Word: berge
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...more unlikely mountaineer could be imagined. Slight, sedentary, intensely fastidious, bored by hiking, Anton Webern nevertheless trudged determinedly up the alpine slopes of his native Austria. ''From time to time,'' he explained to his friend Alban Berg, ''I must breathe this air. Transparent, clear, pure-the heights...
Compared with Webern, his fellow revolutionaries Schoenberg and Berg were vestigial romantics. They used Schoenberg's twelve-tone system to rework the old, large-scale forms of Wagner and Brahms. Webern used it to abolish those forms, along with the entire principle of elaboration and climax. He let his three-or four-note motives suggest their own, rather static structural implications through intricate counterpoint and variation-not development. ''Once stated,'' he said, ''the theme expresses all it has to say.'' By relating everything else to that theme, he attempted to achieve...
...pensato, a note so subtle that the per former only thought of it. His conductor's scores were meticulously diagrammed in various colors-road maps, as Robert Craft said, to perfect performances. But the price of perfection could be too high. In 1936, preparing the posthumous premiere of Berg's Violin Concerto, Webern covered only eight bars in two rehearsals. He had to withdraw in favor of a less exacting conductor...
...orchestration of some Schubert dances-a gesture of homage that was not unusual for him. What passed for classicism in his own day, he wrote in one of the letters quoted by the Moldenhauers, ''emulates the style without knowing its meaning . . . whereas I (and Schoenberg and Berg) endeavor to fulfill this meaning-and it remains eternally the same-through our means.'' Webern's meaning may still elude us. But the pure aesthetic integrity of his means continues to beckon us to the heights...
...central drama of worldly power and rationality being ravaged by the primal erotic instinct. Among other solid supporting performances, Bass-Baritone Andrew Foldi is funny and touching as Schigolch, the old man who may be Lulu's father and who is as good a key as any to Berg's newly retrieved third act. Schigolch is the none too comforting image of what is left after passion and violence are spent: a scrabbling, wheezy, lecherous rag bag of a survivor...