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Sieben frühe Lieder (Seven Early Songs) Nacht (Night) |
Composed: 1905-08; revised and orchestrated in 1928 Estimated length: |
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Born on February 9, 1885, in Vienna, Austria; Died on December 24, 1935, in Vienna, Austria |
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First performance(of the orchestrated version): November 6, 1928, in Vienna, with Claire Born as the soloist and Robert Heger conducting. |
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First Nashville Symphony performance: These are the Nashville Symphony's first performances of this work. |
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When Alban Berg was accepted by Arnold Schoenberg as a private student in 1904, he could not have foreseen just how profoundly the experience would change his life and art—and the course of 20th century music. Berg was only 19 and (like Schoenberg, for that matter) had developed his passion for music by teaching himself to compose. By the end of his official studies with Schoenberg in 1911—he remained, along with fellow student Anton Webern, a close associate to the end of his life—Berg was making unique contributions to the musical revolution being pioneered by his mentor.
Berg’s official Opus 1 was a piano sonata written during this period of tutorship and was intended to model the principles he had been absorbing from Schoenberg. Meanwhile, Berg continued to compose art songs for voice and piano—a genre he had begun composing in his teens, while also writing poetry. In fact, it was through a portfolio of his early songs Berg had initially demonstrated his potential to Schoenberg, who generously offered to teach him without charge.
In 1928, the mature Berg cast his glance back to the trove of unpublished songs that were among his earliest compositional efforts. He had been a prolific songwriter, producing some 80-plus songs by 1908 (the year of the pivotal Piano Sonata), but only a handful of these had been performed in public. (None of the seven that Berg chose for his new collection was in the portfolio that had introduced him to Schoenberg.) He presented the Seven Early Songs both in their original vocal-piano format and with fresh orchestrations that benefited from his experience in writing his epochal first opera, Wozzeck (1914-22), which had brought Berg international success.
Each song sets a text by a different poet, indicating the breadth of Berg’s literary taste. Musically, the Seven Early Songs are a compendium of the varied influences that helped shape the young composer.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
The whole-tone harmonies and delicate textures of “Night” (text by Carl Hauptmann) remind us that Schoenberg’s circle admired the aesthetic of the French Impressionists. The Mahlerian “Song Amongst the Reeds” uses exquisite but eerie tone painting to convey the disturbing emotions of Nikolaus Lenau’s poem about returning to the spot where a lover was heard to drown. Here and in the Richard Strauss-tinged “The Nightingale” (to a poem by Theodor Storm), the influence of Berg’s Romantic forerunners in the genre of the art song is most obvious.
Berg’s setting of Rilke’s poem “Crowned with Dreams” is the fulcrum of the collection. Its harmonic ambiguity looks ahead to future developments. “Indoors” (text by Johannes Schlaf) is the earliest song (from 1905) and also suggests a French flavor, along with an intensity of detail Berg admired in Mahler. The sensuality that is a signature of Berg’s music mixes with techniques he had learned from Schoenberg in his treatment of Otto Erich Hartleben’s “Ode to Love.” The brief final song (“Summer Days”) is by a poet Berg had known since childhood, Paul Hohenberg, and concludes the cycle on a passionate note.
In addition to the vocal soloist, scored for 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (2nd doubling English horn), 2 clarinets and bass clarinet, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, trumpet, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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