Three Pieces for Orchestra

Quick Facts

• Composer’s life: Born in Vienna on February 9, 1885; and died there on December 23, 1935
• Year completed: 1923
• First performance: “Präludium” and “Reigen” only: June 5, 1923, in Berlin, Anton Webern conducting; complete: April 14, 1930, in Oldenburg, under Johannes Schüler
• First BSO performance: February 7, 1969, Pierre Boulez conducting
• Approximate duration: 20 minutes

The Three Pieces call for an orchestra of 4 flutes (all doubling piccolos), 4 oboes (4th doubling English horn), 4 clarinets (3rd doubling E-flat clarinet), bass clarinet, 3 bassoons and contrabassoon, 6 horns in F, 4 trumpets in F, 3 trombones and bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (xylophone, glockenspiel, suspended cymbals, crash cymbals, large tam-tam, small tam-tam, triangle, heavy hammer (“with nonmetallic sound”), snare drum, tenor drum, bass drum with cymbal attached), 2 harps, celesta, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). The piece is about 20 minutes long.

At the beginning of 1914 Berg was at a critical point in his artistic development. He had not yet reached the crossroads of his opera Wozzeck, which was to occupy him for five years between 1917 and 1922 and which would permanently alter the history of opera. But in 1914 he was fully involved with problems that had paralyzed his creativity for months and that would be resolved only by time, dogged effort, and the turn of events.

Berg’s first independent effort as a composer—independent in the sense that he did not show his work to his teacher Arnold Schoenberg until it was entirely completed—was the Five Orchestral Songs on Picture-postcard Texts of Peter Altenberg, Opus 4, composed in the summer of 1912. This was also Berg’s first attempt at writing for orchestra, and he was especially eager to gain Schoenberg’s approval for what had been, for Berg, a bold step. Schoenberg was at first encouraging, and invited Berg to have two of the songs performed in a concert in Vienna on March 31, 1913, under Schoenberg’s direction. The concert was unexpectedly a catastrophe; a sizable audience in the Grosser Musikvereinssaal hooted Berg’s songs off the stage, fistfights broke out, and the police had to be called in. Disgusted by the experience, Berg never again attempted to get the Altenberg Songs performed. (They did not receive a complete performance anywhere until 1953.)

There was another reason as well. Berg’s public humiliation was followed shortly afterwards by a private one: Schoenberg’s rejection of the songs. We do not know all the details, but Berg’s letters reveal clearly that Schoenberg judged Berg to be on the wrong track in the Altenberg Songs; there was too much abstract technical artifice, he felt, too much willful novelty, and, above all, the short, aphoristic form of some of the songs violated Berg’s own better nature as a composer. After nearly a century, with better hindsight, we can show that Schoenberg’s summary judgment of Berg’s songs was wrong. But Berg took it to heart all the same, and after a year of soul-searching (during which he composed only the Four Pieces for clarinet and piano, Opus 5, another exercise in brevity that he was later to find unsatisfactory), began to write the Three Pieces for Orchestra. If Schoenberg wanted from Berg a work which in terms of dimensions and development would be the opposite of the two songs which he had performed, he certainly got one. Berg wrote to his wife on July 11, 1914:

If I dedicate the new orchestra pieces to Schoenberg, it’s because I’ve owed him, as my teacher, the dedication of a big work for a long time. In Amsterdam he asked me for them directly—indeed, he ordered them. He was their inspiration, too, as much from my hearing his orchestra pieces [Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 16] (although please note: mine don’t resemble his at all in feeling, they will even be fundamentally different!) as in his cautionary advice to me to write character pieces.

The Three Pieces did turn out as “fundamentally different” from Schoenberg’s Five Pieces as two masterworks could be. Berg’s effort constantly strives beyond the already exaggerated extremes of musical expression and gesture that so strongly characterize Schoenberg’s Five Pieces. No other work of Berg’s shows such a feverish complexity of texture; no other printed score of his contains such a density of expression marks or changes of tempo (some 75 of the latter in the March alone, an average of more than one every three measures), and only Wozzeck has an orchestra of comparable size. Even more than Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, another work that profoundly influenced the Three Pieces, they tend to symbolize the feeling of utmostness, the last gasp of Imperial splendor of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire that would soon be torn apart. Small wonder, then, that Berg did not finish the Three Pieces until nearly a year after the Great War began, and then did not compose anything at all for two years, when his absorption with Wozzeck would conquer his disillusionment.

The formal precision of Berg’s Altenberg Songs is continued and expanded in the Three Pieces, with greater maturity, though perhaps without the same blaze of originality that marks the earlier work. There is an obsessive concern with motivic manipulation and transformation that makes the Altenberg Songs seem by comparison a mere exercise. It is not too much to say that a century of tradition in cyclic form, beginning with such works as Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy and Liszt’s Faust Symphony and carrying through Brahms, Mahler, Strauss, and Schoenberg, reaches a peak in this work. The Three Pieces are fundamentally unified by Berg’s use of five recurring themes in the Prelude, four of which appear in “Reigen” (“Round Dance”), and four in March. Beyond these, there are themes that appear exclusively in the individual pieces—just one in the Präludium, five in Reigen, and no less than thirty-one in the Marsch.

The Prelude demonstrates the most obviously symmetrical overall structure in the Three Pieces. Its formal outlines are easily perceived, beginning and ending in unpitched percussion. As tones begin to appear, first vaguely and then more definitely, they are distributed in constantly changing rhythmic layers; at the end of the piece, they die away in retrograde fashion, leaving only a single tam-tam stroke at the end. The center of the movement’s arch is represented by a climax of activity, as massive as anything Berg ever wrote.

The second piece, “Reigen,” though initiated by the closing theme of the Prelude, is wholly different in character. The greater part of the piece emphasizes the harmony and instrumental color, with nothing like the relentless contrapuntal development of motives that characterizes the other two pieces. The various episodes of “Reigen” are well separated from each other by the prominence of one or another melody or by appearance and disappearance of the character of the Ländler (a rustic, Austrian dance much beloved by Joseph Haydn and Gustav Mahler).

The March is as long as the first two pieces combined, more consistently frantic than either of them, and serves not only as a climax to the Three Pieces but as a spectacular capstone to all of Berg’s pre-war achievement. As George Perle says in his book on Berg’s operas:

The Marsch was completed in the weeks immediately following the assassination at Sarajevo and is, in its feeling of doom and catastrophe, an ideal, if unintentional, musical expression of the ominous implications of that event. Fragmentary rhythmic and melodic figures typical of an orthodox military march repeatedly coalesce into polyphonic episodes of incredible density that surge to frenzied climaxes, then fall apart. It is not a march, but music about a march, or rather about the march, just as Ravel’s La Valse is music in which the waltz is similarly reduced to its minimum characteristic elements. In spite of the fundamental differences in their respective musical idioms, the emotional climate of Berg’s pre-war “marche macabre” is very similar to that of Ravel’s post-war “valse macabre.”

The textural complexity of the Marsch was never again approached by Berg and has indeed been approximated by only a few composers since. The overall form is essentially episodic, from one kind of texture to another. As in the other two pieces, a symmetrical arch form is indicated by the opening and closing events of the March (if one ignores the final five-measure coda), but a larger arch form defines the span of the entire Three Pieces, resulting from a “flashback” to a moment early in the Prelude. Otherwise, there is no actual “march form,” just as in any ordinary march by Sousa or Fučik or Blankenburg, where one strain follows another without thematic integration or development. There is a march style, but this too is often submerged entirely in the welter of changing textures and tempi.

Berg himself seems to have realized the conceptual barriers that the Three Pieces posed for performer and listener. In the opera Wozzeck, his next work, the orchestral body is nearly as large, but the textural complexity, though still dominated by the thematic structure, is the servant of the dramatic conception, and that is surely as it should be. Berg’s uncanny instinct for form survived translation into the operatic domain with natural ease, with complete success, and at a new psychological level of musical maturity.

Mark DeVoto

Mark DeVoto taught at Tufts University for 19 years before his retirement in 2000. He studied at Harvard and Princeton, earning his doctorate with a dissertation on Berg’s Altenberg Songs; his score of that work, for the new critical edition of all of Berg’s works, appeared in 1997. He wrote the revised fourth (1978) and fifth (1987) editions of Harmony by his teacher Walter Piston. In 2004 he published a book of analytical essays, Debussy and the Veil of Tonality, and in 2011, Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony.