Lyric Suite (Berg)

The Lyric Suite is organized into six movements, alternating fast and slow tempi: Allegretto gioviale, Andante amoroso, Allegro misterioso, Adagio appassionato, Presto delirando, and Largo desolato. Berg employs a twelve-tone row, but he treats it with considerable freedom, often using only fragments of the row and incorporating tonal triads and traditional harmonic progressions. The row itself is derived from the whole-tone scale and contains all intervals, yet Berg shapes it to create a sense of tonal gravity, particularly around the pitch class A. The third movement features a palindrome structure, and the entire work is linked by a recurring motto of four notes (F–E–C–A) that appears throughout, unifying the suite cyclically.

For decades, the Lyric Suite was understood as a purely abstract work, but in 1977 the musicologist Douglass Green discovered that Berg had secretly inscribed a program into the score, revealing a love affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the sister of Franz Werfel. The hidden program is encoded in the music through the use of the notes F and H (B natural in German notation), which correspond to the initials of Hanna and her husband Herbert, and through the inclusion of a quotation from Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony in the sixth movement. The final movement, marked Largo desolato, is a musical depiction of Berg's despair at the impossibility of the affair, and it includes a setting of a poem by Charles Baudelaire, De profundis clamavi, which Berg intended to be sung but never published in that form.¹

The premiere was given by the Kolisch Quartet in Vienna on January 8, 1927, and the work quickly entered the repertoire of leading ensembles. Berg later arranged three movements for string orchestra, creating the Three Pieces from the Lyric Suite, which were premiered in 1929. In 1935, Berg prepared a full orchestral version of the entire suite, but it remained unfinished at his death; this version was completed by Friedrich Cerha and premiered in 1980. The work has been recorded by numerous quartets, including the Alban Berg Quartet, the Emerson String Quartet, and the Arditti Quartet, and it has inspired choreographic interpretations, notably by the choreographer John Neumeier.²

One of the most intriguing lesser-known aspects is the discovery of a hidden vocal part in the sixth movement, which Berg had notated in the score but never published; this part, a setting of Baudelaire's poem, was first performed in 1979 by the soprano Bethany Beardslee with the Juilliard Quartet. Another detail is that the work's row is derived from a four-note motto that also appears in Berg's Lyric Symphony quotation, creating a web of self-references. The third movement contains an exact retrograde of its own first half, and the entire suite is structured so that the final movement is a retrograde of the first, a feature that was only fully appreciated after the discovery of the program. Additionally, Berg's use of the number 23, a number he associated with fate, appears in the rhythmic structure of the fifth movement, where the meter changes 23 times.³

Twelve-tone technique

A method of composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg in which all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale are treated as equally important, arranged in a fixed row.

Palindrome

A structure that reads the same forwards and backwards; in music, a passage that is mirrored in retrograde.

Retrograde

The reversal of a musical line, so that the last note becomes the first, and so on.