4 Jugendlieder

Ferne Lieder 1901-4

Geliebte Schöne 1901-4

Er klagt 1904-8

Tiefe Sehnsucht 1904-8

When Berg first met Schoenberg, whose pupil he became in 1904, the older composer was impressed by the compositions this “very tall and extremely timid” young man had brought with him, “however awkward they may have been”. Berg was capable of writing only songs at the time but from these examples “in a style between Hugo Wolf and Brahms,” Schoenberg recognised at once that he was “a real talent.” Berg’s own attitude to his teenage scores, and to most of those he was to write during the next four years, was implicit in his decision to keep them firmly out of sight of the public. In 1928 he did agree to publish seven of them but these Sieben frühe Lieder were the best of the many he had written while working with Schoenberg between 1904 and 1908. Nothing else, he declared, was to see the light of day.    It was only after Berg’s death, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his birth, that his publishers issued two volumes of what were now presented as Jugendlieder (Songs from the Composer’s Youth), 22 of them dating from 1901 to 1904 and a similar number from 1904 to 1908.

Ferne Lieder, one of the earlier set of Jugendlieder, is a fascinating example of the kind of thing Berg would have put before Schoenberg at the beginning of their relationship. The first stanza proceeds engagingly enough on an attractively limping rhythm in the piano part as it describes the magical scene. But the real test of the composer’s imagination is in the second stanza where a woman “plays and sings” and where Berg adds a new voice in high right-hand octaves in the piano part. Better still, he recalls that voice in the piano interlude just before the singer’s last two words. Geliebte Schöne, from the same early volume, is remarkable for the composer’s choice of a spring poem which is far from the joyful verse conventionally associated with the same season and so much favoured by Schubert and his romantic successors. It is remarkable too for the setting, where the first stanza is as glum as the words but where the second gives expression in its sinking harmonies to the erotic suggestions of the last line of Heine’s text. (As it happened, Hugo Wolf made a setting of the same unlikely verse in 1878, when he was about the same age as Berg when he wrote his, and produced a far less interesting song.) Arno Holz’s Er Klagt, a more conventional spring poem, is matched by a more conventional setting, which – thanks no doubt to Schoenberg’s tuition – is thoroughly professional and thoroughly delightful.

Looking at the the words of Liliencron’s Tiefe Sehnsucht one wonders why any composer bothered to set it. The clue is in the title, which suggests that the first stanza arouses memories which create a “deep longing” in the second. Strangely enough, in his uniformly cheerful setting Brahms leaves out the title – he calls it Maienkätzchen – and misses the point. Berg’s somewhat Schumannesque version, which illuminates the nostalgia in the second stanza, makes no such mistake.