Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs: The Story of a Love in Letters. By Constantin Floros. Trans. by Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch.

Abstract

Constantin Floros's edition of Alban Berg's correspondence with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin—the ‘muse’ who inspired his Lyric Suite—and her husband Herbert, a Prague industrialist, was originally published in 1995 as the fiftieth anniversary issue of the Österreichische Musikzeitschrift (Alban Berg und Hanna Fuchs. Briefe und Studien, Erstveröffentlichungen (Vienna, 1995)). A revised and expanded edition was published in 2001 by Arche Verlag, Zürich and Hamburg (Alban Berg und Hanna Fuchs. Die Geschichte einer Liebe in Briefen, henceforth Geschichte). This incorporated a new chapter on Der Wein replacing the brief note in the 1995 edition but omitted Walburga Litschauer's essay on Berg's juvenile poem ‘Hanna’—of interest to a student of Berg's early life but not strictly relevant to the later love affair. An appendix contained two letters from Adorno to Helene Berg dating from 1936, both of which originally appeared in Henri Lonitz's edition of the Adorno–Berg correspondence (Theodor W. Adorno/Alban Berg: Briefwechsel 1925–1935 (Frankfurt, 1997), 329–39). The present volume is essentially a translation of that edition. However, there are some revisions and expansions, notably in the introduction, which has been doubled in length to include more general remarks about Berg and his oeuvre.