The Violin Concerto is Berg’s last work that he composed in 1935 as he was writing his (unfinished) opera Lulu. It was commissioned by a young American violinist, Louis Krasner, but the Berg drew emotional and artistic inspiration from the death of Manon Gropius, the beautiful 18-year-old daughter born from the second marriage of Alma Mahler. Dedicated ‘To the memory of an angel’, the Violin Concerto would become Manon Gropius’s requiem.
Alban Berg was always the most popular member of the New Viennese School among the audiences. He was ‘modernist and romantic, formalist and sensual at the same time’. Violin Concerto is a strictly dodecaphonic work; however, its curious twelve-tone scale comprising four triads allowed for the inclusion of excerpts of tonal music, such as a Carinthian folk song and the melody of the chorale ‘Es ist genug’ which J. S. Bach’s harmonised in his eponymous cantata. The work consists of two parts, each of which comprises two movements following each other without interruption: 1a Andante – 1b Allegretto; 2a Allegro – 2b Adagio. The Allegro is essentially one great violin cadenza with orchestral accompaniment. Evocative of waltz and Ländler, the playful Allegretto barely discernibly features the folk-song excerpt, deliberately kept in the background, played by the horns and trumpets; however, the melody of the chorale calling for reconciliation with death appears recognisably at the very start of the Adagio, alternately played by the solo violin and the woodwind.