Review of Patricia Hall,Berg’s “Wozzeck”(Oxford University Press, 2011)

Abstract

[1] The release of Patricia Hall's sketch-based study of composer Alban Berg's first opera Wozzeck, fifteen years after her earlier parallel study of Berg's second opera Lulu (Hall 1996, awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award), is a seminal event in Berg scholarship. I have previously defined three stages in Berg research (Headlam 1993). The first encompasses writings of Berg himself and his circle of students and correspondents, notably Willi Reich and Theodor W. Adorno. The second stage begins with the writings of Hans Redlich in the 1950s and extends through seminal studies of individual works and overviews of Berg's oeuvre by writers such as George Perle, Mark DeVoto, and Douglas Jarman in the 1970s and 80s. This stage also includes the onset of comprehensive studies of sketches and other materials, and the revelations of the secret programs in Berg's music. The third stage is a continuation and expansion of the directions in the second; it includes my own book (Headlam 1996), Hall's Lulu book (Hall 1996), exegeses of further secret programs in the Chamber Concerto, Violin Concerto and other works, and a number of collected and individual volumes on Berg's music.(1) Hall's present book and the passing of George Perle (January 2009) may turn out to mark the completion of this third stage. In this review, I will consider Hall's book in this context and try to frame some questions that might set the stage for the next generation, which should properly provide a complete biography of Berg as well as new directions for analysis.[2] In her Wozzeck study, Patricia Hall deploys the exemplary sketch and analytical techniques evident in her earlier book. Hall is the undisputed English-language expert on the Berg sketch and biographical material, and this welcome second volume offers the same high level of scholarship and insight into the working methods of this fascinating composer familiar from the first study on Lulu. Readers will come away impressed by the detailed analytical nature of Berg's compositional method, and by the thorough and self-conscious way in which he approached musical and related dramatic questions. Berg was a careful analyst of his own and others' music, and the notes and letters surrounding his first opera confirm that he was sensitive to subtle dramatic and formal points and all aspects of musical and text combinations; his notations characterizing the psychological aspects of Schoenberg's orchestration in Erwartung provide further evidence of this propensity (see pages 103-7). Berg's analytical and communicative abilities are exemplified in the famous lecture presented before some performances of Wozzeck in the 1920s, as well as in several analytical letters to Schoenberg.[3] As in her earlier book, Hall expertly takes us through not only the immediate sketches, but also through other surrounding sketch and biographical material to support her narrative. Hall's assessment allows us to extrapolate a provocative parallel with Lulu. As early as 1985 Hall pointed out a two-part compositional structure for Lulu: measures 85-528 in Act I are, with a few exceptions, based on the original sketch material (1927), and the Prologue (written last) and remaining sections of the opera follow from correspondence between Berg and Willi Reich and the composition of Der Wein (1929). This in turn leads to an expanded set of materials derived from the row, most notably the order position cycles creating most of the character rows of the opera (Hall 1985). We can detect an analogous two-part compositional process for Wozzeck, based on the increased use of permutational alignments of intervals cycles (described by Berg in a letter to Schoenberg of 1920) and his general implementation of serial ordering, but in a more comprehensive fashion than before (110, identified in sketches from 1919). The notable increase in these algorithmic procedures-some foreshadowing the coming twelve-tone techniques-suggests an analogous bifurcation in the composition of Wozzeck, which Hall divides into three phases: 1914-18, 1919-22, and 1923-25 (the latter more concerned with arranging and preparing for the premiere in 1925). …