Lyric Suite

Composition and analysis

According to Rene Leibowitz (1947) it is "entirely written in the twelve-tone technique, [it] is a sonata movement without the development. Thus the recapitulation follows directly upon the exposition; but, because of the highly advanced twelve-tone technique of variation, everything in this movement is developmental."

However, the first analysis was undertaken by H.F. Redlich (1957), who notices that, "the first movement of the Lyric Suite develops out of the disorder of intervals in its first bar, the notes of which, strung out horizontally, present the complete chromatic scale, and from this in the second and following bars, grows the Basic Set in its thematic shape."

Theodor Adorno called the quartet "a latent opera" (Sandberger, 1996). Redlich (ibid, p.142) described, "the concealed vocality of the Lyric Suite," despite having no knowledge of the setting of Baudelaire in the finale movement, deciphered by Douglass M. Green in 1976 from what George Perle call's, "Berg's cryptic notations". Perle discovered a complete copy of the first edition annotated by Berg for his dedicatee, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (Franz Werfel's sister, with whom Berg had an affair in the 1920s), later that year. (Perle, 1990).

Berg used the motif, A-B-H-F, to combine Alban Berg (A.B.) and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (H.F.) (AMG). This is most prominent in movment three. Berg also quotes a melody from Zemlinksy's Lyric Symphony in the movement four which originall set the words "You are mine own". In the last movement, according to Berg's self-analysis, the, "entire material, the tonal element too...as well as the Tristan motif" is developed "by strict adherence to the 12-note series."(Sandberger, 1996)

Despite assertions by Berg and others, George Perle, however, "had not yet been informed, as Leibowitz and Redlich were by the time they came to write their respective books, that everything in the 'strictly' dodecaphonic first movement had to be derived from a single serial ordering of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale." Rather, he, "recognized that the first three chords unfold tetrachordal segments of a single statement of the cycle of fifths (C7), and that at the bottom of the same page, in bars 7-9, the cello presents a linear statement of the same cycle." The second violin unfolds "the initial tetrachordal segmentation of the perfect-5th cycle," again at the beginning of the recapitulation. He asks: "How could one [think] of the initial bar as 'disordered'? If anything is to be designated as an Urform here, surely it is this perfect-5th cycle, given its background role in relation to the tone row and other components of the movement."

Recordings