Alban Berg

Alban Berg, the third great composer of the Viennese triad, leads us back into more familiar territory. Born in Vienna on February 7, 1885, Berg became Schoenberg's student; the disciple became a friend, and the friendship was then extended to include Anton Webern. The cohesion of this group, today famous, is due in great part to that friendship, to the qualities of heart, and to the faithfulness and unselfishness that distinguished the three artists. Their devoted friendship was to them no less important than their devotion to purity. It furnished for each of them a solid pillar that helped them keep intact their faith in the ars nova they created amid almost general hostility, until the day when their worth became evident. Their literary tastes united them as well, a taste for subtlety which put them at odds with all-powerful academic groups. At the same time their yearning for individual freedom incited them to exasperation with their social environment, which threatened to exterminate or overwhelm the individual, and tended to make man a machine, a robot, a passive being subjugated to the state. Expressionism is in part the outcome of that revolt against the mounting tide of collectivism.

The character of Alban Berg, so fascinating and charming for all who had the privilege of knowing him, is also a natural product of that tragic time when flights of spirit and personal intuition battled desperately with the indifference of the masses. His destiny was to disappear in full maturity, after succeeding in expressing man's distress so fully and giving the last shout for individualism, before transmitting all he had to pass on to us and before achieving the peace of untroubled happiness. For such was Berg's ultimate aim.

Alban Berg spoke apt words regarding this contemporary disaffection. When asked by a newsman what he thought of Bach and Handel, he answered: "Lucky that Handel and Bach were born in 1685 and not two hundred years later! Today the nationality of one would have been questioned as surely as the music of the other would have been blacklisted as Bolshevik."

Berg wrote music for the poetry he carried in himself. His art is not just a development based on a certain technical facility and virtuosity in composition, as in Hindemith's case. His literary sense is always perceptible in his works. It is apparent in his choice of texts for his Lieder and in the mastery he displays in adapting the texts of his operas.

Berg's penchant for transforming an exterior aspect by integrating it with his own concepts, a penchant that defines his affinity with the nineteenth century, could only be exercised in terms of exaggeration: he magnified extreme traits, which destroyed the bourgeois propriety of that century's aesthetic. The erotic motive principle that animates Tristan exceeds the limits of individual psychology; it is amplified to the point of chaos. This threat of chaos inherent in Berg's personality is frightening, and has been from the start. The greatest scandal of the Schoenberg group was provoked by one of Berg's art songs set to a poem by Altenberg.

Contemporary German expressionism naturally presents itself in turn as an analysis, then as a synthesis, of a corrosive, destructive spirit, and puts all the horrors of that spirit on display. Its only conception of joy is an enormous need for tenderness and goodness, and it seeks-refuge in slumber and dreaming. Kokoschka's and Grosz's art express this state of mind? In drama, expressionism is the child of Strindberg, of his bitter pessimism and misogyny. Everything good, noble, and beautiful is stifled by the crushing forces of the destructive instinct. These views had already been aired in a famous drama in Germany, Georg Buchner's Wozzeck, and were carried to the extreme in Frank Wedekind's tragedies. At its highest pitch, expressionist art offers a vision of a shattered, pulverized world that ends in destruction and returns to nothingness. This is the chaos Alban Berg expresses in his music.