Urs Faes: Als hätte die Stille Türen

“Immer neu intoniert” – Alban Berg and his music for Hanna Fuchs
On 14 May 1925 the Austrian composer Alban Berg (1885-1935) travelled from Vienna to Prague. The occasion was a performance of his “Drei Bruchstücke aus der Oper Wozzeck” (the première of the complete stage work would not follow until December of the same year in Berlin). What the musician did not suspect as he arrived in the Czechoslovak capital: this short stay would not only leave a deep mark on his emotional life but would also lastingly influence his further artistic development — and with it that of new music as a whole. The reason: in his Jewish hostess Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, sister of Franz Werfel and married to the industrialist Herbert Fuchs-Robettin, Berg met — and came to love — a woman who, as he later confessed, made “every stop of the heart speak” in him.
The love that flared up within a few days was returned, but remained unfulfilled — out of consideration for their respective spouses — and plunged the forty-year-old into a deep existential crisis. Fourteen “secret” letters from Berg to the distant beloved, written between 1925 and 1935 and rediscovered only in the 1970s in her estate, are the sole testimony. To this must be added the recognition, brought to light by musicologists bit by bit, of how deeply this passion marked the composer’s late work, down to its smallest ramifications. This is true above all of the “Lyrische Suite” written in 1925/26: outwardly dedicated to his Viennese colleague Alexander von Zemlinsky, the work survives in a presentation copy addressed to Hanna Fuchs whose intimate marginal notes leave nothing in doubt…
Change of scene: we are in the present. The journalist David, recovered from a long illness and looking for a new perspective on his life, meets the singer Simone. The young woman, with her passion for Alban Berg’s music, exerts a strong attraction on him and sets him in turn to research the composer’s life and his secret Prague beloved. Marked by several false starts and breaks, their shared journey through life finally leads from Zurich to a Croatia traumatised by civil war, where they hear that very violin concerto “Dem Andenken eines Engels” with which Berg’s life and work came to an end. – “Als hätte die Stille Türen” – a novel in search, as the blurb has it, “of the possibilities and limits of love, of its failures and its utopias” – a narrative in which past and present, the real and the fictional, the meeting of Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs and a modern love story are artfully interwoven and mirrored in one another.