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TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSIC Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs: The Story of a Love in Letters. By Constantin Floros. Translated by Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. [xx, 145p. ISBN-13: 9780253349668. $24.95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographic references, index.
Constantin Floros's Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs is an installment in the still growing literature on Berg's affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin and the incorporation of its details into his music, especially the Lyric Suite. Information about the affair began to appear in print in 1977, and it is now the subject of more than twenty books and articles, a BBC documentary, and at least two novels. Briefly, here's what happened. In mid-May 1925 Berg visited Prague for a festival of modern music at which his Wozzeck Fragments were to be performed, and he accepted an invitation from Herbert Fuchs-Robettin-brother-inlaw of his friend Franz Werfel-to stay with him and his family in the Prague suburb of Bubenec. Berg was in high spirits during the festival: his music was enjoying success as never before, and just as he arrived he learned from the conductor Erich Kleiber that Wozzeck would definitely receive its premier performance at the Berlin Staatsoper in the near future. "My brain is on fire," he wrote to his wife, Helene. Berg was especially charmed by the Fuchs-Robettins' two children and fascinated by their luxurious life style. "My hosts spoil me," Berg wrote to Helene on the day after he arrived. "Room with hot water, glorious view, Roger Galet soap, Venetian blinds so that you can sleep with the windows open at night" (Alban Berg, Letters to his Wife [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971], 337).
In his letters to Helene, Berg did not, of course, mention the principal attraction during his stay-Fuchs-Robettin's wife, Hanna, who was pretty, at thirty some ten years younger than her husband or Berg, and known as something of a flirt. Soma Morgenstern described her as a "scharfe Dame," and Adorno summed her up as an opportunist, "a bourgeoise through and through, who was once touched by the possibility of being other, without ever being able to realize that possibility" (p. 128). Judging from Berg's later correspondence with Hanna-all that is known is given in this book for the first time in English-the...