The Violin Concert To The Memory of an Angel by the Austrian expressionist composer ALBAN BERG (1885-1935) was written in 1935 for the Ukrainian-born American violinist Louis Krasner. The composer was working on his second opera, Lulu, when he received a generous offer from the performer to write a concerto for a fee of $1,500. This was a large sum for Berg, whose work had been banned by the Nazis in Germany and Austria. But he was not enthusiastic, assuming that Krasner wanted a virtuoso work of the Wieniawski – style. The violinist persuaded him by argument, “The onslaught of criticism on twelve-tone music is all over the place trumpeting that it is a rational music without feeling or emotion. Think what it would mean for the whole Schoenberg movement if a new Berg Violin Concerto could destroy the antagonism of this cliché.”
A few days later, the composer informed Krasner that he was going to his villa on Lake Woerthersee in May and would write the concerto there during the summer. But on April 22nd, 1935, Manon Gropius, the 18-year-old daughter of Alma (Mahler’s widow) in her second marriage to the architect Walter Gropius (one of the founders of the Bauhaus), died of polio. The Berg family were deeply attached to the girl and when they heard the sad news, the composer decided to dedicate the title of the work: To the Memory of an Angel. It was first performed in 1936 in Barcelona at the Festival of the International Association for Contemporary Music, with the Pablo Casals Orchestra conducted by Hermann Scherchen and Louis Krasner as soloist.
The concerto is in two movements, each of which has two sections. Andante (Prelude) – Allegro (Scherzo), II. Allegro (Cadenza) – Adagio (Chorale Variations). It combines “the use of serial technique and thematicism in the organisation of form, dodecaphony and tonality in the limitation of harmony” (V. Holopova).
The prelude begins with an exposition of the series and the feeling of fragility, absorption, a certain distance. The author’s notes here are: ‘gentle’, ‘graceful’, ‘delicate’. The themes of the second section are alternately playful and dance-like. Marked in the score as ‘scherzando’, ‘Viennese style’, ‘rustic style’, they are sustained in the spirit of the ländler and the waltz – a lovely sonic image of the dreamy Manon.
The second movement’s Cadenza accommodates the collapse of life, the powerful climax overflowing at the beginning of the Adagio, built with variations on Bach’s chorale “Es ist genug” (“Enough of this“) from the cantata O Eternity, you thunderous word, BWV 60. Berg wrote below the notes in parentheses the entire text, symbolically significant for the concert programme: ‘Enough of this! Lord, if it is God-pleasing, set me free. Let my Jesus come! Now, good night, world. I pass on to the heavenly home, I go confidently hence with joy, my desponding sadness remains down there. Enough of this!”
The first four notes of the Bach chorale are peculiarly linked to the last third of the first series that opens the concerto. The coda musically embodies enlightenment, the soul’s ascent to the highest realms of eternal beauty. The Violin Concerto was the last composition Berg completed before his sudden death from sepsis. A requiem not only for Manon but, as it turned out, for the artist himself. Unusually for his practice, the composer worked intensely on the score, pouring it out in one breath, saying: I can’t stop writing the concerto – I haven’t got the time!