Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite has always seemed an intensely personal work, a string quartet larded with autobiographical allusions, which appeared the most likely explanation for the quotations from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony that it explicitly includes. But it was not until the 1970s that the full extent and importance of those references became clear. The Berg scholar George Perle was given access to a copy of the printed score of the quartet containing Berg’s handwritten annotations, detailing not only the programme behind each of the six movements, which charted the progress of Berg’s affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the wife of a Prague industrialist, but also the hidden text of the final movement, revealed as a setting of a German translation of Baudelaire’s De Profundis Clamavi, from Les Fleurs du Mal.
Whether Berg ever intended the Lyric Suite to be performed with the text of the Largo Desolato movement sung by a soprano seems doubtful. But it has been recorded in that form a few times before, most recently by the Quatuor Diotime and Sandrine Piau for Naive in 2011. The Emerson Quartet offers the option of both finales, with the version with soprano – Renée Fleming no less – following the traditional one on the disc. Fleming sings with velvety evenness, threading her vocal line through the swirling strings, but in a rather impersonal, neutral way. But it’s the performance of the whole work by the Emersons that it is so remarkable; there is much more emotional directness, less of the usual armour-plated efficiency about their playing, and that, combined with the total technical assurance, suits the world of late Berg perfectly.
The pairing with another nearly contemporary work for soprano and string quartet is a hugely rewarding one too. Egon Wellesz was a pupil of Schoenberg alongside Berg and Webern in the mid-1900s, and remained in contact with the group until the rise of the Nazis forced him to flee Vienna in 1938; he came to England and eventually settled in Oxford. His Sonnets are settings of those by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in German translations by Stefan George, composed in 1934. They show Wellesz’s music at that time to be closest to Berg’s, but still retaining echoes of Brahms, Mahler and even Richard Strauss. The vocal and string writing are both immaculate, and the world of each song is perfectly evoked; Fleming handles them all with great care.
