Alban Berg- Lyric Suite

As Berg's friend and fellow Schoenberg pupil Erwin Stein wrote in the preface to
the score, "The work (Ist and VIth part, the main part of the IIIrd and the mid
dle section of the Vth) has been mostly written strictly in accordance with Scho
enberg's technique of the 'Composition with 12 inwardly related tones.' A set of
12 different tones gives the rough material of the composition, and the portion
s which have been treated more freely still adhere more or less to the technique
" (Perle 1990, 123). Perle points out that the first movement is not strictly tw
elve-tone, with the opening four chords being derived not from the series but fr
om the interval-7 cycle (Perle 1977a, 21).
According to Ren Leibowitz, it is "entirely written in the twelve-tone technique,
[it] is a sonata movement without the development. Thus the recapitulation follo
ws directly upon the exposition; but, because of the highly advanced twelve-tone
technique of variation, everything in this movement is developmental" (Leibowit
z 1947,[page needed]). The first analysis was undertaken by H.F. Redlich, who no
tices that "the first movement of the Lyric Suite develops out of the disorder o
f intervals in its first bar, the notes of which, strung out horizontally, prese
nt the complete chromatic scale, and from this in the second and following bars,
grows the Basic Set in its thematic shape" (Redlich 1957,[page needed]).
Theodor W. Adorno called the quartet "a latent opera" (Sandberger 1996). Redlich
(1957, 142) described "the concealed vocality of the Lyric Suite," despite havi
ng no knowledge of the setting of Baudelaire in the finale movement, deciphered
by Douglass M. Green (1976) from what George Perle calls "Berg's cryptic notatio
ns". Perle discovered a complete copy of the first edition annotated by Berg for
his dedicatee, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (Franz Werfel's sister, with whom Berg had
an affair in the 1920s), later that year (Perle 1990,[page needed]).
Berg used the signature motif, A-B -H-F, to combine Alban Berg (A. B.) and Hanna Fuc
hs-Robettin (H. F.) (Reel 2010). This is most prominent in the third movement. B
erg also quotes a melody from Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony in movement four which
originally set the words "You are mine own". In the last movement, according to
Berg's self-analysis, the, "entire material, the tonal element too ... as well a
s the Tristan motif" is developed "by strict adherence to the 12-note series" (S
andberger 1996).
The outer sections of the Allegro misterioso present the same music forwards and
then backwards, while the Trio ecstatico, the B section of the ABA, is throughcomposed (Pople 1991, 17 18). Berg generates a characteristic rhythmic cell through
partitioning the series into a seven note chromatic segment and a complementary
five-note motive from the remaining notes (Pople 1991, 15). See below.
Despite assertions by Berg and others, George Perle, however, "had not yet been
informed, as Leibowitz and Redlich were by the time they came to write their res
pective books, that everything in the 'strictly' dodecaphonic first movement had
to be derived from a single serial ordering of the twelve notes of the chromati
c scale." Rather, he, "recognized that the first three chords unfold tetrachorda
l segments of a single statement of the cycle of fifths (C7), and that at the bo
ttom of the same page, in bars 7 9, the cello presents a linear statement of the sam
e cycle." The second violin unfolds "the initial tetrachordal segmentation of th
e perfect-5th cycle," again at the beginning of the recapitulation. He asks: "Ho
w could one [think] of the initial bar as 'disordered'? If anything is to be des
ignated as an Urform here, surely it is this perfect-5th cycle, given its backgr
ound role in relation to the tone row and other components of the movement."[thi
s quote needs a citation]
The "Row" of the Lyric Suite is an all-interval row. It is the first all-interva
l row derived by its discoverer and Berg student Fritz Heinrich Klein (Whittall

2008, 68).