Violin Concerto (Berg)

Conception and composition

The piece stemmed from a commission from the violinist Louis Krasner[?]. When he first received the commission, Berg was working on his opera Lulu, and he did not begin work on the concerto for some months. The event which spurred him into writing was the death of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler (once Gustav Mahler's wife) and Walter Gropius. Berg set Lulu to one side to write the concerto, which he dedicated "To the memory of an angel."

Berg worked on the piece very quickly, completing it within a few months, although it is thought that his working on the piece was largely responsible for his failing to complete Lulu before his death on December 24, 1935 (the violin concerto was the last work that Berg completed). The work was premiered after the composer's death, with Krasner playing the solo part on April 19, 1936.

The music

The concerto is structured in four movements. The first and second movements run into each other, as do the third and fourth, though there is a brief break between the second and third movements. The first movement is in a classical sonata form; the second is a dance-like movement; the third, marked Allegro and largely based on a single recurring rhythmic cell, has been described as cadenza-like, with very difficult passages in the solo part becoming rather violent at its climax; the fourth is in a much calmer mood, marked Adagio. The first two movements are meant to represent life, the last two death and transfiguration.

Like a number of other works by Berg, the piece combines the twelve tone technique which Berg had learnt from his teacher Arnold Schoenberg with passages written in a freer style. While parts of the score are atonal, as is the norm in twleve tone works, some parts can be said to be in a certain key, and quotes of purely tonal music are also present. The work's principal tone row reflects this conflict between atonality and tonality:

Sound sample of the tone row (ogg format, 10 seconds, 34KB)

Like all tone rows, this contains all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. However, there is a strong tonal undercurrent: the first three notes of the row make up a G minor triad; notes three to five are a D major triad; notes five to seven are an A minor triad; notes seven to nine are an E major triad; and the last four notes together make up part of a whole tone scale.

These last four notes of the row are also the first four notes of the chorale melody, Es ist genug (It Is Enough). Berg quotes this chorale directly in the last movement of the piece, where the harmonisation by Johann Sebastian Bach is heard in the clarinets.

There is another directly quoted tonal passage in the work in the form of a Carinthian folk song in the second movement.

Sound samples

• The original appearance of the tone row in the first movement - this is the tone row as shown in the above example. Note that the B which separates the triads from the whole-tone scale at the end of the row is longer than the other notes. (ogg format, 10 seconds, 43KB)
• The climax of the third movement - most of the orchestra can be heard playing the rhythmic motif which runs through this movement. (ogg format, 18 seconds, 83KB)
• The Bach chorale from the fourth movement (ogg format, 17 seconds, 77KB)

All samples are performed by Itzhak Perlman and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa[?].

Premieres

• World premiere: April 19, 1936, Barcelona at the ISCM Festival. Louis Krasner[?] played the solo part, and the performance was conducted by Hermann Scherchen[?].
• English premiere: May 1, 1936, London, at an invitation-only concert. Krasner was again the soloist, and the composer conducted a BBC orchestra.
• English public premiere: December 9, 1936, London at the Queen's Hall[?] in a BBC concert. Krasner was again the soloist, and Henry Wood conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Further reading

• Anthony Pople, Berg: Violin Concerto (Cambridge University Press, 1991)