Alban Berg

When Austrian composer Alban Berg was working on his opera Lulu, he wrote three Baudelaire songs as a Konzertaria entitled Der Wein. Premiered in 1930, Der Wein is a large-scale work for voice and orchestra. Berg uses a German translation by Stefan George, but the published score is in parallel texts, accommodating the French verse line. The chapter also considers a ‘hidden’ Baudelaire setting from Berg’s 1926 Lyric Suite for string quartet. The analysis covers: (a) the context of composition; (b) the connections established between selected poems; (c) the statistical data generated from the adhesion strength tests; and (d) how the data shape an evaluation of Berg’s settings of Baudelaire. Evidence suggests that Berg’s settings of Baudelaire are loosely entangled; the highly prescriptive score affects syntax, semantics, and prosody. Yet, because Der Wein has stood the test of time, the settings are deemed loosely accretive.