On 14 May 1925 Alban Berg travels from Vienna to Prague, where his “Drei Bruchstücke aus der Oper Wozzeck” are to be performed. There he meets his hostess Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, Franz Werfel’s sister and wife of the industrialist Herbert Fuchs-Robettin. The love that arises within a few days is returned but remains unfulfilled out of consideration for their spouses. Fourteen letters from Berg to Hanna, written between 1925 and 1935 and only found among her papers in the 1970s, are the sole testimony to this relationship. Since then it has been known how deeply it shaped Berg’s late works, above all the Lyrische Suite of 1925/26, whose secret programme was meant for Hanna alone.
Urs Faes, born in Aarau in 1947, links this historical love story with a story of the present in his novel, published by Suhrkamp in 2005. The journalist David, recovered from a long illness, meets the singer Simone, whose passion for Berg’s music leads him to research the composer and his secret lover in Prague. After several false starts and breaks, their journey together takes them from Zurich to Croatia, where they hear Berg’s Violin Concerto “Dem Andenken eines Engels” – the work with which Berg’s life and output come to an end. Past and present, reality and fiction mirror one another in this novel.
The music comes from a concert at the Gergiev Festival Rotterdam on 14 September 2005 in the Jurriaanse Zaal of De Doelen. The DoelenKwartet plays Alban Berg’s Lyrische Suite with Hanneke de Wit (soprano), Alexander von Zemlinsky’s “Maiblumen blühten überall” Op. 10 for soprano and string sextet and Arnold Schönberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” Op. 4; in the sextets Anne Huser (viola) and Floris Mijnders (cello) join the quartet. Excerpts from these three works are assigned to the novel’s 26 chapters.
Michael Rotschopf, Mirjam Wiesemann and Christian Higer read the novel unabridged; the spoken word was recorded in June 2006 at the Cybele Studios under the direction of Vera Forester. With a good five hours of playing time on four SACDs, “Als hätte die Stille Türen” is the most extensive production of the audiobook series Wort&Musik. It was supported by the Kunststiftung NRW and the Aargauer Kuratorium.
The four hybrid SACDs together run to 301:24 in stereo and 5.0 surround; the booklet has 24 pages. What is read is the unabridged version of the novel published by Suhrkamp in 2005. Berg’s Violin Concerto, which stands at the end of the journey, was written in 1935 in memory of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler who died at eighteen; it remained Berg’s last completed work.