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Tag: Alban Berg

Alban Berg’s Lulu of an Opera

If one were to bake a birthday cake for Alban Berg, one would be forgiven for rendering a handgun in icing and hollowing out the layers to make room for prostitutes and madmen.

When Berg came to write his sordid, darkly humorous, ultimately bloodcurdling masterpiece “Lulu,” he based it on the plays of Frank Wedekind. However, significantly, the influence of film also permeates the work.

I don’t know that it’s ever been proved, but the composer had to have seen Louise Brooks’ sensational performance in G.W. Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box” (1929). The scandalous silent film classic, based on the same material, was an international triumph, and to this day, stage Lulus frequently emulate Brooks’ iconic style.

Also, at the very center of the opera is a filmed interlude. The composer was obsessed with symmetry and palindromes. They pervade the opera, so much so that in the cinematic centerpiece, a silent film that dramatizes the events surrounding Lulu’s incarceration and escape, the music reads the same backwards and forwards.

In a piece that’s so aggressively contemporary in its decadence and cynicism, it’s unsurprising that Berg would embrace modern technology. One wonders what he would have made of the digital age.

Love, eroticism, and death were nothing new to opera, but there is something about “Lulu” that’s especially disturbing and transgressive. It’s subversive, sleazy, squalid, and calculated to shock. It’s not for nothing that Lulu, the protagonist, is introduced by a lion tamer!

But Lulu is just being Lulu. The title of the first of Wedekind’s plays is “Erdgeist” – “Earth Spirit.” Lulu is plucked from the streets, and her raw sexuality has devastating effects on both the men and women in her life. Moral confusion abounds. Sure, she makes some monstrous choices. But we’re left to wonder, as with Jessica Rabbit, is she bad, or did society just draw her that way?

Lulu in her amorality is the product of in an inauthentic world. After three acts of unfettered destruction, she dies at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Serialism’s greatest heroine falls prey to history’s most notorious serial killer.

Berg composed his opera between 1929 and 1935. The ‘30s were a fraught time in Europe. It goes without saying, the Nazis did not like “Lulu.” Berg himself may not have been Jewish, but his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, high priest of dodecaphony, was. Berg’s twelve-tone idiom alone would have been enough to get his opera banned. And his reputation had already been made with the equally disturbing “Wozzeck,” given its first performance in Berlin in 1925. He was added to the Nazi catalogue of “entartete” composers in 1933.

The composer did not live to see the Führer’s furor over “Lulu.” He died of blood poisoning, the result of an insect sting, on Christmas Eve 1935. He was 50 years-old.

At the time of his death, the opera was not yet quite complete. He was well along on the piece when two things occurred:

First, he learned from Wilhelm Furtwängler that the climate in Berlin was unfavorable to a performance there. So he broke off on orchestrating the opera to develop some of the music into a “Lulu Suite,” which he hoped to have played in concert. Erich Kleiber, who had introduced “Wozzeck” in 1925, programmed the suite at the Berlin State Opera. After the performance, he was forced to resign and basically run out of the country.

Berg paused a second time to compose his Violin Concerto for Louis Krasner. This he dedicated to the memory of 18 year-old Manon Gropius, one of Berg’s muses, whom he and his wife had come to view as their own daughter. Manon’s birth parents were Alma Mahler, Gustav’s widow, and Walter Gropius. The concerto would go on to become Berg’s best-loved work.

At some point, the composer wrote to Anton Webern to let him know that “Lulu” was essentially complete. He anticipated he would need only two or three weeks to overhaul it before he started in on its orchestration.

After his death, it was found he had managed to complete most of it. The parts he did not were left in short score, with detailed indications as to his plans for filling out the orchestration. Nevertheless, Schoenberg, Webern, and Zemlinsky, all friends of Berg, declined to take up its completion. Berg’s widow was left with the impression that the task must have been impractical, if not impossible. It was only after her own death in 1976 that Friedrich Cerha moved ahead with plans to finish it.

“Lulu” received its premiere, incomplete, in Switzerland, in 1937. Cerha’s edition was first staged soon after its publication in 1979. This was rapturously received, and it is now the preferred version.

Berg was always considered the Romantic among serialists. One critic dubbed him “the Puccini of twelve-tone music.” “Lulu” is freely-composed, but makes use of the twelve-tone technique promulgated by Schoenberg. Fascinatingly, each character in the opera gets his or her own tone row, so that each of the rows serves the purpose of a leitmotif – a fragmentary slip of music, bearing extramusical associations – as in the works of Richard Wagner. But if there is an opera further from Wagner’s Valhalla than “Lulu,” I don’t know it!

Interestingly, there was nothing at all sordid about Berg the man. There was no violence or scandal in his life. He was intellectual and well-spoken, and he didn’t consort with criminals and prostitutes. He just knew a good succès de scandale when he saw one.

“Lulu” has long since taken its place in the standard repertoire, alongside Berg’s “Wozzeck.” I can’t say it’s the most pleasant night at the theater, but it is an absorbing one, and it still retains its modern edge.

Happy birthday, Alban Berg!

———

Berg’s “Lulu Suite”

The Violin Concerto

Louise Brooks as Lulu

“Lulu”… by Lou Reed and Metallica?

February 9, 2026
Alban Berg’s Birthday Alma Mahler’s Scandalous Life

Today is the 140th anniversary of the birth of Alban Berg.

By coincidence, I just finally got around to watching “Bride of the Wind” (2001), about the life of Alma Mahler – unquestionably a fascinating figure. A composer herself (and also an author), Alma’s lasting contribution would be as a socialite who often left scandal and ruin in her wake.

To its credit, the film does comment on the limitations imposed on women, even society women, at the time. Alma was the wife of composer-conductor Gustav Mahler, who firmly requested that she renounce her own ambitions to support his. Following his death, she would simultaneously promote and obscure his biography and intentions. She also married architect Walter Gropius (with whom she had had an affair during her marriage to Mahler), but not before a hot, crazy fling with the half-mad painter Oskar Kokoschka. Furthermore, she was romantically involved with writer Franz Werfel, and Lord knows who else.

The film was directed by Bruce Beresford, of “Breaker Morant”/”Tender Mercies”/”Crimes of the Heart”/”Driving Miss Daisy” fame. Unlike those titles, however, the only gold “Bride of the Wind” would ever see would be that on the Klimt canvases it aspires to evoke.

Underbaked, badly acted, poorly scripted, and blandly executed, it’s a missed opportunity, to be sure. Even the usually excellent Jonathan Pryce is ridiculous as Gustav Mahler. The scenes of him conducting teeter on the verge of parody. Well, come to think of it, he wasn’t all that convincing as Prince Philip on “The Crown,” either, but even with an actor of his caliber, surely 99-percent of the job comes down to casting. (I liked him fine as Pope Francis.)

Fin-de-siècle culture vultures will get more out of it. As with Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro,” a cavalcade of significant artistic and historical figures drop by, and you’re expected to deduce that some shmo with no lines is Arnold Schoenberg, because he’s bald, or another is Alexander Zemlinsky, because he’s got the nose. (Yes, I knew who they were immediately, but only a fraction of a percent of potential viewers would.) It’s the kind of movie that allows the NPR crowd to chuckle knowingly to themselves because they get the joke that Gustav Klimt is always hanging around with nude women. You get Mahler’s declaration that the symphony must be like the world. You get Kokoschka’s life-size Alma doll. If only they had gotten Jeffrey Tambor to play Schoenberg, now THAT would have been something.

I streamed it for free on Tubi and still feel like I was overcharged. What a tepid movie about a figure who most certainly was NOT! The one thing it did bring home, through one of those “American Graffiti,” where-are-they-now-style epilogues, is just how astoundingly short history is, as some of the figures depicted lived well into my lifetime. There’s a famous photograph (not in the movie) of Bernstein genuflecting and kissing Alma’s hand, following a rehearsal of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony at Carnegie Hall.

So what’s the Alban Berg connection?

While his is one of the few names that ISN’T dropped in the film, Berg composed his Violin Concerto of 1935 in memory of Manon Gropius, Alma and Walter’s daughter, who died of polio at the age of 18.

Always regarded as the Romantic among serialists – one critic described him as “the Puccini of twelve-tone music” – Berg processes loss and grief with the kind of humanity that seems have eluded Schoenberg, his teacher. The concerto is a fine example of a talented artist bending the rules of a particular system to achieve his own expressive ends.

A shimmering, unresolved longing imbues much of Berg’s music. It makes him effortlessly relatable and more easily discernible as a link to the more traditionally-minded among his Viennese contemporaries. His Violin Concerto really does touch people’s hearts. Furthermore, Berg is not above erecting signposts for the uninitiated, in his concerto alluding to a chorale melody employed by Johann Sebastian Bach and a Carinthian folk song.

Berg himself died of a blood poisoning, the result of an insect sting, later the same year, at the age of 50. His output may be comparatively small, but his stature endures as one of the most important musical voices of the early 20th century. He is certainly the most readily approachable of composers of the Second Viennese School.

Some scholars have pointed out that aspects of the anti-heroine of Berg’s opera “Lulu” – a femme fatale who captivates and destroys the men and women around her – may have been modeled in part on Alma’s personality. Berg was fascinated by Alma’s charm and the ease with which she navigated Vienna’s cultural milieu. The two definitely knew one another and in fact were close enough that the composer and his wife, Helene – who were childless – considered Manon their own daughter and kept a picture of her at their bedside.

The last time I watched “Lulu,” a tree fell on my house. Thematically, I think that’s a worthy addition to Alma’s legacy!

Happy birthday, Alban Berg.

Alma Mahler, “Laue Sommernacht” (“Balmy Summer Night”)

Berg, “Lulu Suite”

Berg, Violin Concerto

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Berg with portrait painted by Arnold Schoenberg; poster for “Bride of the Wind;” Alma Mahler, stylin’; Bernstein genuflecting

February 9, 2025
Cerha’s “Lulu” & Legacy

The composer Friedrich Cerha has died at the age of 96. But what he left us is a complete “Lulu.”

When Alban Berg died unexpectedly – of blood poisoning from an insect bite on Christmas Eve, 1935 – his second opera remained incomplete. His work on “Lulu,” begun in 1929, was interrupted so that he could develop some of the music into a “Lulu Suite,” an attempt to subvert the Nazis, which had already added Berg to their catalogue of “entartete” – or degenerate – composers in 1933. When Erich Kleiber, who had introduced Berg’s first opera, “Wozzeck,” at the Berlin State Opera in 1925, performed the suite there in 1934, he was forced to resign and basically run out of the country.

Berg broke off work on the opera a second time to compose his Violin Concerto for Louis Krasner. This he dedicated to the memory of 18-year-old Manon Gropius, one of Berg’s muses, whom he and his wife had come to view as their own daughter. Manon’s birth parents were Alma Mahler, Gustav’s widow, and Walter Gropius. The concerto would go on to become Berg’s most beloved work.

At some point, the composer wrote to Anton Webern to let him know that “Lulu” was essentially complete. He anticipated he would need only two or three weeks to overhaul it before he started in on its orchestration.

After his death, it was found he had managed to complete most of it. The parts he did not were left in short score, with detailed indications as to his plans for filling out the orchestration.

Schoenberg, Webern, and Zemlinsky, all friends of Berg, declined to take up its completion. Berg’s widow was left with the impression that the task must have been impractical, if not impossible. It was only after her own death in 1976 that Friedrich Cerha moved ahead with plans to finish it.

“Lulu” received its premiere, incomplete, in Switzerland, in 1937. Cerha’s edition was first staged soon after its publication in 1979. This was rapturously received, and it is now the preferred version.

Lulu” has long since taken its place in the standard repertoire, alongside Berg’s “Wozzeck.”

Cerha himself produced orchestral music and five original operas. He was a teacher at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts (formerly the Viennese Music Academy, where he studied). He received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna.

A noted interpreter of the music of the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern), he was invited to conduct at orchestra halls, opera houses, and festivals around the world. He cofounded with his wife Gertraud and composer Kurt Schwertsik the contemporary music ensemble die reihe (“the row” or “the series”).

Interestingly, he and Gertraud were also founding members of the Joseph Marx Society. Though Marx is credited with having coined the term atonality, one would be hard-pressed to think of a 20th century composer more Romantic in outlook. The pianist Jorge Bolet described Marx’s “Romantic Piano Concerto” (1919-20) as his favorite among the great virtuoso works.

Of his own music, Cerha’s publisher singles out “Spiegel I-VII” as occupying a special place. His first opera, “Baal,” appeared in 1981.

Percussion Concerto (2007-08)

“Nachtstücke” (“Night Piece”) for piano trio (1992)

Spiegel II for 55 Strings (1964)

Act III of “Lulu”

Cerha talks about his music

Jorge Bolet performs Joseph Marx’s “Romantic Piano Concerto”

February 14, 2023
Burt Bacharach’s Lost Sonatina & Milhaud’s Advice

Earlier today, I posted that the late Burt Bacharach was a pupil of Darius Milhaud. He also studied with Henry Cowell and Bohuslav Martinu. For Milhaud, he wrote a Sonatina for Violin, Oboe and Piano. I don’t know that the work has ever been recorded. At any rate, I’ve never been able to locate a copy. Bacharach talks a bit more about it in this excerpt from an interview he gave with NPR back in 2014.

“Darius Milhaud taught me at the Music Academy of the West, and he’s this brilliant French composer, wonderful man. I’m taking this composition class with him where I’d written a piece, a sonatina, for violin, oboe and piano. You know, it was very extreme music that people were writing – we were all influenced by 12-tone music, Alban Berg.

“I had this one piece at the end of the semester that I got to play for Milhaud – not with violin, not with the oboe; I just had to just do it at the piano. I was very, very reluctant when it came to the second movement, because it was quite melodic instead of being harsh and dissonant [and] avant-garde. And he took me aside afterward, and maybe he sensed what I felt or maybe just his observation was: Never be ashamed of something that’s melodic, one could whistle. I said, ‘Wow.’ So that was a valuable lesson I learned from him. Never forgot that one. Never be afraid of something that you can whistle.”

It’s advice that served him well. R.I.P.

Coincidentally, today is Alban Berg’s birthday!

February 9, 2023
Alban Berg’s Shocking “Lulu” Opera

If one were to bake a birthday cake for Alban Berg, one would be forgiven for rendering a handgun in icing and hollowing out the layers to make room for prostitutes and madmen.

When Berg came to write his sordid, darkly humorous, ultimately bloodcurdling masterpiece “Lulu,” he based it on the plays of Frank Wedekind. However, significantly, the influence of film also permeates the work.

I don’t know that it’s ever been proved, but the composer had to have seen Louise Brooks’ sensational performance in G.W. Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box” (1929). The scandalous silent film classic, based on the same material, was an international triumph, and to this day, stage Lulus frequently emulate Brooks’ iconic style.

Also, at the very center of the opera is a filmed interlude. The composer was obsessed with symmetry and palindromes. They pervade the opera, so much so that in the cinematic centerpiece, a silent film that dramatizes the events surrounding Lulu’s incarceration and escape, the music reads the same backwards and forwards.

In a piece that’s so aggressively contemporary in its decadence and cynicism, it’s unsurprising that Berg would embrace modern technology. One wonders what he would have made of the digital age.

Love, eroticism, and death were nothing new to opera, but there is something about “Lulu” that’s especially disturbing and transgressive. It’s subversive, sleazy, squalid, and calculated to shock. It’s not for nothing that Lulu, the protagonist, is introduced by a lion tamer!

But Lulu is just being Lulu. The title of the first of Wedekind’s plays is “Erdgeist” – “Earth Spirit.” Lulu is plucked from the streets, and her raw sexuality has devastating effects on both the men and women in her life. Moral confusion abounds. Sure, she makes some monstrous choices. But we’re left to wonder, as with Jessica Rabbit, is she bad, or did society just draw her that way?

Lulu in her amorality is the product of in an inauthentic world. After three acts of unfettered destruction, she dies at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Serialism’s greatest heroine falls prey to history’s most notorious serial killer.

Berg composed his opera between 1929 and 1935. The ‘30s were a fraught time in Europe. It goes without saying, the Nazis did not like “Lulu.” Berg himself may not have been Jewish, but his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, high priest of dodecaphony, was. Berg’s twelve-tone idiom alone would have been enough to get his opera banned. And his reputation had already been made with the equally disturbing “Wozzeck,” given its first performance in Berlin in 1925. He was added to the Nazi catalogue of “entartete” composers in 1933.

The composer did not live to see the Führer’s furor over “Lulu.” He died of blood poisoning, the result of an insect sting, on Christmas Eve 1935. He was 50 years-old.

At the time of his death, the opera was not yet quite complete. He was well along on the piece when two things occurred:

First, he learned from Wilhelm Furtwängler that the climate in Berlin was unfavorable to a performance there. So he broke off on orchestrating the opera to develop some of the music into a “Lulu Suite,” which he hoped to have played in concert. Erich Kleiber, who had introduced “Wozzeck” in 1925, programmed the suite at the Berlin State Opera. After the performance, he was forced to resign and basically run out of the country.

Berg paused a second time to compose his Violin Concerto for Louis Krasner. This he dedicated to the memory of 18 year-old Manon Gropius, one of Berg’s muses, whom he and his wife had come to view as their own daughter. Manon’s birth parents were Alma Mahler, Gustav’s widow, and Walter Gropius. The concerto would go on to become Berg’s best-loved work.

At some point, the composer wrote to Anton Webern to let him know that “Lulu” was essentially complete. He anticipated he would need only two or three weeks to overhaul it before he started in on its orchestration.

After his death, it was found he had managed to complete most of it. The parts he did not were left in short score, with detailed indications as to his plans for filling out the orchestration. Nevertheless, Schoenberg, Webern, and Zemlinsky, all friends of Berg, declined to take up its completion. Berg’s widow was left with the impression that the task must have been impractical, if not impossible. It was only after her own death in 1976 that Friedrich Cerha moved ahead with plans to finish it.

“Lulu” received its premiere, incomplete, in Switzerland, in 1937. Cerha’s edition was first staged soon after its publication in 1979. This was rapturously received, and it is now the preferred version.

Berg was always considered the Romantic among serialists. One critic dubbed him “the Puccini of twelve-tone music.” “Lulu” is freely-composed, but makes use of the twelve-tone technique promulgated by Schoenberg. Fascinatingly, each character in the opera gets his or her own tone row, so that each of the rows serves the purpose of a leitmotif – a fragmentary slip of music, bearing extramusical associations – as in the works of Richard Wagner. But if there is an opera further from Wagner’s Valhalla than “Lulu,” I don’t know it!

Interestingly, there was nothing at all sordid about Berg the man. There was no violence or scandal in his life. He was intellectual and well-spoken, and he didn’t consort with criminals and prostitutes. He just knew a good succès de scandale when he saw one.

“Lulu” has long since taken its place in the standard repertoire, alongside Berg’s “Wozzeck.” I can’t say it’s the most pleasant night at the theater, but it is an absorbing one, and it still retains its modern edge.

Happy birthday, Alban Berg!

Berg’s “Lulu Suite”

The Violin Concerto

Louise Brooks as Lulu

“Lulu”… by Lou Reed and Metallica?

February 9, 2022

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