Adagio (1925-35)

Preparing for a concert in honour of Berg’s fiftieth birthday in 1935, the violinist Dea Gombrich suggested she might play the Adagio from the Chamber Concerto as a violin solo with piano accompaniment. Rather than being horrified by the proposal - as anyone aware of the complex network of relationships between the three movements of the Chamber Concerto might have expected - the composer expressed no objection to taking the Adagio out of its context at the centre of the work. He was worried more by the idea of reducing a piece scored for violin and thirteen wind instruments to a violin and piano duo. So he reworked it as a trio, creating a new clarinet part out of the more expressive and the more significant solo contri­butions which emerge from the wind ensemble in the original version.

Although the violin part of the Adagio is much the same in the trio as in the Chamber Concerto, there are a few small cuts in the new version - which, since it compromises the symmetrical integrity of the original structure, is another surprising develop­ment. Clearly, ten years after completing the Chamber Concerto, Berg was able to forget his obsessively numerical calculations and to see the Adagio as a lyrical inspiration in its own right.

Of course, the basic structure survives the reworking in spite of the few modifications. It is divided into two more or less equal parts, the second being a retrograde version of the first. In the Chamber Concerto the turning point is signalled, on the one entry the piano makes in this movement, by twelve C sharps arranged in a palindromic rhythmic pattern at the bottom of the keyboard: they are still there in the trio version but, since the piano is present throughout, less obviously. Each of the two parts is in ternary form, the third section being an inversion of the first - which means that when the first part is retrograded in the second part, the final section must be… But it really doesn’t matter. As the trio version demonstrates, the interplay between the two solo instruments greatly enhancing its intimacy, the Adagio is one of the most expressive of all Berg’s slow movements.