Violin Concerto

The concerto begins in utmost quiet, with harp and clarinets preluding. The solo violin enters by touching its four open strings, from G up to E and down again. A clear cadence follows, and the first movement proper begins over a simple accompanying figure.

In June 1935 Krasner spent some time with Berg at his country house on the Wörthersee and improvised for hours, so that Berg could learn his playing. On 16 July Berg wrote to him that he had finished the composition the day before.

The violin’s next entrance again begins on the open G string and rises through the twelve-note row: G, B♭, D, F♯, A, C, E, G♯, B, C♯, E♭, F. Four triads within the row begin on the violin’s four open strings.

Michael Steinberg describes the two movements as a portrait of Manon Gropius and a drama of “death and transfiguration”. Berg thought of the Andante as a Praeludium.

The Allegretto follows the Andante. Berg marks the violin’s sweet thirds “wienerisch” (Viennese) and a rougher passage “rustico”, and the hiccup of a yodel is heard.

The American Music Lover reviewed the set in September 1941. It wrote that “musicianship and taste are strikingly displayed in this performance” and praised Rodzinski’s “clarity of line and detail”.

Ernst Krenek identified the Carinthian folk song in 1957. Bryan Simms and Charlotte Erwin give its title as “A Vögele af’n Zweschpm-bam” and call it a yodelling song with a saucy, ribald text. In this movement it is passed among horn, solo violin and two trumpets.

The second movement begins violently, with an intensity of dissonance Berg has so far avoided. He wanted the opening played with the freedom of a cadenza. A strictly rhythmic style, ruled by a dotted rhythm, takes over later.

Krasner, the soloist here, suggested the concerto to Berg and played it first, in Barcelona on 19 April 1936. Webern was to have conducted but withdrew, and Hermann Scherchen took over with next to no rehearsal time.

Berg wrote the concerto in memory of Manon Gropius, Alma Mahler’s daughter, who died of polio on 22 April 1935, aged eighteen. His title page reads “Dem Andenken eines Engels” (to the memory of an angel).

A demanding cadenza halts the forward movement for a moment. The orchestra then returns in full force and drives the music to an immense climax, which subsides before the Adagio.

The Adagio begins with the solo violin playing the chorale Es ist genug, accompanied by bassoon and a few orchestral strings. Its first four notes are the last four of Berg’s twelve-note row, rising by whole tones.

The tune is by Johann Rudolf Ahle and the words by Franz Joachim Burmeister. Bach harmonised it in the cantata O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort, BWV 60. Berg’s harmonisation and Bach’s alternate through the Adagio.

In the variations the melody is in muted cellos and harp, and the solo violin, also muted, joins them. One orchestral violin then joins the soloist, then another, and Berg asks the soloist to lead the violins “audibly and visibly”.

Krasner reported that Berg regarded this passage, with the orchestral violins joining the soloist one by one, as “the real cadenza” of the concerto.

The orchestral strings drop away as gradually as they entered, until only the soloist is left.

The Carinthian folk song from the first movement returns, in Steinberg’s words “as if from a great distance”. The chorale, surrounded by figuration in the solo strings, then leads to the close.

The last music is a scarcely audible return of the preluding on open strings that began the concerto, when the soloist touched the four open strings G–D–A–E.