Lyric Suite (Berg)

Lyric Suite
String quartet by Alban Berg
Sketch of Alban Berg by Emil Stumpp (1927)
Composed	1925 (1925)–26
Dedication	Alexander von Zemlinsky
Movements	Six

The Lyric Suite is a six-movement work for string quartet written by Alban Berg between 1925 and 1926 using methods derived from Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Though publicly dedicated to Alexander von Zemlinsky (from whose Lyric Symphony it quotes), the work has been shown to possess a "secret dedication" and to outline a "secret programme".^[1]

Berg arranged three of the "pieces" (movements) for string orchestra in 1928.

The string quartet has six movements:

As Berg's friend and fellow Schoenberg pupil Erwin Stein wrote in the preface to the score, "[t]he work (Ist and VIth part, the main part of the IIIrd and the middle section of the Vth) has been mostly written strictly in accordance with Schoenberg's technique of the 'Composition with 12 inwardly related tones." A set of 12 different tones gives the rough material of the composition, and the portions which have been treated more freely still adhere more or less to the technique".^[3] George Perle points out that the first movement is not strictly twelve-tone, with the opening four chords being derived not from the series but from the interval-7 cycle.^[4]

The first analysis was undertaken by H. F. Redlich, who notices that "the first movement of the Lyric Suite develops out of the disorder of intervals in its first bar, the notes of which, strung out horizontally, present the complete chromatic scale, and from this in the second and following bars, grows the Basic Set in its thematic shape".^[5]

Theodor W. Adorno called the quartet "a latent opera".^[6] Redlich described "the concealed vocality of the Lyric Suite"^[7] despite having no knowledge of the setting of Baudelaire's De profundis clamavi in the finale movement, deciphered by Douglass M. Green from what Perle calls "Berg's cryptic notations".^[8]

Perle discovered a complete copy of the first edition annotated by Berg for his dedicatee, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (Franz Werfel's sister, with whom Berg had an affair in the 1920s), later that year.^[9] Berg used the signature motif, A-B-H-F (in German notation, B means B♭, while H means B♮), to combine Alban Berg (A. B.) and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (H. F.).^[10] This is most prominent in the third movement. Berg also quotes a melody from Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony in movement four which originally set the words "You are mine own". In the last movement, according to Berg's self-analysis, the "entire material, the tonal element too... as well as the Tristan motif" is developed "by strict adherence to the 12-note series".^[6]

According to René Leibowitz, the first movement is "entirely written in the twelve-tone technique, [it] is a sonata movement without the development. Thus the recapitulation follows directly upon the exposition; but, because of the highly advanced twelve-tone technique of variation, everything in this movement is developmental".^[11]

The tone row of the first movement is

Pople adds a bar line to group the first and the last six pitches.^[12] He also depicts it as:

Whenever a given row-form is immediately repeated, a reversed coupling of the hexachords is employed to produce a secondary set. Berg had used the row previously, in 1925, in his first twelve-tone work, his second setting of "Schliesse mir die Augen beide".^[2]

In the third movement, the outer sections of the Allegro misterioso present the same music forwards and then backwards, while the Trio estatico, the B section of the ABA, is through-composed.^[13] Berg generates a characteristic rhythmic cell through partitioning the series into a seven-note chromatic segment and a complementary five-note motive from the remaining notes.^[14]

According to Wolfgang Martin Stroh,^[15] the tone row of the third movement is

which can be partitioned into a rising chromatic segment and remaining pitches:^[15][9]

George Perle,^{[citation needed]} gives

Despite assertions by Berg and others, George Perle, however, "had not yet been informed, as Leibowitz and Redlich were by the time they came to write their respective books, that everything in the 'strictly' dodecaphonic first movement had to be derived from a single serial ordering of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale." Rather, he, "recognized that the first three chords unfold tetrachordal segments of a single statement of the cycle of fifths (C7), and that at the bottom of the same page, in bars 7–9, the cello presents a linear statement of the same cycle." The second violin unfolds "the initial tetrachordal segmentation of the perfect-5th cycle," again at the beginning of the recapitulation. He asks: "How could one [think] of the initial bar as 'disordered'? If anything is to be designated as an Urform here, surely it is this perfect-5th cycle, given its background role in relation to the tone row and other components of the movement."^[16]

In the sixth movement, tone row 1 is^[17]

while tone row 2, derived from tone row 1, is^[17]

In 1928, Berg arranged the second, third and fourth movements of the Lyric Suite for string orchestra. According to Adorno:

If the lyrical nature of the Suite is best fostered in the quartet, its dramatic nature is best fostered in the string tutti; only here are its contours dissolved as completely and enigmatically as the accompanimental concept of the sound demands; and only here does the paroxysm attain its full catastrophic force.^[18]

The piece has been recorded by and released on:

Sources

• Lyrische Suite: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project
• Schiff, David (September 21, 2003). "The Secret Love Affair Behind the Lyric Suite", The New York Times.
• Lyric Suite, D1f.com.
• Lyric Suite for string orchestra, 3 pieces (Nr. 1, 5, 6) arr. Theo Verbey, Universal Edition.