Chamber music

Whenever I attend a classical music concert, I want the various musical pieces to be performed in chronological order.  Maybe it's the writer in me, but I like the "story" of musical change, from the baroque period to the classical, to the romantic era to modern music.  

This rarely happens, though.  One reason, I think, is that performers save the big piece for last, whatever its era.  And they also try to hide less popular music in the middle of a concert program, so that the audience won't clear out before the end.  This happened when the Wolf Quartett performed at Krannert: Alban Berg's Lyric Suite was stuck in the middle, just before the intermission.  Apparently, some music lovers still don't love twelve-tone music, even when it's written by Berg, one of the most "romantic" of the twelve-tone composers.  During the intermission, I overheard more than a few folks complaining about the piece.

Which amazed me, because I thought it was the high point of the concert.  The Haydn quartet beginning the concert was perfectly fine.  It was "chamber music" of a certain sort--elegant and witty, its passion held mostly in check, and I could imagine listeners of the late eighteenth century sitting primly on seats, or wandering quietly about the musicians, tea cups in hand.  All very polite (though other of Haydn's work is more than fiery).  The Schubert quartet, which hails from the early nineteenth century, was brawny, heartfelt, and complex romantic music, straining against the strictures of classical form.  But still chamber music.

This gravitational tug of form and content is in an entirely different sphere in Berg's Lyric Suite, from the early twentieth century.  The music  seems to ache, so charged with emotion that one would miss the form (which, being a version of twelve-tone music, must be strict).  But what amazed me most was the story behind the music.  Apparently, Berg was having an affair, and he coded into the music itself his initials and that of his lover, and the last movement is even secretly fitted to an apt sonnet by the French poet Baudelaire.  Again, it's the writer in me, but this tormented secret story transformed the music.  This no longer seemed like public "chamber music," but more like music resonating in the chamber of the composer's mind.  No tea drinking when this is playing!  I was also struck that the secret correspondences of the music remained unknown for 50 years, until a musical scholar's analysis (and documentary evidence) brought it all to light.  Even the most elaborate disguise contains the code to its own unravelling.