[ Orchestral music playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Adorno: The HF business was not paramount for him.

♪♪ He knew from the first day that he could never leave you for HF.

♪♪ ♪♪ Female voice: ...two miles.

Keep left.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Drucker: It's very exciting finally to be recording this great piece of music.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Speaking in German ] The piece is a masterpiece, and everybody knew it.

♪♪ ♪♪ Walton: When I first heard the "Lyric Suite" as a teenager, it seemed to be saying something to me, and I couldn't figure out what.

Setzer: I think any performing artist, in a sense, is a detective.

You're looking for clues, you're looking for the truth.

♪♪ Jarman: And then all the manuscripts suddenly became available.

Suddenly the whole thing opened up.

Berg: It is intended as a confession, one that concerns no one but you, of our encountering love.

The piece is sort of dripping with sex.

Well, you just think, "Wow."

We don't actually know how or why he died.

[ Singing in foreign language ] Botstein: Love, life, death, love, hidden messages, betrayal.

This isn't only about music.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Birds chirping ] [ String instruments tuning ] Well, hi.

Hey.

Drucker: We're about two-thirds of the way through our first season with our wonderful new cellist Paul Watkins.

[ Indistinct conversation ] We haven't yet begun to work on the "Lyric Suite" with Paul, but we look forward to learning this with him.

Well, it's been... it's been a very daunting journey, actually, because there are many technical demands for this piece.

It's a very... ♪♪ I distinctly remember listening through an old recording and wondering how the hell I was going to get anywhere close to this piece.

♪♪ You know, it's a question of how much can one know Berg.

♪♪ Botstein: He came from a relatively well-to-do commercial family in Vienna.

♪♪ He did not go to university.

He didn't have a talent for business.

He wasn't going to go into the family business.

You know, he was handsome, relatively not hard working, not too serious a fellow, but he loved music.

♪♪ Schoenberg: When Alban Berg came to me, he was a very tall youngster and extremely timid.

But when I saw the compositions he showed me, I recognized at once that he was a real talent -- that music was, to him, a language, and that he really expressed himself in that language.

♪♪ [ Man singing in German ] ♪♪ Hailey: Berg's love of Helene was deep.

Their courtship was long.

[ Man singing in German ] ♪♪ So he marries her... [ Man singing in German ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Jarman: I think he needed her.

She gave him a stability.

Hailey: She protected him.

She made this cocoon for him.

What she made possible was the ability to work, the ability to create.

♪♪ [ Song ends ] [ Wind blows ] Adorno: HF was a romantic error.

She was not in a position to challenge his relationship with you.

And he ends up writing "Wozzeck," which is a smash hit.

♪♪ Hailey: After the premiere of "Wozzeck" in 1925, Berg became an international figure.

Jarman: And really before that, he hadn't been known much, even in Vienna.

♪♪ Hailey: Suddenly that secluded life was transformed into something that made him a celebrity.

♪♪ Herbert: My very dear Mr. Alban Berg, my wife and I have learned that you will be attending the Prague Music Festival.

We would be greatly delighted if you were to accept our hospitality and stay at our house during these days.

Yours, Herbert Fuchs-Robettin.

♪♪ Berg: Will I be granted the tranquility necessary to express in tones what I've experienced since those days in Prague, Bubenec?

Perhaps a string quartet... ♪♪ Its movements would re-enact everything I went through from the moment I entered your house.

Dorothea: In this annotated copy of the "Lyric Suite," which my mother gave to me, back, in his own handwriting, marks everything that refers to my mother in red ink, everything that refers to my brother in blue ink, and everything that refers to me in green ink.

By the way, Gene, have you seen this?

This is the one that he -- Drucker: That he annotated.

Have you guys seen this?

This is the score that he annotated for Anna.

Dutton: Oh, that would be great to see.

Setzer: Oh, wow.

This is his annotations?

Yeah.

Right?

That's fantastic.

Watkins: It's like the feeling of Berg the director being in the room with you.

Of what's in focus.

It's what's in focus.

Exactly.

Watkins: So it's her up to that -- to that point.

Drucker: That's right.

And then her son comes in.

Watkins: No idea what that says.

[ Speaking German ] Like a gefilte fish.

Oh, "gefluster."

-Oh, whispered, whispered -Secrets.

Watkins: The first time that we played the "Lyric Suite" in rehearsal, the work felt, to me, fragmented.

But now the big shape of the movements are coming together.

There's Hanna.

There's another one.

Coming back to you.

All -- -To all you.

-To all you.

He's kind of obsessed with her, isn't he?

Leslie: So who was this woman who Alban Berg, for years, called his "one and only everlasting love"?

Adorno: She is a bourgeois, through and through, of a woman merely bored to death, who was once touched by the chance to be different.

♪♪ Leslie: She was the second-born child into a well-established and assimilated Jewish family in Prague.

♪♪ Hanna's beloved brother, Franz, he discovered his tendency towards poetry and writing rather early in his life.

He stayed an inspiration and role model for his sister.

This beautiful woman was adored by many renowned personalities.

Kafka may have been her first admirer.

When she's like 18 and he says, "The moment Hanna realizes how much I'm looking at her, she leans back in her chair and looks into the mirror..." Kafka: She leaned against the chair.

Often looked at the mirror out of the corner of her eye, and then, as if she were not already devoured by my eyes, gently pointed a finger to a brooch pinned to her blouse.

It was a low-cut blue blouse.

Jungk: He was basically infatuated the moment he saw her.

Leslie: Hanna didn't need any professional ambitions in the time they lived in.

She only needed to find a worthy husband.

In 1917, Hanna married the rich Jewish paper manufacturer Herbert von Fuchs-Robettin, whose parents were ennobled by the kaiser, a rare honor for Jewish people.

The young family moved to Prague's 19th District, called Bubenec, into a huge villa that was constructed exclusively for them.

That's how it all started.

[ Instruments tuning ] Drucker: So, do you want to put it all together now?

Yeah.

[ Instruments tuning ] Berg: "Lyric Suite."

For my Hanna -- Alban.

One.

From the beginning of my coming to Prague in May 1925.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ My golden one, I am living here quite simply in the villa of the Fuchs family.

♪♪ I feel pretty respected and distinguished.

My hosts spoil me.

♪♪ Then, in bursts the two children who won't be satisfied unless they can at last see the famous composer.

♪♪ Very sweet.

I found them most refreshing.

♪♪ ♪♪ Everyone asks about you and regrets that I came alone.

♪♪ Then I was taken to the theater.

♪♪ Leslie: I think Hanna was a victim of her time.

She was extremely talented.

She wrote poems and essays.

But back in those days, nobody thought about a professional education in their circles, which would have been a great benefit for her.

♪♪ [ Instruments tuning ] Dutton: Now everybody knows about this.

There's nothing you can do.

It does affect your interpretation because you can't stop thinking about the idea of this affair.

-Okay.

-Where is this?

We've, like, uncovered this kind of mess.

♪♪ And knowing the story also makes it sexy, in a way.

It captures the imagination.

♪♪ Berg: The second movement, "Andante amoroso," the most beautiful music I believe I ever wrote, shows you and your sweet children in three themes that recur in the style of a rondo.

♪♪ ♪♪ You.

♪♪ ♪♪ Munzo.

Somewhat deliberately with a gentle Czech flavor.

♪♪ ♪♪ Drucker: The younger child, Dorothea, her nickname was "Dodo."

So it turns out that Dodo, those two C's, is a musical motif, the... ♪ Yom bom ♪ ♪ Bom bom ♪ ♪♪ Berg: Dodo.

♪♪ ♪♪ When, toward the end, your theme blazes for the last time, even an unsuspecting listener must, I think, sense something of the loveliness I have in mind.

Always in mind whenever I think of you.

The loveliest of women.

♪♪ ♪♪ "Dein thema."

Gosh, I want a secret piece.

Berg: Three.

"Mysterious allegro."

May 20, 1925.

The whole movement is played with mutes on.

♪♪ ♪♪ A little softer, like a whisper, AB, HF.

Drucker: Berg embedded his initials and those of his lover in that musical motif -- A, B-flat, B-natural, F. In German musical notation, B natural equals H -- Alban Berg, Hanna Fuchs.

♪♪ And their four initials keep being twined around in these different permutations.

♪♪ He fell in love with her, and she fell in love with him to a lesser extent.

♪♪ ♪♪ Berg: Ecstatic trio.

♪♪ We're suddenly bursting out -- A, B, H, F -- as loud as possible.

♪♪ Nothing but cool wine it must be.

♪♪ Forget it!

♪♪ Jarman: "It can't happen.

We're both married.

It's an impossible affair.

The next movement is the kind of love scene.

Berg: Four.

"Passionate adagio."

The blissful half-hour and whole eternity of that morning.

The next day.

While your children were getting their haircuts.

After a night when I had already buried all my hopes.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ I say you are my own.

My own.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Now you also say it -- "You are my own."

My own.

The words spoken, at first, effusively by me are repeated by you in the sweetest, dreamiest piano.

♪♪ The mutes come off.

♪♪ Louder, getting always louder, until... ♪♪ Perle: No one with any kind of sensitivity to music can listen to the "Lyric Suite" without realizing there is an unmistakable representation of the -- of love, in the sense of sex.

At least, to me, it was unmistakable.

[ Man speaking German ] ♪♪ Ja.

♪♪ Setzer: Every time he has the word "appassionata," he underlines it in red.

Dutton: One has to realize that all these composers are all human beings, and they had incredibly complicated -- as we all do, complicated and fascinating lives.

♪♪ Berg: Fading into wholly ethereal, spiritual, transcendental.

♪♪ To you, O soul beloved.

♪♪ ♪♪ Adorno: I knew of the HF matter from the first day on and was his confidant and, if you wish, his accomplice.

I think that there is nothing that I would not have been prepared to do for him.

Hailey: Theodor Adorno was a young man from Frankfurt who had heard Berg's music and came to Vienna in order to study with Berg.

Adorno was one of the mailmen, so to speak, helping Hanna and Berg to exchange love letters.

Berg: What is it that I like about you?

Everything.

Everything from your golden head to your rosy heels.

But it all started with your eyes.

Those eyes, that glance.

And then your way of walking.

The serene rhythm of your stride that conceals a second one vibrating in secret harmony.

And then your... [ Chuckles ] But, no, no!

I must not write any of this.

[ Man speaking German ] Berg: Naturally, my wife, too, notices something.

♪♪ But the true state of affairs she does not know or even guess, thank God.

It would be the end of her.

If you could become friends with my wife, as I am with your dear husband, so that continued close contact would be even more certain.

You must help me with this.

♪♪ Soma: Whenever she came to Vienna, I had to play the lookout for Alban and act as though I was in love with her whenever we were invited to the Bergs'.

[ Laughter ] Dan: Berg used him as, what we would call, a beard.

If there was a dinner, my father was her escort.

Soma: That wasn't easy because she did not play along well.

[ Laughter ] ♪♪ I had the impression that, for her part, she would have had no objection to Helene's noticing something.

♪♪ Botstein: I don't think betrayal can be measured by the existence of a smoking gun.

♪♪ Even though she may not know the details, she knows that this great artist is communicating with this person in a way he's not communicating with her.

♪♪ She then expresses her anxiety and unhappiness in undefined medical symptoms.

[ Man speaking German ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Berg: It goes against the grain, really, to have to reassure you about me and Hanna.

Perhaps I'll just say that faithfulness is one of my main qualities.

I'm sure I must have been born a dog in a previous incarnation.

Faithfulness to you and to myself.

To music.

♪♪ Perle: Berg was obviously madly in love with Hanna and warned her, according to her daughter, to be careful of Helene, who was so jealous that she was capable of violence.

♪♪ ♪♪ Go on!

-Way to go, Ajax.

Come back.

-Ajax.

-Oh, he's outside.

♪♪ We're just really starting the fifth movement.

The fifth movement is a movement that, frankly, I've put off putting on my music stand.

Setzer: It is a kind of terrifying movement to play, and it's hopefully a terrifying movement to listen to.

♪♪ Watkins: It has a lot of fast pizzicato, so you're plucking incredibly... ♪♪ Right.

You start slowly.

♪♪ You put it together, and you speed it up.

Little faster.

♪♪ ♪♪ And, eventually, the piece becomes maybe not like an old friend but certainly an old -- an old enemy.

[ Laughs ] ♪♪ We weren't actually planning on recording this movement.

I think maybe holding out for more money or something.

[ Laughs ] Drucker: Now that we have this knowledge about the affair he was having, we feel perhaps an even greater commitment to try to exceed almost what we're capable of in trying to bring this piece to fruition.

♪♪ [ Man speaking German ] [ Speaking German ] Berg: We have been seeing each other now for 10 days.

The lovely things were so immeasurably numerous that I will feed on them for years.

Those full hours we could be together.

Not to speak of that holiest afternoon.

Adorno: He used me to deliver his love letters, taking my frequent visits to Prague as a pretext.

I played my part clumsily.

♪♪ The entire business was arranged so conspicuously that her husband became suspicious.

♪♪ [ Woman speaking German ] [ No audio ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Berg: I had heard nothing more from you.

♪♪ I did not even know whether you still loved me.

♪♪ By your confession to Herbert, you have managed to brush off, what, in the first days, still moved you entirely.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Does my love not delight you at all?

♪♪ [ Man speaking German ] [ Woman speaking German ] Drucker: What you notice is that the slow movements become slower, but the fast movements become faster.

And it's not just that the tempos diverge but that the emotions become more extreme.

♪♪ Jarman: He sort of does go to pieces in the delirando.

Becomes sort of crazy.

Berg: Presto delirando.

Delirious presto.

Of the horrors of the days with their insanely rapid heartbeat.

♪♪ Of the painful gloom of the night with her darkening drift into what can hardly be called sleep.

♪♪ ♪♪ To attain those few hours of oblivion, I secretly take to alcohol at night and yet sleep only so briefly.

♪♪ Memory of the fourth movement.

♪♪ Then my longing for you grips me with such vehemence.

♪♪ As though the heart would wrest itself.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Woman speaking German ] Jarman: And then the "Largo desolato," the finale, is totally desolate.

It's like this bleak landscape he's left you.

♪♪ Berg: Six.

"Desolate Largo."

♪♪ ♪♪ In winter, on a solitary walk, I sought out all the spots where you might have lingered.

♪♪ Places where our belonging together has manifested itself for all time.

♪♪ Jarman: There's one letter where he writes about going to their house and standing outside, looking at her window.

♪♪ Berg: To you.

To you.

To you.

♪♪ And when at last I found the house, I could have screamed your name -- "The one, the only Hanna!"

♪♪ ♪♪ Jarman: In '74, I went to the National Library.

I got the manuscripts for the "Lyric Suite," and I could see that there was some kind of text in the last movement.

Berg: One particular book in your library fell into my hands.

Baudelaire's "Fleurs du Mal."

"De Profundis Clamavi" appears on page 46, the poem that would perfectly convey the content of the final movement.

This poem is incredibly wrenching.

♪♪ Berg: For no one but you must know that the music of this last movement underlines the words of Baudelaire.

Perle: Which sort of suggests that maybe Berg meant it to be sung.

Even though he meant it to be sung, and then he suppressed -- he suppressed it.

He suppressed the real text.

♪♪ [ Singing in German ] Fleming: And when you find out that he crossed it out because he was afraid it would expose the real nature of the piece, it does invest everything with a different kind of power.

♪♪ [ Singing in German ] Berg: I worked in feverish haste on the composition of the "song without words" and finished the movement and thereby the entire quartet on the last night of September.

But the excitement of this experience was too much for me.

The day after, I broke down completely.

♪♪ [ Applause ] Drucker: You don't have to know that it's about a hidden love affair.

For 40 years after Berg's death, practically nobody knew about this.

And the piece was considered one of the great pieces of chamber music of the 20th century.

George Gershwin was a great admirer of Alban Berg and particularly loved the "Lyric Suite."

When Gershwin was traveling, he sometimes hired musicians to play through the piece for him.

Walton: He loved the music.

I think, without the knowledge of Berg's music, "Porgy and Bess" would have been a different opera.

♪♪ ♪♪ Man: No!

[ Dramatic music plays ] [ Applause ] ♪♪ It seems almost as if he needed a love affair, at least a love affair of the mind, in order to fuel his aesthetic imagination.

Walton: I think every work after the "Lyric Suite" is in some way about Hanna.

♪♪ The violin concerto "To the Memory of an Angel," everyone, of course, said it's Manon Gropius, who was Alma Mahler's daughter.

Manon got polio and died in April 1935.

Berg was working on the violin concerto and dedicated the piece, supposedly, to her.

Except I don't think he did.

I think it's got nothing to do with Manon.

The dedication just says, "To the Memory of an Angel."

For me, it's clear that the angel is Hanna.

It's much more a piece about love than anything else.

One of the variations is marked "amoroso," which is a pretty weird thing to write in a score supposedly about a girl's death.

But it's about Hanna and the death of their affair, then it makes perfect sense.

♪♪ Erich: Hanna, and not her brother, Franz Werfel, as Helene Berg liked to report, was the one who inspired Berg to write "Lulu."

[ Woman screams ] ♪♪ [ Woman singing in German ] Jarman: In "Lulu," at the very end, when Countess Geschwitz is dying, the last words she sings are, "I'm with you in eternity."

[ Woman singing in German ] And you have BA, HF again just after the words "I am with you in eternity."

♪♪ [ Man speaking German ] But, you see, I think it's really more complicated than that because it was a kind of idealized affair.

Jungk: As far as I know, Berg and Hanna did not see each other very, very often.

He didn't have that much contact with Hanna Fuchs.

Hanna Fuchs was more an object of his imagination.

She wasn't living next door.

They didn't rent an apartment together.

"I'm in love.

Therefore, I must express myself in music."

This is an old psychological narcotic delusion that artists can bring into themselves in order to make work.

It doesn't mean getting your hands dirty in the actual difficulties of a relationship.

I do think that Berg really didn't want a relationship with this woman.

Adorno: He knew from the first day that he could never leave you for HF.

♪♪ And I am sure he was glad that she also never considered it on account of the children.

♪♪ So, in essence, Berg was looking for material.

At the same time, though, he was having affairs with other women.

I can't bring myself not to call you beloved.

♪♪ I called you that already in that moment when I first saw your dining room illuminated by the sun -- that is, illuminated by you.

So he was being unfaithful to the woman with whom he was being unfaithful to his wife.

It was not your beauty that struck me but always your deepest seriousness.

♪♪ Walton: They're all in on this weird sort of Viennese drama that they are playing out with each other.

[ Flash powder ignites ] If you put them all together, it's like the cast of "Lulu."

Adorno: Berg had numerous affairs, which never went well, however.

One had the feeling that these liaisons were part of his productive apparatus from the start.

I mean, you create great things when you're in love.

Berg: The pain of parting, the willingness to completely surrender.

It was about the rush, somehow, of imagination that came from desiring and being desired in return.

[ Man speaking German ] Walton: I think there was definitely a cruel side to Berg.

♪♪ The way he plays games with people as if they're just numbers.

Enough.

[ Flash powder ignites ] Helene: He did not want too close contact with this woman, whom he idealized with his more-than-lively artistic imagination for fear of becoming disillusioned, for Alban was spoiled, both intellectually and physically.

In this way, and only in this way, could the "Lyric Suite" come to be.

♪♪ And nothing -- nothing -- can cloud my love for him.

One day, I will stand before God with it.

♪♪ Dan: My father was always suspicious of the circumstances of Berg's death.

He got blood poisoning.

That's clear.

Some sources say he was stung by a bee, others that he was bitten by a gnat.

It seems that he developed boils.

Helene, she treated it herself.

You know, she put hot water, and she lanced it.

♪♪ [ No audio ] Botstein: Everybody knew that it was a dangerous thing to do.

This is before antibiotics.

Puncturing a boil with a household implement that wasn't sterilized.

Soma: I was horrified -- horrified, Helene -- by your attempt at surgery.

Sepsis, blood poisoning was a possibility to be feared.

One day later, in the Cafe Museum, I mentioned to you and Alban that my friend Dr.

Blond, a surgeon known to you by name, was sitting right there in the coffee house, and I proposed that you consult him.

♪♪ You, Helene, wouldn't hear of it.

Alban followed you.

Because I was suspicious of you.

Suspicious that you didn't want any interference from a well-known physician.

I assured you both that Dr.

Blond never sent any bills to my friends whom I recommended to him.

Even then, you declined.

And Alban, unfortunately, followed your lead again.

♪♪ Dan: He, you know, literally accuses her of being the cause of his death.

I think that takes things a bit far.

Whatever problems their marriage might have had, I think it would be going a bit far to say that Helene, on some level, wanted her husband dead.

I don't think she psychologically thought in a criminal way that she wanted to kill him, but she must have been filled with resentment, not really being paid attention to, of sort of being paid attention to.

♪♪ I wouldn't live such a life for two days, let alone for years.

So now he's sick, and she's unhappy and she's lonely.

Would she rather be alone?

Yeah.

♪♪ Botstein: She had a much better life being the widow and keeper of the legacy rights to the music of an increasingly famous and admired man.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ So she got revenge.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Birds chirping ] [ Woman speaking German ] Jarman: I arranged to go and see her.

She was still living in the flat.

And it was just as it had been when Berg was alive.

"This was Alban's last cigarette on the --" It was very strange.

I said to her, "I found very interesting text in the last movement of the 'Lyric Suite.'

Do you know anything about it?"

And Helene said, "Oh, that's very interesting.

I didn't know about that."

And obviously she knew about it all the time.

Botstein: And then slowly, through the great research of George Perle, they uncovered the Hanna Fuchs thing.

Jarman: I don't think George could have published the article about the "Lyric Suite" had Helene been alive, but she died in '76, just before.

It became a big cause célèbre, not 'cause it was written up in The New York Times.

Jarman: But it was very contentious.

A lot of people felt George should not have published it, that it shouldn't be known.

It should have been kept quiet.

Setzer: You don't want the knowledge of the story and all of the sort of lurid details to somehow diminish the music and bring this whole thing into kind of a soap opera.

[ Speaking German ] ♪♪ It's so great to have got those first two movements done.

And, frankly, I'm just itching to record the rest of it now.

Jarman: And whether the piece should have been performed with the vocal finale was a really combative issue.

[ Singing in German ] ♪♪ [ Man speaking German ] There's all this talk about secrets in Berg, but for a man who supposedly had so many secrets, he was remarkably open about them.

One thought alone animates me.

Walton: Even when he's writing supposedly hurried notes to her, I feel he's writing for posterity.

As a famous composer, of course he expected her to keep it and that, at some point, other people would see it.

Then people would think... Wow.

Wow.

"Wow!

This is a secret program."

♪♪ Fleming: It's fascinating to know about the story.

I really like that.

The thought that these composers had personal relationships that deeply affected their art.

The more we know, the more we can bring to it.

♪♪ Walton: So by doing this, Berg is giving his listeners something that will hopefully strike a chord in them... ♪♪ ...so that they'll be able to understand the music better.

Then, of course, go out and pay to go and hear the music performed, buy CDs.

All of the passion and then the despair of knowing that it couldn't continue is encapsulated in this marvelous piece.

♪♪ Walton: If it helps us to understand the music, then by all means, let's have all the stories.

Let's invent even more of them.

But I think it's, in the end, the music that speaks to us that is the raison d'etre of all of this.

It's the music that makes Berg, as a figure, so fascinating.

It's the music that does it in the end.

♪♪ Adorno: The HF business was not paramount for him.

[ Applause ] ♪♪ Berg: Will the music be powerful enough, despite its modernity, to speak to you and speak as forcibly and unambiguously as it is intended?

♪♪ Will anyone but you guess what these sounds, played casually by four simple instruments, want to say?

[ Indistinct conversations ] If only you can feel it, then it will not have been written in vain.

♪♪ If only you feel how I love you.

♪♪ Then there will not have loved in vain.

Your.

Your.

Your.

♪♪ Your.

♪♪ Your Alban.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Applause ] ♪♪ [ Applause continues ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪