
A review of the first weekend of “Berg and His World” at Bard College, August 13—15:
Berg and Vienna
Review by Larry Wallach
The theme of Bard’s retrospective “Berg and His World” was clearly stated and
restated: Berg needs to be liberated from the so-called “Second Viennese School” and
seen in a wider context of Vienna and beyond. Too long has he been seen primarily as
a student of Schoenberg along with Webern; this perspective masks his individuality as
well as his stature, which, if anything, is as great or greater than that of his beloved “master.” The gauntlet was laid down right away by Leon Botstein, who gave the first
pre-concert talk: Berg gives us the best of both worlds, the expressive, content-oriented approach to composition as communication, and the formally strict, self-contained structural world of the music for its own sake.
Implication no. 1: Schoenberg and Webern over-emphasize the latter at the
expense of the former. Implication no. 2: other composers and artists than Schoenberg
had powerful influences on Berg’s urge to compose expressively (read “romantically”).
Implication no. 3: Berg was as much a romantic as a modernist. Result: Berg became
by far the most popular (hence, successful) composer of the three.
The musical offerings put forth to illustrate this thesis (or are there more than one?)
were so lavish, and for the most part so convincingly performed, that it seems churlish
to beg to differ, or to at least keep an open mind about the more traditional view of Berg
as someone whose development utterly hinged on his relationship with Schoenberg for a significant period of time, and whose continuing relationship remained an important (not to say crucial) force field within which he worked. (This position will be referred to henceforth in this writing as the contrarian one.) And in fairness, there were some wonderful Schoenberg performances to remind us of that composer’s virtues: songs from the Georgelieder, the little piano pieces op. 19, and the powerful Chamber Symphony no. 1. No weak links here; but also, no
twelve-tone works. Lecturers and panelists repeatedly underscored the fact that even though Berg used twelve-tone-rows, his approach was very different from Schoenberg’s. And so were the audible results.
