Violin Concerto

Program notes

About the Work

Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto is one of the most moving and beautiful works of the twentieth century, a piece that bridges, as few others do, the worlds of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone modernism and late-Romantic emotion. Berg, a pupil of Schoenberg and a member of the Second Viennese School, wrote it in 1935 on a commission from the American violinist Louis Krasner. He was working on it when tragedy struck: Manon Gropius, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler (Gustav Mahler’s widow) and the architect Walter Gropius, died of polio. Berg, devastated, set aside his opera Lulu and poured his grief into the concerto, dedicating it ‘to the memory of an angel’, meaning Manon. In a further, terrible irony, the concerto became Berg’s own requiem: he died suddenly that December, before he ever heard it performed. It is, in effect, a double memorial.

The concerto is built on a twelve-tone row, but Berg chose one so cunningly constructed that it sounds tonal and consonant, full of major and minor triads, and ending in a rising sequence of whole tones. This lets the music speak with a warmth and lyricism rare in serial works. It falls into two parts. The first evokes the living girl: a gentle, dancing portrait that includes a folk tune from Carinthia, where Berg had first met Manon. The second part depicts her suffering, death and transfiguration: a violent catastrophe followed by extraordinary consolation, for at its heart Berg quotes a Bach chorale, ‘Es ist genug’ (‘It is enough’), whose opening notes happen to coincide with the end of his tone row. The work ends in radiant, heartbreaking peace. It is a profound and accessible masterpiece, and an ideal vehicle for a searching, expressive soloist like Patricia Kopatchinskaja.

What to Listen For

The concerto plays continuously but falls into two large parts. Listen at the very opening for the soloist’s quiet, rising arpeggios over open strings, Berg’s tone row laid out so that it sounds gentle and tonal, not harsh. In the first part, listen for the tender, dancing ‘portrait’ of the girl, and especially for the lilting Carinthian folk song that floats in like a memory, a touch of innocent, rustic charm.

The second part begins with violence: listen for the shattering orchestral outburst and the agitated, anguished solo writing that depict suffering and death. Then comes the work’s miraculous turn: the entry of Bach’s chorale ‘Es ist genug,’ first played by clarinets in Bach’s own harmonisation, then taken up and varied by the soloist. Listen for the way this old Lutheran hymn of acceptance (‘It is enough, Lord’) brings consolation out of grief. The concerto rises to a final transfiguration: listen for the violin ascending, higher and higher, into serene stillness as the music dissolves into radiant calm, the angel’s soul at peace. It is one of the most affecting endings in all music.