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‘Shattering’ was Britten’s view of Berg’s Violin Concerto, a 20th century work with a rich recorded legacy, explored here by Arnold Whittall

Memory of

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lban Berg’s Violin Concerto was first performed in Barcelona on April 19, 1936, just five months after the composer’s early and

unexpected death aged 50. The audience at this International Society for Contemporary Music event included the 22-year-old Benjamin Britten, who a few years before had hoped to study with Berg in Vienna. Britten described the experience in his diary as “just shattering – very simple and touching”, and went on to explain that he’d felt unable to attend a formal banquet after the concert: “You can’t be polite after Berg!” That premiere, with the work’s commissioner Louis Krasner as soloist, should have been conducted by Anton Webern, Berg’s close friend and fellow Schoenberg pupil. Webern was an experienced conductor as well as a visionary composer but at a late stage he felt unable to fulfil such a highly charged commitment, and Hermann Scherchen – always a safe pair of hands in difficult new music – took over. Just two weeks later, however, on May 1, 1936, Webern conducted the concerto, with Krasner again as soloist, at a BBC concert in London. Britten was there: the performance

12 GRAMOPHONE MAY 2010

was “not a patch on the Barcelona one” but was nevertheless “a very moving experience. It certainly is a very great work, and at the end I feel pretty wet with anger about losing a genius like this”.

Britten’s admiration for Berg’s Concerto, as a young composer scornful of what he believed to be the predominantly conservative and timid character of contemporary music in Britain, comes as no surprise. But the work’s

“It is fascinating and fruitless to speculate on how differently the work might have evolved had Manon Gropius not died”

relative popularity – as the acceptable face of that allegedly arid phenomenon, 12-note music – was as much the result of its obvious

and inspired gestures in the direction of well- loved musical traditions, both sacred and secular, as of the special circumstances of its conception and completion. The parallels with Mozart were far from exact: Berg wasn’t asked by a mysterious stranger to abandon the completion of his opera Lulu in order to write an instrumental requiem for Manon, daughter of his friends Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius, who had died aged 18 in April 1935. The Krasner commission had come in February 1935 and Berg welcomed the chance to earn some money with a project that could be completed fairly quickly. He therefore set Lulu aside, with just the orchestration and final refinements to Act 3 unfinished, in order to write the concerto. It is both fascinating and fruitless to speculate on how differently the work might have evolved had Manon Gropius not died from infantile paralysis on April 22. Its particular 12-note row, with ascending arpeggios filling out the violin’s open strings, had already been devised by then: and even the connection between the row’s last four notes and the funeral chorale melody “Es ist genug”, which Berg quotes in Bach’s harmonisation in the second movement, seems such an inspired association that it could have struck the

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