3 - Of Forked Tongues and Angels: Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto

Summary

My Almschi, I don’t know when I will see you, nor whether I will

be able to express what is unspeakable—if only in a wordless

embrace. Nor do I wish to attempt in a letter to find words

where language fails… . And yet: one day—before this terrible

year is at an end—a score will be dedicated

to the memory of an angel

that might express, in sounds, to you and Franz

what I feel and that I can find no words to express today.

Your Alban

—Letter from Alban Berg to Alma Mahler-Werfel, ca. May 1935

Here are the facts as given, virtually uncontested, throughout the literature. Commissioned in February 1935 to write a concerto for the Ukrainian-American violinist Louis Krasner, Berg found the project at first intractable. Tragedy provided the inspiration that he needed when on April 22, 1935, Alma Mahler’s eighteen-year-old daughter Manon Gropius died of polio. Work proceeded quickly thereafter, and the concerto was finished the following August. But as he was putting the final touches to the full score— with its title-page dedication “To the memory of an angel” [Dem Angedenken eines Engels] as promised—Berg was stung by an insect. His health deteriorated, blood poisoning set in, and he died on December 24, 1935. Berg’s pupil Willi Reich had already told the story of the Violin Concerto’s genesis and Manon’s role in it in early autumn 1935, in an article written with the composer’s collaboration (as Reich himself confirmed) and published variously in the Neues Wiener Journal, Anbruch, and the Schweizerische Musikzeitung (Reich added further detail two years later in his book-length study of Berg). The version of the article published in Anbruch was entitled “Requiem for Manon,” making its inspiration as evident as could be. After Berg’s early death, the concerto was soon seen by many as a requiem for the composer himself. Inevitably, comparisons were made with the Requiem by Mozart, long seen in the literature as that composer’s own farewell to the world.