Violin Concerto

Berg’s Violin Concerto is one of very few modernist masterpieces with a firm place in the classical music repertory. Its creation was the result of personal tragedy. In April 1935, Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler (the composer’s widow) and her second husband, Walter Gropius, had died in Vienna aged 18, of complications from polio contracted a year earlier. Berg knew Alma and her family well, and he felt Manon's death intensely. The American violinist Louis Krasner had recently asked him for a concerto, and Berg now decided to compose the piece as a musical memorial to Manon. Normally a slow worker, he finished his 25-minute concerto in less than four months. Dedicated “to the memory of an angel” and additionally inscribed “For Louis Krasner", the concerto filters the 12-tone technique devised by Schoenberg (Berg’s former teacher) through a hyper-expressive brand of post-Romanticism. There are two movements, each in two continuous parts. The first portrays Manon’s graceful poise and playfulness, while the second describes her death struggle and her passing into immortality—a moment symbolised by the introduction of a Lutheran chorale tune harmonised by Bach, whose text begins, “Es ist genug!” ("It is enough!"). Shortly after finishing the concerto, Berg was bitten by an insect at the base of his spine; developing blood poisoning, he died in Vienna on 24 December. The Violin Concerto’s premiere, performed by Krasner on 19 April 1936, in Barcelona, became a memorial both to Manon and to Berg himself.