AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts saturday noon 133
PiAno Music in viennA BeyonD the seconD viennese
school: An exPlorAtion of the rePertories in the
context of AlBAn Berg’s PiAno sonAtA, oP. 1
seda röder, harvard university, piano
PROGRAM
Mazurka—im Carneval Richard Heuberger (1850–1914)
Piano Sonata, op. 88 Robert Fuchs (1847–1927)
Three Piano Pieces, op. 9 Egon Wellesz (1885–1974)
Piano Sonata, op. 23 Conrad Ansorge (1862–1930)
Piano Sonata, op. 1 Alban Berg (1885–1935)
Two significant compositional trends and their continuous conflict mark the turn of the
century in Vienna. On the one hand we observe a group of composers around Schoenberg
that builds upon and expands the musical language of the so called “New German School.”
On the other hand we observe composers who form a counterpart to these developments by
following in the footsteps of Brahms and the “Old German School” that was associated with
him.
While the continuation of the “New German School” paved the way for the so called
“Second Viennese School” and made its way into the canon of music history, the repertories
that glorified and built upon a Brahmsian romanticism have not been paid much attention
by scholars.
This concert program revives four pieces from these unexplored repertories of fin-de-siècle
Vienna and juxtaposes them with Berg’s Piano Sonata, op. 1.
Each of these pieces was composed and published in the years between 1908 and 1911, when
Berg composed his sonata and Schoenberg published his Three Piano Pieces, op. 11. While
the pieces by Heuberger and Fuchs demonstrate how composers who made up the Brahmsian
front were situating themselves within a conservative musical tradition, the works by Wellesz
and Ansorge exhibit two models of connecting these Brahmsian modes of composing with
the newer understanding of expanded tonality. This approach of fusing old and new—also a
prominent aspect of the Piano Sonata, op. 1—had a remarkable influence on the development
of Berg’s compositional style throughout his career and shaped our view of him as the most
“conservative” composer of the “Second Viennese School.”
By exploring these unknown repertories, I hope to offer a more comprehensive picture
of early-twentieth-century music in Vienna and contribute to a better understanding of the
compositional development of young Alban Berg.