Lyric Suite

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Seminal cypher work by Austrian serialist composer Alban Berg dating from the year 1926. The composer stated in his opera Wozzeck "man is a chasm, it makes your head reel when you look inside". In this light, the Lyric Suite can be viewed as a highly coded view into Berg's lust-riddled psychic depths. The piece is in effect a darkly erotic ode to Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, sister of his close friend Franz Werfel and wife of industrialist and music patron Herbert Fuchs-Robettin. Smouldering letters between Hanna and Berg were secretly carried back and forth by Theodor W. Adorno throughout their shrouded affair. In the suite's final movement, Berg uses the cold mechanics of serialism to embed a lust-ridden poem entitled "Out of the Depths" by the French poet Charles Baudelaire into his sonic matrix - a secret that remained undiscovered until 1978, a full 50 years after the Lyric Suite's completion. Of the piece, Berg secretly stated to Hanna:

"It has also, my insatiable Hanna, allowed me other freedoms! For example, that of secretly inserting our initials, HF and AB, into the music, and relating every movement and every section of every movement to our numbers, 10 and 23. May it be a small monument to the infinite depths of our love. You are mine own."