"Barely concealed beneath the surface of Expressionist [opera]… runs a feeling of horror that sometimes bursts out in an agonized cry."[i] Schoenberg’s Student: The Artistic Development of Alban Berg Alban Berg was an Austrian born student of the influential musician, Schoenberg. Born in 1885 to an affluent family, Berg had a tumultuous childhood when the family grew financially destitute following the death of his father. Berg struggled with school, having to repeat several grades and got into serious trouble when he had an affair with a kitchen maid at the age of seventeen that resulted in an illegitimate daughter.[ii] Despite the hardship of these early years, Berg learned how to play piano from his governess—igniting his passion for musical composition. By the time Berg was a teenager, he began composing and performing musical works for friends and family.[iii] Recognizing their brother’s love and talent for music, Berg’s brother and sister responded to a newspaper advertisement posted by a man named Arnold Schoenberg looking for musical pupils. Shortly thereafter, Berg began his formal musical training under Schoenberg in 1904.[iv] The two would develop a highly influential and extremely volatile student-teacher relationship over the next eleven years. Berg’s musical ability developed rapidly under Schoenberg’s tutelage. He was a constant presence during the creation of Schoenberg’s radically innovative atonal period. This ground-breaking musical style, which lacked a focal tone or key, helped shape the music of Berg’s future work. It was also during this time that Schoenberg created his gesamtkunstwerk, the Expressionist Opera: Die Glückliche Hand. Although the opera was not performed until 1924, it was conceived and written in 1908 when Berg was studying under the musical innovator. The influence of both Schoenberg’s atonal period and Die Glückliche Hand on Berg’s artistic development cannot be overlooked. In fact, early into their relationship Schoenberg openly criticized Berg’s initial lack of imagination. Regarding his student, Schoenberg stated that Berg’s “imagination could not work…he was absolutely incapable of writing an instrumental movement or inventing an instrumental theme.”[v] As a result, Berg was pushed creatively during this period by his mentor who was breaking every established rule found in Classical music. Within a few years, Berg wrote a musical composition that was later developed and used for his Expressionist opera, Wozzeck.[vi] Despite experiencing this artistic growth, Berg saw little work or success in his earlier career (1911-1915). Although he was no longer Schoenberg’s student he devoted much of his time towards the musical endeavors of his mentors rather than his own.[vii] He did earn notoriety, however, during a very controversial performance in March of 1913 when he composed a musical arrangement to the modernist poet Peter Altenberg’s scandalous poems. His mentor Schoenberg conducted the performance, but it resulted in a riot and fisticuffs that led to police action.[viii] From this point on, Berg’s desire to shock the bourgeoisie increased, as did his interest in new artistic styles. He fell in love with the avant-garde and befriended many of its leading artists including fellow Austrian composer Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942) and painter Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). In 1914, Berg went to Vienna to see the first stage production of Georg Büchner’s (1813-1837) Woyzeck. Immediately upon seeing the play Berg exclaimed, “Someone must set this to music!”[ix] Later that year he began developing the opera that would become Wozzeck. While doing so, “Berg… [was] torn between awareness of his debt to Schoenberg and the need to assert his personal and artistic independence.”[x] He had yet to fully embark on an independent musical pursuit and Berg also knew that his volatile father-like relationship with his mentor was now inhibiting his creativity. By 1915, Berg decided to cease all communications with Schoenberg. His progress on Wozzeck the opera was still to be delayed when he was later called to serve in the Austrian Army the same year.[xi] Nonetheless, following the end of the Great War, Berg returned to his magnum opus, Wozzeck—the masterpiece that introduced Expressionism to the operatic stage. Wozzeck Wozzeck is an opera that personifies the Expressionist social conscious during the Interwar period. Based on Büchner's nineteenth-century play, the story describes the life and tragic fate of simple Wozzeck. Throughout the opera, he hovers on the brink of madness as he is subjected to both his lover’s infidelity and horrific experiments by the Doctor. Wozzeck is a soldier oppressed by poverty, brutally exploited by his superiors and humiliated by his unfaithful lover, Marie. Eventually, Wozzeck is driven insane, murders Marie and, ultimately, commits suicide. Berg's Wozzeck “embodies…the fullness of the torment of the soul that constituted Expressionism as a ‘worldview.’”[xii] The main character is isolated from society as he fails to make connections to those around him; Wozzeck waivers in and out of lucidity as hallucinations and reality become harder to separate. Berg created a “world without normality or humanity and peopled by grotesques, a haunted world of strange hallucinatory voices and visions of natural phenomena indifferent to the human tragedy being played out.”[xiii] German citizens identified with Wozzeck’s pain for they, too, felt the world was indifferent to their suffering—that the deaths of WWI had been rendered meaningless. Although Berg was inspired to write the play prior to the war, he did not finish composing the score or the libretto until 1921.[xiv] Thus, the bleak existence that constituted post-war society in Germany and Austria profoundly influenced the violent and tortured themes found throughout Wozzeck. As a result, it resonated powerfully with Berlin audiences when it premiered in December of 1925.[xv] Berg's introduction of Schoenberg's atonal and twelve-note system in Wozzeck allows the social commentary found within the opera to come to its full fruition. Berg fully conveys his Expressionistic worldview through the score’s jarring atonal sounds and ritualistic twelve-note progressions. The atonal language of Wozzeck, “constantly hovering on the edge of tonal confirmation, becomes a perfect metaphor for the emotional state of the opera’s chief protagonist” and post-war German society.[xvi] Citizens were still searching for meaning after the war, and many were left in broken emotional states that resembled Wozzeck or Kirchner in his Self-Portrait as an Invalid. The musical dissonance, created by the atonal score’s lack of an over-arching key or tone, symbolized the German people’s existential struggles at this time just as much as it represented Wozzeck’s emotional turmoil. Berg continued his social commentary on German Society in Wozzeck through another innovative musical device: the twelve-tone technique. As all notes are treated equally in the twelve-tone progression, it creates a sense of repetition, a feeling that the music will continue, but never evolve or reach resolution. The ritualistic nature of this musical style plays into the sense of fatalism that was so prevalent within Expressionism. Berg paints the tale of a society so consumed with moral decay, that the “disease is too far gone to remedy.”[xvii] Wozzeck is a good man, but the corrupt people within his life drive him into sharing their loathsome existence; the depravity is inescapable. Just like the musical notes being continuously repeated, so too will their actions. Society keeps marching on, but never changes, never evolves. During this time, many Germans felt that the new Weimar Republic was no different than the previous Wilhelmine Monarchy. Only a radical change could restore Germany to its former glory, but as Berg highlighted in Wozzeck, perhaps the opportunity for change was too late. All this had happened before, and it was probably going to happen again. “On We Go!”[xviii] Wozzeck declares ominously. Like the Expressionists before him, Berg proved to be eerily prophetic as Germany would continue in the footsteps of the past and march on towards another World War. Watch a later 20th-century rendition of Bergs masterpiece below Endnotes: [i] Padmore, “Expressionist Opera,” 47. [ii] “Alban Berg,” New Grove Dictionary of Music,” 312 [iii] Ibid. [iv] Ibid. [v] Ibid., 313. [vi] Ibid. [vii] Ibid., 314 [viii] Ibid., 315. [ix] Ibid., 316. [x] Ibid., 314. [xi] Ibid., 314-16. [xii] Biel, Total Expressionism, 40. [xiii] Douglas, “Alban Berg,” New Grove Dictionary, 317. [xiv] Biel, Total Expressionism, 40. [xv] Douglas, “Alban Berg.” New Grove Dictionary, 318. [xvi] Ibid., 317. [xvii] Padmore, “Expressionist Opera,” 44. [xviii] Ibid.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorScholar. Student. Unadulterated lover of all art forms. Archives
September 2017
Categories
All
|