To the Memory of an Angel

When Berg received a commission for a concerto from the violinist Louis Krasner in January 1935, he was busy working on Lulu and set the commission aside. On April 22 of that year, the beloved daughter of his friend Alma Mahler, Manon Gropius, died at the age of 18, and Berg ceased work on the opera to compose his Violin Concerto as a memorial. Working at an unusually fast pace, Berg completed the score by August 11, though did not live to hear its premiere in April 1936. Some commentators have lamented the fact that work on the Violin Concerto prevented Berg from completing Lulu, which many view as his most important work. Yet the Violin Concerto has become Berg's single most popular and regularly programmed work. Beyond

the firmly tonal works of his youth, the Violin Concerto is also Berg's most accessible score in its compelling combination of both tonal and atonal idioms.

In his sixties, Krasner recalled that Berg had expressed some doubts about undertaking a violin concerto, observing that he was “not a violin composer.” Krasner persuaded him, however, by suggesting that such a work would give him an opportunity to show how the violin could be effective in twelve-tone music, and Berg proceeded to compose, in only four months, a large-scale work in which he not only registered that point most convincingly but also created one of the most touching of instrumental requiems.

As with many of Berg's pieces, the concerto follows a program governed by a strict formal design. The four movements are may be grouped into two parts of two movements each, with only a short break between movements two and three. The first two movements are structured like a Classical sonata-allegro and dance movement, respectively, and together form a musical portrait of the girl. The second part reverses the typical pattern of the Classical symphony, placing an Allegro, in this case an intense and elaborate cadenza-like movement first, followed by an Adagio, a set of variations after the Bach chorale It Is Enough. These movements represent the catastrophe of death and, ultimately, the sublimity of transfiguration.

No memorial context had been suggested by Krasner. The dedication cited above is a reference to Manon Gropius, the daughter of the architect Walter Gropius and his wife Alma, the former wife of Gustav Mahler. Alma had divorced Gropius in 1918, and in 1929 married the novelist Franz Werfel, who added his efforts to her own in the cause of her first husband's music. Manon Gropius, who had a remarkable personality that enchanted everyone who knew her, was to have played the part of an angel in a Max Reinhardt production at Salzburg in the summer of 1935, but she died of polio on Easter Sunday of that year, at age 19.

[see the score to Berg's violin concerto here.]

According to her mother, Berg was so moved that he “could not finish his opera Lulu . He composed the Violin Concerto and dedicated it to the memory of Manon.” Indeed, Berg spoke of the Concerto as a “Requiem for Manon”; it was to become his own requiem as well: it was the last work he completed, and its many-faceted involvement with death has been assumed to include an acknowledgement of the dissolution of the world in which both he and young Manon lived.

The Concerto is in two movements, each of which is itself divided into two parts. The first section ( Andante ) presents the twelve-tone row on which the composition is based, and establishes an inward, ruminative mood. The opening movement's second half ( Allegretto ), identified by Berg as a portrait, or character study, of Manon, is in the form of a scherzo with two trios; the trios are filled with characteristics of Austrian dances, and bear such markings as “rustic,” “waltzlike” and “Wienerisch.” Near the end of the movement a Carinthian folk song is cited and the mood turns eerie as this subject is more or less vivisected in a suspended-in-air treatment with more than a hint of bitterness. It has been suggested that this section is a reference to the imminent destruction of the old values and the old life Berg and his circle had known.
In the second movement we arrive at something more like a conventional lament. Its first section, an Allegro which Berg designated “Catastrophe,” is to be played “freely, like a cadenza.” Here the music builds to a powerful climax and, with the relaxation of tension that follows, Berg brings in the motif of the chorale “Es ist genug,” from Bach's cantata O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort (BWV 60). This four-note motif is exactly the same as the last four notes of the Concerto's initial tone-row; as the row reaches its conclusion in these notes, the emotional yield of the Concerto is realized in them. It is appropriate to cite here the text of the Bach chorale, in translation:

It is enough: Lord, if it please Thee,

Do Thou unshackle me.

My Jesus comes; I bid the world farewell,

And go in peace to dwell.

In Heaven's house I then will find me,

My cares and troubles all behind me.

It is enough, it is enough.

The concluding section, designated “Deliverance,” is an Adagio in which the chorale theme is developed and another climax is achieved, this time in the form of an unrestrained threnody in which the “Requiem for Manon” truly becomes Berg's own farewell. When the climax subsides, fragments from the Concerto's earlier sections come and go, as if in a lingering gesture of departure, reluctant to break off for good; but the final bars glow with sweetness and resignation.

Our San Antonio Symphony performs Berg's masterpiece this Friday and Saturday. The soloist for November 18 & 19 will be Kolja Blacher. Born in Berlin, Blacher was accepted for study with Dorothy Delay at The Juilliard School in New York as a fifteen year-old. He subsequently completed his studies with Sándor Végh in Salzburg before embarking on a remarkable career as a solo violinist. He has been a professor for violin and chamber music at the Hochschule für Musik in Hamburg since October 1999. Since spring 2009 he has a professorship at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin. Kolja Blacher has appeared as a soloist with important orchestras, including the Philharmonic Orchestras of Berlin, London, Oslo, St. Petersburg, Tokyo and Munich, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the NDR Sinfonieorchester, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra (MCO), the Gürzenich Orchester Cologne and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. He plays the “Tritton” Stradivari violin from 1730, on generous loan to him from Ms. Kimiko Powers.

November 18 & 19 at 8 p.m., Majestic Theatre
San Antonio Symphony
Sebastian Lang-Lessing, conductor
Kolja Blacher, violin

Mozart Overture to The Marriage of Figaro
Berg Violin Concerto
Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2 in E minor