Alban Berg
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra “To the Memory of an Angel”

Alban Berg’s career as a composer gathered momentum rather late. It was not until 1925 that his first opera, Wozzeck, premiered in Berlin – an immediate sensation, soon taken up by opera houses around the world. It was the first stage work no longer based on conventional melody and harmony, but on twelve-tone technique. According to this system developed by Berg’s teacher Arnold Schoenberg, a musical theme always consists of all twelve semitones of the Western scale; such a “tone row” can then be mirrored, expanded, contracted or worked into fugal textures as the composer wishes. The rise of the National Socialists, however, abruptly halted Berg’s success: in Germany, his music was branded as “degenerate” and banned.

Help came from abroad. In 1935, Berg received a commission for a new violin concerto. The request came from Louis Krasner, a violinist of Ukrainian origin who had emigrated to the United States. Since hearing Wozzeck in New York, he had become an ardent admirer of Berg and now wished to champion the composer’s new style in the concert hall. Berg met his request for a work with “as much melody as possible” by constructing the underlying twelve-tone row from interlocking traditional triads – a kind of pseudo-tonal idiom.

Shortly thereafter, Berg learned of a tragedy among his close friends: on 22 April 1935, Manon Gropius, the daughter of architect Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler, died of polio at the age of 18. Berg dedicated the concerto to her memory – “To the Memory of an Angel” – and sought to translate “the young girl’s essential traits into musical characters.” The tone of a requiem is underscored by the Bach chorale “Es ist genug” – “It is enough, Lord, if it be Thy will, then release me”, which Berg weaves into the woodwinds toward the end. Fittingly, it begins with three whole-tone steps – the same intervals with which Berg’s twelve-tone row concludes. The B–A–C–H motif also makes an appearance.

By 31 August 1935 – the birthday of Alma Mahler-Gropius-Werfel (by then divorced from Gropius and married to the writer Franz Werfel) – the score was complete. Her letter of thanks to Alban Berg and his wife Helene was accordingly effusive: “Dearly beloved friends! With this immense act of love, you have given me the only birthday gift that could still bring me joy.” Yet it would be more than a year before Louis Krasner could give the world premiere. Berg did not live to hear it; he died in December 1935 of blood poisoning.

The violin concerto is set in two movements, each subdivided into two sections, forming an overall arch of slow – fast – fast – slow. According to an analysis authorized by the composer, the first movement creates “the image of a lovely young girl in a fantastic round dance,” while the second mirrors the “catastrophe” and the ensuing “lament for the dead.”

Analysts have uncovered two further layers of meaning. A Carinthian folk song quoted in the first movement may relate to a youthful love affair Berg had in Carinthia, from which an illegitimate child was born. Furthermore, Berg – who was fond of ciphers and numerical symbolism – may have embedded another secret message in bar numbers, phrase lengths and metronome markings: a reference to his sister-in-law Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, with whom he had an affair in the 1920s. In this interpretation, the violin concerto becomes not only an elegy for Manon Gropius, but also a veiled reflection on the composer’s own life.