Twentieth-Century Music.(Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs: The Story of a Love in Letters)(Book review)

Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs: The Story of a Love in Letters. By Constantin Floros. Translated by Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. [xx, 145p. ISBN-13: 9780253349668. $24.95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographic references, index.

Constantin Floros's Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs is an installment in the still growing literature on Berg's affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin and the incorporation of its details into his music, especially the Lyric Suite. Information about the affair began to appear in print in 1977, and it is now the subject of more than twenty books and articles, a BBC documentary, and at least two novels. Briefly, here's what happened. In mid-May 1925 Berg visited Prague for a festival of modern music at which his Wozzeck Fragments were to be performed, and he accepted an invitation from Herbert Fuchs-Robettin--brother-in-law of his friend Franz Werfel--to stay with him and his family in the Prague suburb of Bubenec. Berg was in high spirits during the festival: his music was enjoying success as never before, and just as he arrived he learned from the conductor Erich Kleiber that Wozzeck would definitely receive its premier performance at the Berlin Staatsoper in the near future. "My brain is on fire," he wrote to his wife, Helene. Berg was especially charmed by the Fuchs-Robettins' two children and fascinated by their luxurious life style. "My hosts spoil me," Berg wrote to Helene on the day after he arrived. "Room with hot water, glorious view, Roger Galet soap, Venetian blinds so that you can sleep with the windows open at night" (Alban Berg, Letters to his Wife [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971], 337).

In his letters to Helene, Berg did not, of course, mention the principal attraction during his stay--Fuchs-Robettin's wife, Hanna, who was pretty, at thirty some ten years younger than her husband or Berg, and known as something of a flirt. Soma Morgenstern described her as a "scharfe Dame," and Adorno summed her up as an opportunist, "a bourgeoise through and through, who was once touched by the possibility of being other, without ever being able to realize that possibility" (p. 128). Judging from Berg's later correspondence with Hanna--all that is known is given in this book for the first time in English--the flirting between the two got heavier during his weeklong stay, leading in all likelihood to a sexual encounter, ("that blissful half hour," as Berg described it), probably on the morning of 20 May. After the festival, the composer returned to Vienna to finish the Chamber Concerto, prepare for the Wozzeck premiere, and take on new compositional challenges.

The correspondence that passed between Berg and the Fuchs-Robbetins after the incident in Prague is the centerpiece of this short book by Constantin Floros. Thirteen of the items are passionate and rambling letters that Berg wrote privately to Hanna between June 1925 and December 1934. They are filled with rapturous professions of love, hopelessness and despair, and some contain information about Berg's enshrinement of the affair in his music. These letters, which were acquired in 1992 by the Austrian National Library, plus thirteen ad- ditional pieces of correspondence between Berg and the Fuchs-Robettins, first appeared in the Osterreichische Musikzeitschrift (50 [special issue, 1995]: 30-71), edited by Floros. They were republished in 2001 in Floros's Alban Berg und Hanna Fuchs: Die Geschichte einer Liebe in Briefen (Zurich: Arche, 2001) where Floros added a concise historical background and interpretation of the relevance of the letters to the Lyric Suite and aria Der Wein. This is the work that is given here in an excellent and careful English translation by Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch.

Few readers in the present day will find Berg's adventure in Prague in May 1925 to be all that unusual. How many composers facing middle age have had affairs with younger women, often leading to a renewed level of productivity? On the surface, at least, Berg's affair is not that different from Haydn's with Luigia Polzelli or Wagner's with Mathilde Wesendonck, the latter also relevant since Wagner imported its passionate aura into his opera Tristan und Isolde. Still, the events in Prague and Berg's subsequent letters to Hanna underscore the composer's extraordinarily complex intertwining of his life and music. Beginning even during his student days under Schoen-berg, Berg brought personal references into his music by way of symbols--numbers, pitch letters, and musical quotations especially. These became ever more pervasive, and with the Chamber Concerto in 1925 Berg finally made some of his symbolic apparatus public in an "open letter" addressed to Schoenberg, to whom the Chamber Concerto was dedicated. Certainly, composers in the past--Bach, Schumann, and Brahms among many others--have incorporated personalized symbols in their works, but Berg's recourse to this technique by 1925 was uniquely far-reaching, and by the time that he began to compose the Lyric Suite in the fall of that year, personal symbols were necessary for him to crystallize and organize his musical thoughts.

Shortly after the incident in Prague--by July of 1925--Berg wrote to Hanna (letter no. 7 in this collection) that he had conceived of a new string quartet that would "reenact everything I went through from the moment I entered your house." He writes out Baudelaire's sonnet "De profundis clamavi," which "would perfectly convey the content of the final movement," filled with "hopelessness, renunciation, and desolation" (p. 21). Berg completed the quartet on 8 October 1926, but he waited until his fateful day, the 23rd of the month, to write to Hanna (letter no. 14) to give an overview of the work's symbology. "It is full of our numbers 10 and 23 and our initials H F A B," Berg assures her, also quotations, and as a final movement a "song without words" on the text of Baudelaire's despairing sonnet. With more than a touch of rhetoric, Berg asks, "Will anyone besides you guess what these sounds, casually played by four simple instruments, want to say?"

Despite Berg's assurances to Hanna, what the sounds want to say in a work such as the Lyric Suite is disputed. Floros's view is that Berg's music is autobiography pure and simple, written not in words but in a code that can be deciphered by a hermeneutic, or "semantic," analysis. In this book Floros gives only a short overview of his interpretive method, by which musical letters, numbers, quotations, instrumentational touches, and special treatments of tone rows are "semantemes" that fully reveal the work's underlying autobiographical meaning. Floros's interpretive method, which he lays out in greater detail in his book Alban Berg: Musik als Autobiographie (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Hartel, 1992), has proved highly influential among German and Austrian writers on Berg, including Peter Petersen, Harmut Krones, Herwig Knaus, Frank Schneider, and Wolfgang Konig. American writers, led by George Perle, have been far more skeptical of the importance of the autobiographical element, more inclined to take a formalist approach to Berg's music, including the Lyric Suite. "To be informed" Perle has written, "that the note-names b-flat a f b ( = b a f h) coincide with the initials of Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs helps us not at all in understanding the structural function of the basic cell in the third movement or in discovering its leitmotivic role in the design of the work as a whole" (George Perle, Style and Idea in the "Lyric Suite" of Alban Berg, rev. ed. [Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2001], 46). Claudio Spies reduces the secret program of the Lyric Suite to "beguiling but trivial rattle." He continues: "Those headline-making matters seem to me to make no difference whatever to the notes themselves" (Claudio Spies, "Some Notes on the Completion of Lulu," in Alban Berg: Historical and Analytical Perspectives, ed. David Gable and Robert P. Morgan [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991], 234).