Bird in the Apple Tree

If, like me, you love Berg’s Violin Concerto, and if, like me, you recently happened to hear Isabelle Faust’s performance of it in Lucerne in memory of the conductor Claudio Abbado, you will be increasingly aware that every performance it receives is a memory of someone special. 

For Berg himself, the work was a requiem for Manon Gropius, the daughter of the architect Walter Gropius and his wife Alma, who had once been Alma Mahler -  Gustav’s wife - and who had already mourned one daughter, the adored young Maria who had died aged five of a combination of diphtheria and scarlet fever.  Now she was mourning another, who had died aged 18 of polio. Mahler himself, who had tempted providence by composing his heart-rending Kindertotenlieder - Songs on the Death of Children - two years before Maria died, had by then been dead for 24 years, and his place in Viennese musical society was filled by Alban Berg. 

Desiring to compose an instrumental memorial for Manon, Berg invited the American violinist Louis Krasner to play for him, so that he could absorb the sound of Krasner’s violin tone. It was at that point that the history of Berg’s Violin Concerto began, and it’s also the point where Raymond Monelle of Edinburgh University’s music department started his novel about Berg, entitled Bird in the Apple Tree. 

By the time he finished it, Raymond was a septuagenarian, not far from death, and he failed to find a publisher for his book before he died.   As a close friend, he allowed me to read the manuscipt and, as a result, to fall for his  portrayal of Carinthia in young Berg’s lifetime. I thought it a lovely book, with all the musical flair one looks for but seldom finds in a novel,  and I rejoice that it has posthumously found its publisher and can be bought (for a song, as they say) in a Kindle edition. 

Though I wish I could have had a hand in its belated success, it’s Raymond’s daughter Cathy we must thank for making it happen. I remain a devoted reader, now reading it for a second time and taking new pleasure in its picture of the young  composer - most of the action takes place, in flashback, before the concerto was composed -   and of how portions of his life (itself famously tragic) are structured into a novel. 

Raymond received a Scottish Arts Council grant to visit Vienna and research the story.  With its evocation of Austria a century ago, of dim street lights, slow old trains,  rustic jollity and the sunlit countryside, it reminds me at moments of Arthur Schnitzler and the world of La Ronde and Beatrice, which is just what I hoped it might do. 

Raymond at 72 could have developed a new career as a novelist as well as a musicologist, composer, jazz pianist, conductor, lecturer and all the other things he was good at.  It makes me all the prouder to have known him, and to have been given his last piano, his Bosendorfer grand, a Viennese make of instrument famous for its deep warmth of tone, an example of which Berg happened to possess and which is mentioned right at the star of the book.

29 May 2014