Autograph musical quotation from Lulu inscribed to his publisher Dr Alfred Kalmus, signed ('Alban Berg'), February 1935

Alban Berg (1885-1935)
Autograph musical quotation from Lulu inscribed to his publisher Dr Alfred Kalmus, signed ('Alban Berg'), February 1935
Lulu's dramatic declaration of fidelity after shooting Alwa's father: 'Ich bin noch jung! Ich will Dir treu sein mein Leben lang!'.

An imposing quotation of nine bars in short score, on two systems of four staves, one page, 287 x 208mm, inscribed in full 'Dr. Alfred Kalmus / "dem lieben Menschen" / mit einer (unverbindlichen) Beteuerung an den Verleger' [to Dr Alfred Kalmus, "the beloved person", with a (non-binding) assurance to the publisher'].

Provenance:
(1) Alfred Kalmus (music publisher, 1889-1972).

(2) Hans Redlich (musicologist, 1903-1968).

(3) George Perle (composer and Berg scholar, 1915-2009).

(4) Sotheby's, 7 December 2015, lot 144 (information on two preceding owners according to the catalogue note).

(5) Schøyen Collection, MS 5561.

Lulu was Berg's second opera, after Wozzeck (1924), and is one of his small oeuvre of major works. Composition was begun in 1929, but orchestration of the third act was still incomplete at Berg's death from sepsis on Christmas Eve 1935. Its radical societal and gender politics and structural complexity – the work is structured around a series of repeated motifs which can be read in its entirety as a palindrome – are a remarkable response to the challenges of the period of its composition, which saw performances of Berg's works more and more restricted because of antisemitism (prompted by Berg's close association with Arnold Schoenberg) and Nazi cultural ideology. The first two acts were first performed on 2 June 1937; but after Schoenberg refused to complete the orchestration, it was to be more than 40 years before the first full production took place at the Opera Garnier on 24 February 1979, using a score prepared by Friedrich Cerha. The recipient of the present quotation, Alfred Kalmus, was joint-director of the Berg's publishers Universal Edition: the text of Lulu's declaration in the quotation, which translates as 'I am still young! I will be faithful to you my whole life long! I will belong to you alone!', undoubted reflects Berg's strong sense of indebtedness to Kalmus, who continued to promote Berg's music and that of his Second Viennese School contemporaries even after his forced emigration to England in 1936. George Perle, a later owner of the leaf, was an important scholar of Berg's work, and was one of the first to establish that Act 3 of Lulu was substantially complete, rather than, as previously thought, an unfinished sketch.