Alban Berg, a little review - Lyric Suite - Andante amoroso

The Austrian composer Alban Maria Johannes Berg, together with his colleagues Schoenberg and Webern, make up the famous triumvirate of the Second Vienna School, one of the most important movements in the evolution of Western music in the 20th century. Their contributions constituted a renovating impact on the art of combining sounds, with the abandonment of tonality, then the adoption of the dodecaphonic technique, and later serialism; the latter, a Webern's contribution, mainly.

The young Berg

Alban Berg joined the future trinity of composers in 1904, at the age of nineteen, when Schoenberg took him on as a pupil after learning a number of songs composed by Alban. Born in Vienna into a well-to-do family of German origin, the young Berg was at that time a civil servant in the administration of the empire, and music was little more than a serious hobby for him. But as fate would have it, Alban's mother inherited no small fortune. The future composer gave up everything and devoted himself entirely to music.

Early works, and marriage

Under Schoenberg's tutelage, Berg composed his first works between 1907 and 1910. The following year he married, although his father-in-law never regarded him as the ideal husband for his daughter. He had his reasons, clearly class-based: the groom's financial insecurity and the low respectability of his family (Berg's sister was a lesbian).

Recognition, and the affair

But after the 1925 premiere of the opera Wossek, his masterpiece, Berg became both a recognized figure and a controversial author. His financial situation also improved and he was then able to focus on composing more comfortably.
That year and the following one, the author experienced one of his most pleasant periods, including a passing extramarital affair that, according to some scholars, is present in the background of one of his most seductive and mysterious works, the Lyric Suite for String Quartet, composed between 1925 and 1926. It was the first time the author made use of the twelve-tone system created by his master.

The good health of romanticism

Apart from an enigmatic cipher using German notation to seal his and the fleeting beloved's initials in the score, it is the naming of the suite's six sections that has brought the idea of the love story that would be hidden behind it. To each tempo indication, Berg added an adjective with "romantic" resonances that, seen as a whole, illustrate the obligatory plot of a typical love enthusiasm from the beginning of the world.

Sections:

Allegretto gioviale - Andante amoroso - Allegro misterioso - Adagio appasionato - Presto delirando-tenebroso - Largo desolato.

Andante amoroso
The most sensual and intimate movement, albeit with a somewhat whimsical atmosphere, is the Andante amoroso. It is presented here in a performance (audio only) by the famed Alban Berg Quartet, an ensemble born in Vienna in 1970, and dissolved in 2008 after the death of one of its most prominent members in 2005.