The Ellington Century (47 page)

-E
). In unordered form the second hexachord just transposed the first up an augmented fourth; this meant (as AB did not point out to AS) that rows beginning on the pitches B and F were equivalent. These hexachords could mimic the scales of C and G
and also produce triadic harmonies like the G
major and minor triads heard in bars 5 and 6. The series, properly manipulated, could produce the sounds of tonality, polytonality, or atonality; given the liberties that Berg took—reorderings, selective verticalizations, superimpositions to create triads—virtually any row might produce these effects. No wonder Berg felt jovial.

To mark the lucidity of the work's harmonic technique Berg wrote the movement in the so-called sonatina form, an exposition and recapitulation without the mature gravitas of a development section. Actually, though, the movement is anything but simple. The exposition contains four thematic groups. The recapitulation feels like an inverted, transposed restatement, mirroring the structure of the row, though it is actually a developed variation, different in every detail. According to Willi Reich, Berg exhorted his students to “develop, do not write sequences, and intensify,”
⁴⁴
just as he had learned from his teacher. Fluently serial and emotionally well adjusted, the movement presents Alban Berg as a very good boy indeed.

If the first movement depicts a happy composer and his new toy, the second, as the annotated score revealed, portrays a happy
Hausfrau mit Kinder
. Stein says the movement is in rondo form, but it sounds like a Mahler scherzo (ABA'CA'') with contrasting trios in a variety of dance rhythms, including minuet, furiant, and waltz. (Berg admired Mahler's Sixth Symphony, whose rhythmic complexities supposedly represented his own two children at play.) Reich claims that the movement is based on an altered row (A-G-E
-A-B
-F-C-E-F#-B-C#-D) in which the pitches A and C have exchanged places. This mutation deprives the row of all its Kleinian properties, making it more like a Schoenberg series. Had Reich written out the row a step higher, another reason for the exchange of pitches would have become obvious; the first four notes would then be B
-A-F-B, or, in German, B-A-F-H. It is difficult, however, to find much trace of the row in the movement, which more conspicuously uses whole-tone and half-diminished harmonies familiar from Berg's Seven Early Songs, op. 1 Sonata and op. 2 Songs. Perhaps the row is only present as an irritant, because the movement becomes increasingly agitated as it progresses. The final appearance of the main section of the piece twice becomes wildly animated, as if a childish game had gotten out of hand and Mama had to intervene—a forecast of a greater loss of control just around the corner.

We have almost reached the sexy bits, but first let's note how Berg's story differs from “Jeux de vagues.” Debussy began with undifferentiated eros, slowly moving toward a sense of form. Berg began with difference, with the opposition of male and female, serial and free, in a presexual state of children's games, a gemütlich middle-class Eden before the fall. Gender differentiation appears in the “immature” forms of sonatina and rondo and in a contrast of highly rational and apparently improvised idioms. It also appears in the most clearly articulated cyclical theme of the quartet, scalar patterns harmonized as three- or four-note chords. We hear their ascending, masculine form at the two structural cadences of the first movement, and the descending, feminine form at the cadences of the three A sections of the second movement.

The onset of the third movement changes everything. Perle reported that the annotated score was prefaced by the date “20.5.25,” five days after Berg's arrival chez Fuchs and a day after he had written his wife that he hoped she was on her way to join him in Prague (perhaps hoping to confirm she was not). The music is almost inaudible, barely musical; bowed on the bridge, the instruments produce more scratchy noise than pitch. If we could hear the pitches we might notice that their sequence
was strictly serial, but the music sounds like the diary of a plague of flies, or a muted hubbub of whispers (Berg's annotation is “
wie geflüstert
”)
⁴⁵
that might fill a Viennese café during one of Berg's favorite activities,
Jause
, afternoon gossip. And what is all the buzzing about? The cello makes the subject (or at least the pitches) clear in bar 6 by plucking the strings rather than scratching them; it plays three different orderings of the pitches (in German) B-A-F-H. Rumors seem to be flying ahead of actual (or imagined) events.

The buzzing texture Berg created out of the various series harkens back to Schoenberg's expressionist period, in particular to the thirteenth movement, “Enhauptung” (Decapitation), from
Pierrot Lunaire
, especially bars 10-16.
⁴⁶
Berg, whose literary sophistication surpassed even his teacher's, would have appreciated the subtext of castration anxiety in Schoenberg's lurid vignette.

Berg excelled in expanding lightning-flash moments of Schoenberg's music into sustained structures. Here he inflated Schoenberg's seven-bar phrase into a sixty-nine-bar paragraph followed by its forty-six-bar retrograde, played
pianissimo
throughout. To make the retrograde audible he structured the initial section as a succession of contrasting textures and timbres:
murmurando
imitation played on the bridge, pizzicato statements of rows hocketing (alternating) between instruments,
tremolando
homorhythm, double canon in augmentation using harmonics in rhythms based on seven beats, repeated notes played by striking the string with the wooden side of the bow (
col legno
), and an imitative stretto mixing notes bowed and struck
col legno
, with a final codetta based on the ascending chromatic scale from F to B. The memorable timbre of each of these phrases keeps them recognizable even when played backward.

Out of this superorganized nonmusic the Trio estatico erupts, “
plötzlich ausbrechend,
” in two loud gasps, as if music itself, like a nearly drowned swimmer, was struggling for breath. In bars 76 and 77 Berg reprised and conjoined the gendered rising and falling scale patterns as an arch, but he also reshaped the scales according to the “master array” of intervals, Berg's contribution to atonal theory. The brief section unfolds in waves, a veritable
jeu de vagues
, plummeting and rising again. Although there are plenty of A-B-H-F sightings, the peaks, notably the motive in the violins at 86, do not state that tetrad either horizontally or vertically but instead state a new idea, a falling major third followed by a rising major third one half step lower. Berg will bring this new motive (which is imitated upside down by the viola and cello) back at the
climax of the fourth movement, but here it appears as an epitome of the warm third-based harmonies that suffuse the entire trio and keep it on the verge of tonality. Had Berg presented the motive with the pitches A-F-E-G# we might recognize it as the first four notes of
Tristan
, an association strengthened by the four-note chromatic countermelody, which, when inverted, as it is by the cello, announces the “Yearning” theme. (Berg presents both ideas at their correct pitches in the final movement,
zu spät
.) Before desire or tonality have much of a chance to expose themselves the buzzing music returns, almost as if a broadcast of
Tristan
suddenly emerged from and disappeared back into a sea of static; Berg often remarked on the quality of radio transmission in his letters. Aberrant electronics drown out human voices.

The Trio estatico figures love as the dissolution of self, both anagrammatically and texturally. The Adagio appassionato, which Berg annotated as “the next day,” presents itself as both a symphonic development and a love scene, but what do these genres have in common? In the classical sonata form the development prolongs the structure by postponing recapitulation; a love scene, like that of act 2 in
Tristan
(which Berg would parody in
Lulu
), attempts to prolong the moment of bliss and postpone the inevitable, which, in Wagner, entails both sexual climax and death. In romantic musical aesthetics the development section was also synonymous with freedom. A subtle example of developmental freedom is the new motive that appears in the viola on the upbeat to bar eight. This figure expands the two-note oscillation that opens the movement in ever-widening intervals: D-C#-E
-C-E
-B-F, from a half step to a diminished fifth. We might say that Berg has turned his “worm” motive into an aroused “screw” motive, which, aptly enough, he will bring back (in bar 51) to generate the final climax at bar 57, a coincidence of mathematics, implicitly lewd sexual imagery, and dramatic overkill that suggests that Berg and perhaps Mrs. Fuchs shared an objective sense of humor about their affair. At the climactic moment, heralded by
tremolandos
on A-B-H-F in the violins, Berg transformed the “screw” motive into a rhythmic idea, with a rhythmic series of thrusts that diminish in number (4, 3, 2, 1) as they increase (by a Fibonacci series) in density (two notes, three, five, eight). A second rhythmic series follows with a six-note spasm on A-B-H-F, receding to five notes and then to four. In different performances this passage sounds either like a nearly simultaneous double orgasm or like a death rattle. The coda that follows, the most tender moment of the entire score, muted throughout, sounds like a ghostly aubade from beyond the grave.