Some Cultural Aspects of Alban Berg's Vienna

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to throw some light on the sociohistorical and cultural background of the milieu in which Alban Berg was raised and educated and where he eventually created his musical compositions. In this attempt I am following the composer's cues, taking up some of his often brief and cryptic remarks about conditions or personages in his native city, elaborating on them and making them somewhat more translucent. To say that Alban Berg was born, grew up, lived and died in Vienna, while not incorrect, is an oversimplification. He actually spent his life in two very different cities: Vienna, the glittering center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and postwar Vienna, the immense head of a pollywog called the First Republic or the unloved state that nobody wanted. There are, in nature and culture, suggestive sites that have traditionally invited a great deal of mythologizing. This can be easily observed in cities such as Rome, New York or Paris, whose legendary fame defies time and space. Art and literature abound in images, topoi, evocations, descriptions, transfigurations, and even demonizations, all engendered by these places. The imaginative forcefield irradiated by the city of Venice, for example, has been so potent in the course of its variegated history that it has given rise to a series of divergent projections in writing and painting. Imperial Vienna, too, has always been a sought-after milieu for myth-makers. In song and operetta, in poems and on canvas, in novels, plays and films, its qualities, fed by fiction as much as fact, have been celebrated a thousandfold. The splendor of the Hapsburg court, the sponsorship of the arts by ambitious wealthy families, the motley crowds of a multiethnic culture, its role as mediator between East and West, the late intrusion of capitalist enterprise and liberal ideas into an essentially feudal order, the relative affluence of the middle classes, the ceaseless arrival of foreign artists, lured to Vienna by the rumor of a light-hearted, sybaritic lifeall of these factors