Alban Berg’s secret

A LOVE HIDDEN WITHIN THE MUSIC Vienna, 1907. Alban Berg, twenty-two years old, enters a living room in Hietzing and notices a hand resting on the edge of a piano. It belongs to Helene Nahowski, the illegitimate daughter of Emperor Franz Joseph. He marries her in 1911. He will call her “the harbor” for the rest of his life. Prague, May 1925. Berg arrives for a contemporary music festival and is hosted in a beautiful home. The hostess is Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. She is the sister of Franz Werfel, Alma Mahler’s third husband. She has long hair and a smile unlike any other. He would compose the Lyrische Suite for her and never forgot her again. Twenty years lie between these two events. Between the two loves, there was no choice. Berg spent the rest of his life trying to hold together what the world would have wanted him to choose. He did so in the only way he knew how: he wrote. He wrote Wozzeck, he wrote the Lyrische Suite with Hanna’s initials hidden in the notes and Baudelaire’s words beneath the string parts; he wrote fiercely passionate letters in the dead of night. And then he wrote Lulu. Helene outlived her husband by forty years and kept everything to herself in silence. Hanna kept a brown leather folder locked away until her death. It contained a score annotated in three pastel colors. The secret held until 1976. The music was the key—the only thing needed to know.

By Luca Stefano Cristini, 214 pages
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