Catching the Early Berg
The new release of Alban Berg's Opus 2 (MHS 3770H) Seven Early Songs, sung by Joan Patenaude accompanied by Mikael Eliasen is the kind of investigation into youthful style. that is happening more often these days, and is certainly welcome. It reflects a trend in the arts that might be worth tracing back a little.
During the past century and until recently, the art world moved from style to style according to the old avant-garde system, by means of which the ''best'' people were stylistically "ahead" of all the others. Ever since the impressionist painters in France turned their backs on the Academy during the 1870s, there had been one new frontier after another to be amazed or outraged at--and eventually to assimilate: to start with, the post-impressionism of Cezanne and Van Gogh led the way towards cubism on the one hand and expressionism on the other--exploring respectively structure and feeling. And the subsequent succession of other "-isms" eventually wound its way down toward the minimal and finally the conceptual, which tended to swallow up the essence of art itself and to spit back only the bits and pieces of process--the nuts and bolts, but little enough of the engine. As a result, the advance guard effectively put itself out of business, with nothing much left to advance or guard.
And perhaps usefully. Because now that the artists have stopped jogging ''ahead,'' or holding out in the rearguard against the other joggers, they've been freer to look around in all directions in time, even backwards. They've nosed their way back into ''outgrown'' and over-shadowed phases of style, and on two levels: that of the historical period--such as any of the past times and phases of realism; and that of the individual period--such as the early work of a major artist or composer.
Therefore we find, at this writing, a show in one of the big New York galleries of the early paintings of Stuart Davis, done at a time (between about 1911 and 1913) when the artist had a studio in Hoboken and was ferrying back and forth across the Hudson to classes with the epochal teacher Robert Henri. These watercolors are obviously influenced by a number of Davis' advanced contemporaries here and abroad, such as John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, Everett Shinn--and Toulouse-Lautrec. But their sense of the people and the places is in a distinct and pungent way Davis' own.
In the course of time, having seen and been involved with the trend-setting Armory show of 1913, he discarded this eminently breathable atmosphere for the clean-lined, brightly-colored, airless abstractions of the mature period by which he is well-known today. That style is most typically and conveniently Stuart Davis. It is a definitive style, but not the only one with gifts for us.
Equally identifiable and equally definitive is the intense twelve-tone serialism of Alban Berg's most mature style, in comparison with the early songs on the Musical Heritage release. But now that we are a bit liberated from the advance/retrograde schism in the arts we can enjoy more evenly not only the big moments of arrival but the most eventful moments of passage--of which these songs are a fragrant and richly chromatic instance. We no longer need to overstress the culminating and perhaps most markedly original later works to the almost total exclusion of the earlier. We can make choices of our own. We can catch the early Berg.
Such liberation is especially desirable when it shows a Davis or a Berg coming to each period of his work with particular giftedness and sensitivity. There are bound to be perceptions in the earlier stages that are, to an extent, lost in the more authoritative later strategy, and are certainly more interesting than someone else's mature (and even "advanced") routine.
If one more artist is allowable in a music magazine, the contemporary American sculptor and painter Harry Jackson does make a good case for freedom of direction. He has been something of a troublemaker for the avant-garde, and for critical compartmentalization. Having spent his young manhood drawing and painting as a cowboy on Wyoming ranch , he plunged during the fifties into the heady swirl of abstract expressionism in New York, in close association with such a Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwel1. Then he found his way "back" (what other word could an up-do-date critic use?) to a realistic kind of figuration, commenting eloquently in both painting and sculpture on cowboy and frontier life, long before realism became fashionable again. Perhaps he too will be helped by the new multi-directionality of art and criticism.
Come to think of it, the most mature Berg showed more of this freedom to move than did either his mentor Schoenberg or his colleague Von Webern. In his final completed work he turned "back" all the way to a Bach chorale. His Violin Concerto, a deeply felt elegy in memory of young Manon Gropius, incorporates toward the end Bach's harmonization of the chorale, "Es ist genug" (It is enough). As Berg's close friend and biographer Willi Reich has written, "Hearing it in the flesh brought out clearly the backwardglancing and summing-up features of the concerto . . . . The use of the Chorale is a significant new element in Berg's creative development." (Italics mine.)
Perhaps, now, the time has come when we no longer need to take sides between early and late, past and future, but may enjoy the unfolding of excellence at one stage without prejudicing our attitude toward a different stage. Perhaps we can even speak, as we tum to a Hoboken watercolor by Davis or an early song by Berg, of moving forward, ahead, avant in our estimation of the artist's whole language.
