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.

1 ‘Literaturoper’: Literary Opera and the ‘problem of opera’

Right up to the end of the 19th century, an opera libretto was conceived differently from a stage play. This was because, from the outset, the libretto was thought out and constructed with a view to being set to music and sung. The librettist, whether he was writing in Italian or French, had to respect the conventions of this particular literary genre, conventions that were derived from a specific type of musical drama comprised of an alternation between recitatives (action) and arias or ensembles (tableaux). The use of specific lines and rhymes made the libretto into a ‘pre-composition’, and gave the composer an architectural plan to follow.

The Black Gondola, John Adams's transcription for chamber orchestra of Liszt's La Lugubre Gondola II, composed in 1989 for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota, shows how – as in the case of Wiegenlied (discussed in an earlier article, Tempo 175) – the composer has been attracted to those aspects of Liszt's late style which inter–connect with minimalism: regular, and fluid, rhythmic textures; economy of thematic material which undergoes ‘minimal’ transformation; extensive phrase repetition in a ‘sequencing’ structure; harmonic ambiguity and elusiveness. In addition, in this case, a strong programmatic element is evident in the symbolism of the original piece which is heightened considerably within Adams's transcription: an expression of the dramatic style which has influenced his recent stage works, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer.

There is a certain type of composer, a type characteristic of the culture of our century, with its unprecedented complexities and contradictions. This is the slow and painstaking composer, who eschews all self–repetition, producing a limited number of works. Each one of these works, however, will be a work of real weight and significance. Henri Dutilleux comes to mind as an example of this type; György Kurtág is another. It can be said that these composers, like Varèse, Webern, Spinner, and Ruggles before them, have given us, in terms of substance, a great deal of music. And so has the Slovak composer Dušan Martinček.