At the first performance of Alban Berg’s six-movement Lyric Suite, given by the Kolisch Quartet in Vienna on January 8, 1927, it was immediately obvious to the audience that the work’s harsh dissonances reflected an unusually intense emotional world. Movement titles like Andante amoroso, Adagio appassionato, or Largo desolato suggested as much to anyone who took one look at the program page. The new work, by the celebrated composer of the opera Wozzeck, quickly established itself as one of the peaks of modern chamber music.
The stunning discoveries came many years later, when eminent American composer and Berg scholar George Perle (1915–2009) first described a copy of the printed score with extensive handwritten annotations in Berg’s hand. Berg had given that copy to Hanna Fuchs-Robettin of Prague, sister of the writer Franz Werfel. After Fuchs-Robettin’s death, her daughter inherited the score, and shared it with Perle in the 1970s. It turned out that Berg and Fuchs-Robettin were passionately in love with one another, but since they were both married and divorce was not an option for either, their relationship was doomed from the start. The Lyric Suite was nothing less than a coded love letter to Fuchs-Robettin.
Much of the work’s thematic material is derived from the notes A–B-flat–B-natural–F (A-B-H-F, using the German note names), which are the initials of Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs. Berg integrated these motifs into a 12-tone row, according to a technique he had taken over from his former teacher Arnold Schoenberg. By using tone rows, Berg ensured motivic unity and at the same time maximized pitch variety. But he never wanted his listener to focus on such technical matters, instead insisting on the primacy of the expression of feelings.
In 1928, Berg arranged the second, third, and fourth movements of his Lyric Suite for string orchestra at the request of Emil Hertzka, director of Universal Edition in Vienna. This version was premiered by the Berliner Philharmoniker under Jascha Horenstein on January 31, 1929.
When Erich Wolfgang Korngold was nine years old, his father—who happened to be Julius Korngold, the most influential music critic in Vienna—showed the boy’s first compositions to Gustav Mahler, who exclaimed: “a genius!” Mahler’s reaction was understandable. The young Korngold was a unique composing prodigy who had an instinctive grasp of the most modern musical styles of the day. He grew up to be an extremely successful opera composer and an expert on the operettas of Johann Strauss Jr. His involvement with new productions of Die Fledermaus and other Strauss operettas (as arranger and conductor) brought him into contact with Max Reinhardt (1873–1943), the foremost German stage director of the time. This turned out to be a lifesaver, as it was with Reinhardt that Korngold first went to Hollywood, where he soon became the star among film composers. After the Nazi occupation of Austria in 1938, Korngold lost his original home base and settled permanently in Los Angeles.
Korngold’s father was deeply disappointed that Erich had given up “serious” composition in favor of the movies. To his last day, the old man kept exhorting his son to return to concert music. Finally, toward the end of Julius’s life, Erich wrote a string quartet (his third), and after his father’s death, he returned to a project started years earlier but never completed: a concerto for violin and orchestra. The concerto was originally intended for the great violinist Bronisław Huberman, but he was unable to perform it due to his poor health, so the work was premiered by Jascha Heifetz in St. Louis on February 15, 1947.
At this point in Korngold’s career, the two aspects of his creative world—concert and film music—had become completely intertwined. His movie scores (of which the most famous are Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood) were symphonic, even operatic, in their scope. The Violin Concerto, conversely, owes much to Korngold’s work in the film industry. Many of the major themes were taken over from movie scores, and there are moments where the instrumentation and the thematic development also bring back Hollywood memories.
In Korngold’s personal style, elements inherited from Mahler and Richard Strauss are treated with the light touch perfected at the Warner Brothers studios. This approach revived the genre of the Romantic concerto at a time when most modern composers and critics were ready to bury it. At first, the concerto found little favor with violinists, despite Heifetz’s strong advocacy. Since the 1970s, however, it has enjoyed a spectacular comeback, with numerous recordings and frequent concert performances all over the world.
Beethoven’s Third Symphony represents a quantum leap within the composer’s oeuvre as it does in the history of music in general. The sheer size of the work—almost twice the length of the average 18th-century symphony—was a novelty, to say nothing of what amounted to a true revolution in musical technique and, even more important, in musical expression.
Music had never before expressed the idea of struggle in such a striking way. Beethoven’s encroaching deafness is surely part of the reason why that idea took center stage in the composer’s thinking at the time, and it is fair to assume that his physical affliction was behind the spectacular change that Beethoven’s style underwent in what has come to be called his “heroic” period. Yet in the case of the Third Symphony, the personal crisis was compounded by the dramatic political events of the day, and in particular by Beethoven’s ambivalent relationship with the leading political figure of the era—Napoleon Bonaparte.
Beethoven had always sympathized with the French Revolution, which broke out when he was at the impressionable age of 19. Like many intellectuals of his time, he was fascinated by the reforms Napoleon introduced as First Consul of the Republic. At the same time, he despised tyranny in all its forms, and when Napoleon crowned himself emperor, he saw that event as a betrayal of the revolution. He had planned to dedicate his new symphony to Bonaparte, but according to an eyewitness, he flew into a wild rage upon hearing the news, and tore up the dedication, replacing it with an inscription that was more impersonal but also more universal: Sinfonia Eroica, composta per festeggiare il Sovvenire di un grand Uomo, or “Heroic Symphony, composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.”
The opening Allegro con brio is Beethoven’s longest symphony movement aside from the finale of the Ninth. In it, some of the basic procedures of Classical sonata form are carried to a point where they take on an entirely new meaning: They become elements of a drama of unprecedented intensity. The themes are shorter than in most earlier symphonies and more open-ended, lending themselves particularly well to modifications of various sorts. It is by transforming, fragmenting, and reintegrating his motifs that Beethoven expresses the idea of struggle that is so unmistakably present throughout this movement.
The second movement bears the title Marcia funebre (“Funeral March”). The music begins softly and rises to a powerful, dramatic climax. The main theme’s final return is interrupted by rests after every three or four notes, as if the violins were so overcome by grief that they could barely play the melody.
In the third and fourth movements, Beethoven managed to ease the feeling of tragedy without letting the tension subside. The third-movement Scherzo begins with two notes repeated in an undertone that evolve into a theme only gradually. In the somewhat more relaxed trio, the three horns take center stage, playing a melody that starts out as a hunting call.
The main theme of the last movement appears in no fewer than four of Beethoven’s compositions. Beethoven first used it in a simple contradance for orchestra, then in the last movement of the ballet The Creatures of Prometheus (both in 1800–1801), followed by the Variations for Piano, Op. 35 (1802), and lastly in the Third Symphony. The elaborate set of variations in the “Eroica” finale is integrated into a single, continuous musical form, culminating in a short Presto section that gives the symphony its dynamic conclusion.
© 2024 Peter Laki