice of E-flat major. This key was associated with the Enlightenment and Freemasonry. It was used by Mozart for The Magic Flute and by Beethoven for his Third Symphony (“Eroica”), all of which share deep connections to secular life.
However, its structure follows in the traditional manner of the liturgical Mass, opening with the Kyrie, which features mystical wind chords and a throbbing rhythm in the cellos and basses. Devoutly, the chorus begins by singing “Have mercy on us, Lord,” a touching expression of Schubert’s humility and modesty. During its Christe eleison section, Schubert significantly modulates to B-flat major, the key of hope.
In the Gloria, Schubert draws on a great reservoir of compositional techniques, starting with unaccompanied chorus, perhaps suggesting a direct connection between humanity and God. This continues into an extraordinary melody, explored through five variations across the orchestra. The ensuing Domine Deus is written at a walking tempo, which can feel emotionally shattering, a confession of guilt for the death of Jesus. The music quiets down, coming nearly to a standstill, before the jubilant singing of the beatitudes. A subsequent fugue inspired by Gregorian chant and Renaissance choral music unites the lowest and highest voices of the choir, a musical demonstration of the limitless reaches of the Holy Spirit.
The following Credo includes one of the most poignantly beautiful sections of this magnificent work, the Et Incarnatus, filled with yearning and melancholy. Set in the romantic key of A-flat major, the two tenors and soprano voices join like three angels, delicately singing of the incarnation of Jesus. Eventually, this ebbs toward silence and then darker colors that depict the crucifixion.
The Sanctus, with its repetitive triplets in the strings, recalls the Christe eleison of the Kyrie, while the chorus reminds us of the same devotion and humility as in the Credo. The penultimate section, the Benedictus, creates a sense of urgency in humanity’s relationship with Jesus.
In the work’s final section, the Agnus Dei, Schubert alludes to one of his most famous songs, “Der Doppelgänger” (from the song cycle Schwanengesang). With this association, Schubert appears to connect Jesus’s suffering directly with our own anguish. These internalized and personal feelings deepen in the closing Dona Nobis, as Schubert paints a renewed view of human harmony.
Schubert did not live to witness the first performances of his Mass in E-flat Major, led by his older brother Ferdinand at Vienna’s Alserkirche in 1829. As a result, some have suggested that this Mass, completed four months before his death, serves as a requiem for or even premonition of his untimely passing at only 31 years of age. Indeed, one can find melancholy resignation and doubt throughout this work, but there is also a sense of consolation and a deep understanding of the human condition.
A concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic once said to me: “This piece cannot be long enough! For me, it could last forever.” How very true.
—Franz Welser-Möst