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Alban Berg and the Fateful Number

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2010

Geoffrey Poole
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Extract

No prizes for guessing the number. The pervasive stamp of 23, whether it be in the precompositional proportions, the tempo markings, or the rhythmic formation of works like the Lyric Suite, Lulu, and the Violin Concerto, is well established in the current analytical literature. It is in any case confirmed by frequent calculations amongst the sketches. 23 also seems to have been inextricably linked to Berg's sense of personal destiny. It is widely agreed, for instance, that his first asthma attack occured on 23 July, though whether in 1900 or 1908 (when he was 23) or possibly another year remains uncertain. (The selectivity of this memory is itself curious.) On his deathbed he was convinced that December 23 would prove ‘decisive’, as indeed it did.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 179 , December 1991 , pp. 2 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 The composer's nephew maintained that death itself occured before midnight, that is to say on 23 December. (See Jarman, Douglas. The Music of Alban Berg, Faber, 1979. footnote to p.229.)Google Scholar

2 Berg-Schoenberg Letters.

3 I am indebted to Douglas Jarman for bringing these matters to my attention. For a fuller account see his article Alban Berg, Wilhelm Fliess, and the secret programme of the Violin Concerto in The Berg Companion ed. Jarman, Douglas, Macmillan, London, 1989, p. 182.Google Scholar

4 See Jung, Carl Collected Works Vol.6Google Scholar, ‘General Description of the Types’ in Psychological Types (1921).Google Scholar

5 Jung, Carl, Synchronicity, para. 870Google Scholar. See also von Franz, Marie-Louise, Number and Time (London: Rider 1974), p.45.Google Scholar

6 Jarman, op cit p.230Google Scholar. T.W. Adorno thought so too, in Berg, Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs, Elisabeth Lafite Verlag, Vienna 1968, p.21Google Scholar. Douglas Jarman returns to the theme in his Wozzeck, Cambridge Opera Handbooks, 1989, ch.7.Google Scholar

7 All the planets move in the same direction on a more or less flat plain of the ecliptic. However, the outer planets can appear to go into retrograde simply because the earth is moving forward at a greater angular velocity than the planet. With the inner planets the reversing is even plainer to see, as it resembles watching a child's circular railway while walking slowly around the outside of it.

8 Gauquelin, Michel, Cosmic influences on Human Behaviour, Futura, London, 1974.Google Scholar

9 Austria adopted Central European Time (one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time) on 1 October 1891. Viennese Local Mean Time runs six minutes ahead of C.E.T., therefore the chart shown here for 6.07 L.M.T. corresponds to 6.01 C.E.T. Intermediate houses are drawn to the Koch system. Incidentally 23° Aquarius ascended at 7.29 a.m. and 23° Pisces at 8.30 a.m. L.M.T. on 9 February 1885, but without the coincidence of 23° at the zenith.

10 I refer to variation 12 of Scene 4. To portray the tracing of a circle Berg gives Wozzeck a descending whole-tone scale and its retrograde (which is also the inversion). The orchestra meanwhile traces similarly harmonically floating circular patterns at five different speeds in what can only be regarded as a symbolic solar system.