Lyric Suite

Writing about Berg’s music often focuses on its compositional intricacy: Schoenbergian note rows, minutely calculated proportions, hidden cyphers and so on. But the effect of the music itself can be more like a Freudian psychodrama, as though a kaleidoscope of feelings and associations were erupting before our ears, and no amount of technical analysis can prepare us for what sounds like the cry of an acutely sensitive, deeply distressed human heart. Nowhere is that truer than in the Lyric Suite (1925-26), six movements for string quartet, neatly arranged so that the odd-numbered movements get faster, the even ones slower. Painstaking detective work has revealed that the music charts a secret programme, a disguised offering to a woman with whom Berg was passionately in love, but who remained unattainable. Quotations from two masterpieces about doomed yearning, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Alexander Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony, are the most obvious clues, but one could probably guess the essence from the music itself—thorny, violent, almost hysterical at times, it is just as often achingly tender. The lyricism is angular and distorted one minute, suddenly melting into sweet, inconsolable sadness the next. In the final desolate “Largo”, the instruments wordlessly intone a poem by Baudelaire: a ‘cry from the abyss’, for which there is no answer, no consolation.