Violin Concerto (Berg)

Alban Berg's Violin Concerto was written in 1935 (the score is dated August 11, 1935). It is probably Berg's best known and most often performed piece.

The music

The concerto is structured in four movements. The first and second movements run into each other, as do the third and fourth, though there is a brief break between the second and third movements. The first movement is in a classical sonata form; the second is a dance-like movement; the third, marked Allegro and largely based on a single recurring rhythmic cell, has been described as cadenza-like, with very difficult passages in the solo part becoming rather violent at its climax; the fourth is in a much calmer mood, marked Adagio. The first two movements are meant to represent life, the last two death and transfiguration.

Related Topics:
Sonata form - Allegro - Rhythm - Cadenza

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Like a number of other works by Berg, the piece combines the twelve tone technique learned from his teacher Arnold Schoenberg with passages written in a freer style. While parts of the score are atonal, as is the norm in twelve tone works, some parts can be said to be in a certain key, and quotes of purely tonal music are also present. The work's principal tone row reflects this conflict between atonality and tonality:

Related Topics:
Twelve tone technique - Arnold Schoenberg - Atonal - Tone row

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Like all tone rows, this contains all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. However, there is a strong tonal undercurrent: the first three notes of the row make up a G minor triad; notes three to five are a D major triad; notes five to seven are an A minor triad; notes seven to nine are an E major triad; and the last four notes together make up part of a whole tone scale. In addition, the first four odd-numbered notes correspond to the open strings of the violin, from bottom to top, and it is exactly this gesture which opens the piece.

Related Topics:
Chromatic scale - Whole tone scale

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The last four notes of the row, ascending whole tones, are also the first four notes of the chorale melody, Es ist genug (It Is Enough). Berg quotes this chorale directly in the last movement of the piece, where the harmonisation by Johann Sebastian Bach is heard in the clarinets.

Related Topics:
Chorale - Melody - Johann Sebastian Bach - Clarinet

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There is another directly quoted tonal passage in the work in the form of a Carinthian folk song in the second movement.

Related Topics:
Carinthian - Folk song

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