Alban Berg and the Fateful NumberAuthor(s): Geoffrey PooleSource: Tempo, New Series, No. 179 (Dec., 1991), pp. 2-7Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/945968Accessed: 07/10/2010 20:32

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Geoffrey Poole

Alban Berg and the Fateful Number

No prizes for guessing the number. The pervasive stamp of 23, whether it be in the precomposi- tional proportions, the tempo markings, or the rhythmic formation of works like the Lyric Suite, Lulu, and the Violin Concerto, is well established in the current analytical literature. It is in any case confirmed by frequent calculations amongst the sketches. 23 also seems to have been inextricably linked to Berg's sense of personal destiny. It is widely agreed, for instance, that his first asthma attack occured on 23 July, though whether in 1900 or 1908 (when he was 23) or possibly another year remains uncertain. (The selectivity of this memory is itself curious.) On his deathbed he was convinced that December 23 would prove 'decisive', as indeed it did.'

But the obsession goes back at least 20 years before that. In the letter dated 10 June 1915 two datestamps on telegrams from Schoenberg are enough to set him off:

... here too a certain number keeps cropping up - a number which has great significance for me. The number 23. I will keep quiet about the many times in my life that I have come up against this number and only give you one or two examples from the recent past:

I received your first telegram (to go back to the beginning) on 4/6 (46 = 2x23). The telegram contained the number Berlin Siidende 46 (2x23) 12/11 (12 + 11 = 23). The second telegram contained the numbers 23/23 and was sent at 11.50 (11.50 = 50x23).2

Now by most standards the interpretation of the date 4/6 and the time 11.50 as evidence of 23 could scarcely be regarded as reasonable: one senses a certain predisposition to see 23 every- where, which suggests some deeper imprinting of 23 amongst the experiences Berg says he is keeping quiet about. Yet if Berg regarded 23 as a number that fate had allotted him then presum- ably the obsession had its rewards, and not only in defusing the emotional detonator of letters from a peevish master! Its constant recurrence in day- ' The composer's nephew maintained that death itself occured before midnight, that is to say on 23 December. (See Douglas Jarman, The Music of Alban Berg, Faber, 1979, footnote to p.229.) 2 Berg-Schoenberg Letters.

to-day life - whether real or imaginary - would provide an illusion of order and purpose, and that illusion would in its turn have brought a measure of real security. Undoubtedly, as a compositional strategy, the belief that 23 could function as a musical schematic really did provide a working solution to otherwise 'open' compositional questions, and therefore a constructional impetus, a method by which the work was transformed from speculation into realization. But there is another angle to this: Berg seems almost to have 'signed himself' 23 (in association with Hanna's 10 in the Lyric Suite, for example) and this impression has struck Berg scholars forcibly enough to provoke attempts to derive 23 from Berg's name. There are plenty of prece- dents for name-cyphers in music: J.S. Bach, for example, appears to have relished both the pitch spelling B-A-C-H and the numerological expression of his name in the number 14; ABEGG and the Schumann 'sphynxes' in Carnival

(though merely the tip of a cryptographic iceberg) and Brahms's Agathe in the G major sextet would have been familiar to Berg long before writing his cryptographic Schoenberg- Berg-Webern spellings into the Chamber Concerto. Yet the counting of the letters in various formations of Berg's given names has yielded no good reason for the signature 23, and numerological-cabbalistic calculations have also drawn a blank.

What, then, could have suggested to Alban Berg that one particular number was 'his' number, his destiny, his emblem, his signature, and yet left no clues as to its origin? My contention is that Berg found the number 23 in his natal horoscope. There is no direct evidence for this: the Berg archives do not, as far as I can ascertain, boast a single astrological holding. That, however, is strange. We have it from the American violinist Louis Krasner that Schoen- berg's life-long friend Oskar Adler drew up astrological charts for Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern, and that Adler (a published writer on

astrology) was in his quiet way as great an influence upon them as Karl Kraus.3 Adorno told 3 I am indebted to Douglas Jarman for bringing these matters

Alban Berg and the Fateful Number 3

Thomas Mann that Berg was seriously interested in astrology. Willi Reich makes the isolated remark that Arnold Schoenberg named his son Ronald (an anagram of Arnold) 'for astrological reasons'. But until fairly recently the permitted parameters of second-Viennese musicology were confined to those that chimed with the paradigm of technological progress; we have to recognize that such factors as love affairs and esoteric personal belief-systems were suppressed by modernist partisans for fear of reawakening the dread spirit of Romanticism, and the Faustian taint of astrology would have done their cause no good at all.

Where the suppression of materials (books and a natal chart) began is anyone's guess. It could have been the haphazard throwing out of old rubbish after the funeral, or a tactical clean-up by zealous pupils like Adomo. It could have arisen from the complex protecting jealousies of the widow Helena; or Alban Berg himself, having perhaps fallen under the spell of astrology for a while, could have thought better of it once he had abstracted whatever was useful to him and adapted himself to the neue sachlichkeit. Personally I suspect the zealous pupils; but at least the situation is not as bad as Ruskin's puritanical bonfire of all Turner's nudes. We still have Berg's music, and it is there, as much as in biographical material, that we find compelling evidence to suggest that both the general principles of astrology and the specific data of his natal chart were, from about 1915 onwards, crucial.

Berg's mind was unquestionably of the sort that could have relished astrology. I do not mean the silly newspaper stuff, but book astrology with its imaginative blend of mysticism, practical psychology, arithmetic calculation and cyclic rhythm which can be combined to give an esoteric species of prediction. Early 20th-century Vienna was certainly one of the more favourable climates for induction into such ideas, as astrology's flames had been fanned by the rise of the Theosophy movement and Buddhism. The musical ethos was ripe for it: no great step is involved in adding the imagery of astrology's cosmic order (and the liberating 'air from other

planets') to the musikreligion inheritance of Bach to Mahler as perceived by Schoenberg and his circle. It is of course well documented that Berg was captivated by the bio-rhythm theories of Wilhelm Fliess. Biorhythm is conceptually a half- way house to astrology: instead of periodic 23-

to my attention. For a fuller account see his article Alban Berg, Wilhelm Fliess, and the secret programme of the Violin Concerto in The Berg Companion ed. Douglas Jarman, Macmillan, London, 1989, p.182.

day rhythms you have nine or ten cyclic controls

(from the planets and luminaries) which are presumed to interact and result in subtle but arithmetically predictable changes of human behaviour.

In his love of cryptic clues, his alertness to ,precognitive experience, and yearning for meaningful coincidence (or synchronicity) Berg fits immediately into the category of the 'introverted intuitive type', in Carl Jung's parlance.4 It is characteristic of this type (amongst whom I would also conjecture Dun- stable, Bach, Debussy and Messiaen) to exp- erience Number and Time and ecstatic illumin- ation as prime realities by comparison with which the 'real world' is rather dimly apprehended. It may well be that in our age, the age of the accountant, Number has been debased (as has Time - not to mention ecstatic illumination) and people who feel numbers qualitatively are regarded as a little odd, but for some people the feel of number still retains a resonance more powerful than the objectivity of number-as- counting. Their intuition reaches back to the pre- Egyptian perception of number as something magical. 'Number is an archetype of order that has become conscious' as Jung puts it.5

If Jung is right, then analysts ought not to be interpreting the compositional use of number merely as a technical discipline that harnesses the imagination; rather, number is a fundamental donne, part of the inspiration, something archetypal, procreative and energetic. In other words, while the specific choice of 23 in Berg is probably circumstantial (and I shall indicate a possible circumstance shortly), the tendency to be imaginatively energized by Number is innate in a certain cast of mind, and the very same cast of mind is predisposed towards the fascination of number and rhythm in music's mute sister, astrology (and biorhythms, prime numbers, golden sections and so forth).

But where does the music itself lend support to this notion? Can we point to instances where a peculiar psychic charge (which Jung regards as typical of archetypal projection) seems to accompany a numerical or else quasi-astrological process? Yes, clearly so in Berg's dynamic conception of palindromic structure, which is indeed quite unique to him.

Berg's prediliction for symmetrical and palindromic structures ... seems to have had both an objective intellectual, and a deeply personal significance. Hans

4 See CarlJung Collected Works Vol.6, 'General Description of the Types' in Psychological Types (1921). 5 Carl Jung, Synchronicity, para. 870. See also Marie-Louise von Franz, Number and Time (London: Rider 1974), p.45.

4 Alban Berg and the Fateful Number

Rcdlich has remarked on the air of mystery which surrounds those moments at which Berg's palindromic structures begin to move backwards; Misha Donat has said that 'in Berg, retrograde movement represents almost a view of life'.6

Perhaps the most spectacular example of this (pace Lulu Act II) is the passage that occurs towards the end of Der Wein, where the dance winds itself into a metaphorical corner; halts; and proceeds to unwind and spin in what is technically a retrograde yet experientially something quite unprecedented in Western Music. There certainly is something about this that suggests 'a view of life', and calls for explanation.

The key to this explanation is something astrologers call the planetary transit. Indeed, Berg could have had very particular reasons to note how transits - the day-to-day passage of the planets across the geographically sensitive 'natal' positions - are reflected (if they are) in the subtler responses of a sensitive life. Knowing the sensitive degrees of his own natal chart and with an ephemeris (planetary timetable) at hand, he would be in a position to observe whether the approach of a transiting planet to those sensitive degrees brought on a depressing month, a romantic week, a creative idea or a terrifying night of asthma, as may be. Whether the effect is real or an illusion is not the point: an astrological dabbler is open to the possibility that the apparently haphazard will fall within a system.

Thus, assuming the necessary suspension of disbelief in the observer, the information given in the ephemeris transforms the concept of coinci- dence into a concern for cyclic pattern. The numbers take on an implicitly exciting aspect: they are engaged in symbolic attractions and leave-takings, tides of mutual support or adversity, an imaginary counterpoint of con- sonance and dissonance that materializes as creativity and illness. Perhaps the most dramatic situation occurs when the planetary transit fails to pass by: when it approaches, slows, and becomes stationary. At this fateful moment its transiting 'influence' is maximal, intensified by unyielding stasis. And next, it reverses: Time turns upon itself and fate proceeds to devour what has passed.7 The fact that Berg innovates the musical

6Jarman op cit p.230. T.W. Adorno thought so too, in Berg, Der Meister des kleilnsten Ubergatngs, Elisabeth Lafite Verlag, Vienna 1968, p.21. DouglasJarman returns to the theme in his Wozzeck, Cambridge Opera Handbooks, 1989, ch.7.

7 All the planets move in the same direction on a more or less flat plain of the ecliptic. However, the outer planets can appear to go into retrograde simply because the earth is moving forward at a greater angular velocity than the planet. With the

device of directed movement - stasis - retrograde precisely for turning points in an individual's fate

(particularly Lulu's apogee) is therefore strongly suggestive of the conscious absorption and fundamental impact of astrological thinking. In this context, one might say the search for 23 has really become somewhat marginal.

But perhaps not. In order to get his own horoscope drawn accurately, Berg would have needed to furnish the time of day as well as the fact he was born in Vienna on 9 February 1885. His birth certificate does not record this information. However, it seems that Berg himself knew it well, since he refers to it in one of his last letters to Schoenberg, written 9 February 1935.

My dearest, best, kindest friend, I didn't think it was still possible to be as happy as I was (and have been ever since) when early this morning: on my birthday - precisely to the minute - your congratulations arrived.

'Early this morning' and 'precisely to the minute' - evidently it mattered to him! Exactly how early the Vienna postmen would have delivered an obviously important package from Los Angeles (undoubtedly scrawled with emphatic instruc- tions from Schoenberg) to the celebrity's house I do not know, but if Berg was not exaggerating too much we can conclude he was born somewhere between about 6 a.m. and 8.30 a.m.

From this range of approximately 21/2 hours it is perfectly possible to construct almost all the details of Berg's horoscope. (A horoscope, or natal chart, is nothing more than a map of the solar system as seen from a given time and place.) It works out that a birth between 5 a.m. and 6.30 a.m. would have given a Capricorn ascendant, while the remaining two hours would have given Aquarius, turning to Pisces at 7.45 a.m. But without the precise time of birth it is not possible to ascer- tain the 'rising degree' that Berg would certainly have been given by any putative astrologer- friend. To get any closer we would need to consult an astrologer, and within their realm the first useful clue would be Berg's physical build, very tall yet somewhat inexpansive, elegantly formal; this would probably be taken as sugges- tive of a Capricorn ascendant. As a matter of fact West and Toonder's The Case for Astrology presents two photographs of Aquarians with Capricorn ascendants - James Stephens and James Joyce, Irish writers, both born 6 a.m 2 February 1882.

inner planets the reversing is even plainer to see, as it resembles watching a child's circular railway while walking slowly around the outside of it.

Alban Berg and the Fateful Number 5

They resemble each other and share Berg's tall yet spare build: and incidentally the Joyce/Berg taste for complex abstract detail culminating in the epic works Ulysses/Wozzeck and Lulu/Finnegan's Wake is an untold story of more than passing interest.

But on slightly less speculative ground, we can turn to the extensive statistical findings of Michel

Gauquelin, demonstrating that musicians tend to avoid being born when Mars is at a 'Gauquelin Plus Zone' (whereas soldiers positively favour it, to a statistical probability against chance of 1 in 5

million).8 If Berg ran true to musicianly form, then, he would not have elected to be born along with the drum-majors when the red planet rose at 7.25 that morning, or indeed within an hour of them, but would have favoured the 'minus zone' that was at its strongest around 5.30 a.m.

Flimsy though these suggestions may be - and actually, following Gauquelin's researches amongst others, the dismissal of astrology is by no means as certain as used to be thought - the clues do all point in the same direction, towards a birth

on a natal chart that could in general be taken to symbolize one's particular being, in the manner of the 23 signature that Alban Berg appears to have arrogated to himself. One of these is the ascendant (East-West horizon) which tradition- ally denotes bodily materialization and impression made upon other people, while the other is the Mid-Sky (North-South axis) which depicts the Ego. It is perfectly easy to construct a natal chart for Vienna on 9 February 1885 that will show 23? Capricorn on the ascendant. You get that if you decide Berg was born at 6.07 a.m. (give or take 2 minutes). But by astonishing coincidence, the same chart displays 23? Scorpio at mid-sky. This unusual circumstance - for. the separation of these points shifts endlessly and involves no necessary connexion - means that the number 23 is blazoned from all four corners of the natal chart, on its East-West and North-South axes. Thus if Berg was at all interested, however briefly, in predictive astrology, he would above all have been aware of (if not wary of) transiting aspects whenever the ephemeris mentioned 23?.

'Lines, circles, strange figures - if only one could read them' (Wozzeck to The Doctor). Astrological chart for 6.07 a.m., 9 February 1885, Vienna (local time).9

Al5kj

A/A?f

between 6.00 and 6.30 under the last degrees of 9 Austria adopted Central European Time (one hour ahead of Capricorn. Greenwich Mean Time) on 1 October 1891. Viennese Local

Mean Time runs six minutes ahead of C.E.T., therefore the Now concerning the number 23, there are chart shown here for 6.07 L.M.T. corresponds to 6.01 C.E.T.

(besides the Sun at 20? Aquarius) two positions Intermediate houses are drawn to the Koch system. Incidentally 23? Aquarius ascended at 7.29 a.m. and 23?

8 Michel Gauquelin, Cosmic Influences on Human Behaviour, Pisces at 8.30 a.m. L.M.T. on 9 February 1885, but without Futura, London, 1974. the coincidence of 23? at the zenith.

6 Alban Berg and the Fateful Number

. ....... certainly take on a symbolic role, and this offers a distinctly possible explanation of 23 as a

signature, and an emblem of fate, for Berg. But Berg would also have been given a character-

reading based on the chart. IFor a mind so .......oimpressionable to symbolic resonance that it

regularly responded to subliminal clues in names - Altenberg (AlbanBerg), Alwa (Alban), Dr. Sch6n (-berg), Hanna (H pitch) - and meta- personal circumstances such as the asthmatic Schigolch, to say nothing of the spell of numbers, it is scarcely conceivable that Berg's putative horoscope-reading would not have exercised his imagination at some level. If it offered a solution to problems of musical construction in terms of 23 and the meaning of retrogrades, might it not also have triggered or identified the dramatic

subject-matter of the operas? What, then, would an astrologer have told

him? Something along these lines: 1. That he was charming and courteous

though a little remote (from Mercury and Venus rising in Capricorn, and an Aquarius Sun). A humanitarian, because of the Aquarian concern for unfortunates, and because of Neptune at the root of the chart.

2. That he was highly sexed (Sun closely conjunct Mars) - but this in severe disharmony (because at 90? or 'square') to Neptune (spirit, oblivion, death by drowning) and the mid-sky. This pattern spells out a lifelong sex-death fixation. (We might note that this Mars-Neptune hostility is perfectly symbolized by the knife- woman destinies of both Marie and Lulu.)

3. Freedom-loving and roving in principle

(Moon in Sagittarius) yet inhibited in practice by

opposing Saturn: more than that, the Moon-

Saturn opposition indicates trouble with father - - ~figures, a tendency not to be able to break free

from those who wish to dominate. Yet the chart also shows that the mental discipline and subordination of that oppositional system offers the healthiest release of the stressful Sun-Mars energy (by 'trine' to Saturn). Thus Berg could be predicted to place himself beneath hard task- masters - a Schoenberg, and a dominating mother and wife: yet they would fulfill this structuring role and open up the path of broader individua-

Albant Berg (Photo: Untiversal Editiot) tion. tion. The usual experience of somebody whose 4. Jupiter, unaspected in the eighth house

horoscope has been cast and given him, if he (though we now know that Pluto, which was values it, is that it becomes an object of unknown until 1931, lies square to it), would contemplation, a personal mandala. It is a have been interpreted as an opportunity to grow microcosm whose inner dynamism and outer through deep emotional experience. Taken boundaries symbolize the inexorable unfolding together with Uranus in the same house, and and ultimate futility of life within a circum- Scorpio at the top of the chart, and the Mars- scribed Fate. Its conspicuous numbers can Neptune square already mentioned, the urge to

Alban Berg and the Fateful Number 7

devote the calculating Sun-Saturn intellect to the mysteries of sex and death will be over- whelming.

It appears therefore that, whether by coinci- dence or auto-suggestion or cosmic design, the horoscope offers a remarkable encapsulation of the salient features of Berg's achievement. This is not the place to argue as to the efficacy of astrology itself, but what we do have is evidence that Berg was presented with at least one natal chart (by Adler); that Berg knew his precise time of birth (and therefore his precise rising degree) even though we do not; that the most likely time of birth from external evidence falls into a narrow range that centres on a chart that would have blazoned the number 23 on both its axes, and that Berg's compositional methods imply a more than circumstantial involvement with astrology. The earliest distinctive use of the retrograded musical statement occurs, as does the Captain's remark 'I shudder to think that the world revolves in a single day, and whenever I see a mill-wheel I feel melancholy' and Wozzeck's

'Lines, Orcles, strange figures - if only one could read them', in Wozzeck Act 110 which was conceived around 1915, the same time as Berg's 23-fixation correspondence with Schoenberg. The structural use of 23 is seen not in Wozzeck but in all the subsequent works. Berg's idiosyncratic 'view of life', as conveyed by the use of retrogrades to depict the working of fate, is increasingly emphatic right up to the end. There is therefore no reason to think Berg ever lost the keen interest that both Adorno and Krasner believed he had in astrology.

There, however, the matter will have to rest pending the discovery of fresh documentary evidence of Berg's time of birth - or else the work-schedules of Viennese postmen in February 1935!

I01 refer to variation 12 of Scene 4. To portray the tracing of a circle Berg gives Wozzeck a descending whole-tone scale and its retrograde (which is also the inversion). The orchestra meanwhile traces similarly harmonically floating circular patterns at five different speeds in what can only be regarded as a symbolic solar system.

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Article Contentsp.[2]p.3p.4p.5p.6p.7

Issue Table of ContentsTempo, New Series, No. 179 (Dec., 1991), pp. 1-68Front Matter [pp.1-66]Alban Berg and the Fateful Number [pp.2-7]York Hller's 'The Master and Margarita': A German Opera [pp.8-15]From Liszt to Adams (II): 'The Black Gondola' [pp.17-20]Sir Andrzej Panufnik (1914 - 1991) [p.21]Duan Martinek: An Introduction to His Music [pp.23-27]Book Reviewsuntitled [pp.29-30]untitled [pp.30-31]untitled [pp.31-32]

Record Reviewuntitled [pp.37-38]untitled [pp.38-40]untitled [pp.40-41]untitled [p.42]untitled [pp.42-44]untitled [pp.44-46]untitled [pp.46-47]untitled [pp.47-50]untitled [pp.50-51]untitled [pp.51-52]

First PerformancesProms 1) Sawyer and Butler [p.55]Proms 2) Peter Paul Nash [pp.55-56]Proms 3) Hugh Wood's Piano Concerto [p.56]Penderecki's 'Ubu Rex' [pp.56-58]New Operas at Salzburg 1991 [pp.58-59]Summer of '91 [p.59]Raymond Clarke in Robert Simpson [pp.59-60]

News Section [pp.62-64]Letters to the Editor[Letter from Ian MacDonald] [p.67][Letter from Mark Doran] [p.67][Letter from Stephen Walsh] [p.67]

Back Matter [pp.68-68]