Encrypted Messages in Alban Berg's Music

Siglind Bruhn, Siglind Bruhn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136522871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The 12 new essays in this volume explore the relationship between text and music in Alban Berg's works. The book examines the biographical issues that made such expressive choices attractive to the composer, and explores ways in which works not involving explicit verbal texts create signification, allusion, and reference.

PART ONE

On Messages and Codes,
Shared and Private

Balzacian Mysticism,
Palindromic Design, and Heavenly Time
in Berg's Music

John Covach

To Glenn Watkins

Introduction

Turn-of-the-century Vienna was an extraordinary place. As the nineteenth century came to a close, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was home to figures who would in many ways set the intellectual and artistic agenda for the twentieth century—figures such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Adolf Loos, Sigmund Freud, and Gustav Mahler. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have written that this culture “is, or appears at first sight to be, our own twentieth-century culture in its infancy.”¹ Karl Kraus, in one of his many caustic moments, chose rather to characterize this same Viennese culture as a “proving ground for world destruction.”² Over the last three decades or so—a time during which this area of inquiry has become a popular research topic—scholars writing on the Jahrhundertwende have explored a Vienna rich in coffee-house debates, concert-hall scandals, political as well as psychological struggles, and Ringstrasse promenades.³

But there was more to turn-of-the-century Vienna than sometimes meets the scholarly eye. In addition to the kinds of figures and topics that tend to reinforce “legitimate” areas of investigation—philosophy, music, architecture, and psychoanalysis, for instance—there was an occult underground present in Vienna, as in much of the German-speaking world. This was a world in which Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Pythagoreanism, astrology, clairvoyance, numerology, and other forms of occult belief played roles—and at times important roles—in the lives of some of the same figures who appear so often in writing about fin-de-siècle Vienna. This tendency of many turn-of-the-century intellectuals and artists to take an interest in areas that most scholars today would dismiss as “mere superstition” has not gone completely unnoticed, however.⁴ It is, for instance, well-known and acknowledged that Freud was for a time very much under the influence of Wilhelm Fliess's ideas about numerology, and that he even kept an open mind to the possibility of mental telepathy.⁵

Perhaps the most conspicuous instance of occult influence in early twentieth-century German culture is Wassily Kandinsky's 1911 book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. While not strictly speaking a product of Viennese culture, Kandinsky's short book had great resonance among artists and composers in the Austrian capital. Arnold Schoenberg's admiration for Concerning the Spiritual in Art has been documented,⁶ and Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern were each represented in the Blaue Reiter Almanac of 1912.⁷ Schoenberg not only respected Kandinsky's ideas, he also formulated some of his own in terms very like those Kandinsky employed. In his 1912 essay devoted to Mahler, for instance, Schoenberg writes: “And this is the essence of genius—that it is our future. This is why the genius is nothing to the present. Because present and genius have nothing to do with one another. The genius is our future.”⁸

While the celebration of genius already had a well-established history in German culture by the early twentieth century, Schoenberg's portrayal of the genius as seeing into the future of mankind bears more than a passing resemblance to Kandinsky's characterization of the genius in Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Kandinsky casts the course of the spiritual development of mankind as a large triangle ascending slowly as it moves forward in time. Most of mankind resides toward the lower, broader base of the triangle, while those more spiritually enlightened reside closer to the top: “At the apex of the top segment stands often one man, and only one. His joyful vision cloaks a vast sorrow. Angrily they abuse him as a charlatan or madman. So in his lifetime stood Beethoven, solitary and insulted.”⁹ For Kandinsky, Beethoven's genius afforded him a vision of mankind's future that his contemporaries could not yet perceive. And since the artist-genius has a vision of something that is, in its purely spiritual state, imperceptible to his contemporaries, art undertakes the struggle to somehow bring this spiritual vision to physical articulation. Kandinsky's book owes a significant debt to occult thinking; at one point he even praises the Theosophical Movement and its founder Madame Blavatsky in the warmest of terms. Working from documents in the Kandinsky estate, Sixten Ringbom has argued that Rudolf Steiner's esoteric interpretation of Goethean science, and especially Goethe's Farbenlehre, had a strong impact on Kandinsky's thinking during the period in which his book was written.¹⁰ Steiner lays special emphasis on an ability that might best be termed “supersensory perception”—an ability to see the world in its spiritual form by using the “spiritual eye” (“geistige Auge”).

But while Kandinsky was writing in Germany, occult ideas were very much in the air in Vienna, too. In her mémoires under the entry “1911,” Alma Mahler recalls the following incident:

I saw a lot of a young American woman who tried to imbue me with the occult. She lent me books by Leadbeater and Mrs. Besant. I always went straight to Mahler the moment she left and repeated word for word all she had said. It was something new in those days and he was interested. We started shutting our eyes to see what colors we could see. We practised this—and many other rites ordained by occultists—so zealously that Gucki [daughter Anna Mahler] was once discovered walking up and down the room with her eyes shut. When we asked her what she was doing, she replied: “I'm looking for green.”¹¹

In the case of this anecdote, the book in question is most likely Leadbeater and Besant's Thought Forms, which discusses the spiritual meanings of colors in enthusiastically Theosophical terms. This same book, according to Ringbom, was also a central text in Kandinsky's theorizing.¹² The only correction one is tempted to offer to Alma Mahler's recollections is that by 1911 occult trends were not so new in Vienna; the circulation of such ideas had a history going back at least to the 1870s, a history of which her husband Gustav would have been well aware.¹³ But Alma's entry confirms an important fact: by 1911 it was easy to learn a great deal about matters occult in Vienna, and one seems to have been able to become acquainted with occult ideas without necessarily having to read the books themselves.

The influence of certain occult ideas can be detected in the writings and remarks of the Second Viennese School composers. I have argued elsewhere that Schoenberg's writing on the musikalische Gedanke is indebted both to Steiner's esoteric interpretation of Goethean science (the Farbenlehre especially) and to Balzac's portrayal of Emanuel Swedenborg's mystical philosophy.¹⁴ I have also argued that the Viennese twelve-tone composer Josef Matthias Hauer relied both on Steiner's interpretations of Goethe, and on the writing of his close associate, the theologian Ferdinand Ebner.¹⁵ Webern's high regard for Goethe's Farbenlehre is well known, though connections between his devotion to Catholic mysticism and occult ideas are yet to be explored in detail.

Into the midst of artists, intellectuals, and occult philosophies in early twentieth-century Vienna, the present study will place the music of Alban Berg. There are a number of features in Berg's music that suggest a fin-de-siècle penchant for things esoteric: secret programs to important instrumental works (the Lyric Suite, Chamber Concerto, and Violin Concerto);¹⁶ a deep involvement with number mysticism;¹⁷ and, most important to this study, a fascination for palindromic procedures and structures.¹⁸ Certainly these features are in many ways intertwined; the secret programs reveal themselves, in part, through Berg's fascination with the numbers 23 and 10—two numbers that had a great deal of personal significance for him. Palindromes can also participate in secret programs, as well as attain numerological significance (as in the Chamber Concerto, for instance).

Despite the interdependence of these three distinctive features in Berg's music, this essay will focus primarily on Berg's use of the palindrome. I will argue that Berg's use of palindromic structures is part of a larger concern in his music for addressing an alternate mode of temporality; this alternate temporal perspective is fueled by Berg's interest in occult philosophy, and especially in Honoré de Balzac's portrayal of Swedenborg's mystical philosophy in his novel, Séraphita. In order to pursue this interpretation of “Berg's time,” I will first survey the use of palindromes in Berg's music. This will be followed by a discussion of Balzac's novel, and then by a close investigation of Berg's Chamber Concerto. The study will conclude by considering Berg's exploration of temporal modes with similar features in the music of Schoenberg and Hauer, placing Berg's compositional concerns within the broader contexts of both early twentieth-century Viennese music in particular, and fin-de-siècle Viennese culture in general.

My End Is My Beginning

Berg's use of the palindrome in his music is perhaps one of its most well-known features, and, as Douglas Jarman has noted, “all Berg's mature music, with the exception of the Violin Concerto, includes large-scale palindromes.”¹⁹ Mischa Donat writes that “Berg's music is in-dissociable in the listener's mind … from its strong element of mathematical mysticism, which more often than not takes the form of a pervasive use of mirror structures and retrograde formations.” He goes on to remark that “In Berg, retrograde movement represents almost a view of life ….”²⁰ Reflecting Berg's more general concern for formal symmetry in his music, Pierre Boulez writes: “Berg's taste for formal symmetry showed itself very early, but the more his work progressed, the more this mere interest took on the character of a fundamental obse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Border Crossings
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor's Preface
• Editor's Introduction
• Encrypted Messages in Alban Berg's Music
• Part One On Messages and Codes, Shared and Private
• Part Two Encoding in Berg's Instrumental Compositions
• Part Three Sleep and the Inner Journey: Berg's Song Cycles
• Part Four Subtext and Subliminal Characterization in Berg's Operas
• The Contributors