Five Songs Op.4

Seele, wie bist du schöner

Sahst du nach dem Gewitterregen

Über die Grenzen des All

Nichts ist gekommen

Hier ist Friede

In retrospect, the most surprising aspect of the first performance of Berg’s Altenberglieder was not that the audience came to blows over it - newsworthy though the scandal obviously was at the time - as that it included only two of the five songs. The disproportion between a work no more than ten minutes in length and the massive orchestral forces involved is conspicuous enough even when it is performed complete. To the audience in the Vienna Musikverein on 31 March 1913, who heard only the two shortest songs, it must have seemed absurd. No wonder there were loud demands to have the composer sent to the mental asylum where the poet was already in residence. Another surprising aspect of that occasion is that the soloist was not a soprano but a tenor. No particular voice is specified but the scoring of Berg’s first work for orchestra is miraculously well calculated to blend and balance a multi-faceted and finely detailed instrumental texture with a soprano vocal line.

That is one reason why the Altenberglieder are so rarely sung with piano accompaniment. Although they were initially published in a reduction for voice and piano - eighteen years after the composer’s death, Berg having suppressed the work after the humiliation of the “Skandalkonzert” in 1913 - the orchestral score has remained the preferred version ever since its first complete performance (under the direction of Jascha Horenstein in Rome) in 1953. It could be, however, that another very special quality of the work - which is its thorough and highly elaborate thematic integration - will emerge all the more clearly in the voice and piano version.

Obviously a work based on aphoristic, postcard-size prose texts has to have a linking theme and Berg was careful to weave a whole web of recurring melodic and rhythmic motifs through the five songs. The clearest connection is between the first and last, partly because the snowfall imagery heard at the beginning of Seele, wie bist du schöner recurs at the end of Hier ist Friede and also because the passacaglia material of the latter has been anticipated in the former (as well as at several points between). There is also a kind of twelve-note organistion, not only in the passacaglia but also as in the harmonies that symbolically open and close Über die Grenzen des All. Whatever the accompaniment, the scarcely perceptible, hummed first entry of the soprano on a rising inflection finds a mirror reflection in the attenuation of the voice on a falling inflection in the closing bars.