“This beastly science…”: On the reception of psychoanalysis by the composers of the Second Viennese School, 1908–1923

Abstract

This paper explores the links between psychoanalysis and music in Vienna between the years 1908 and 1923, focusing in particular on two members of the highly influential Second Viennese School, the composers Alban Berg and Anton Webern. While there is little evidence of an actual interaction between Freud and his circle and contemporaneous musicians in Vienna, this paper discusses the direct personal and professional contact Webern and Berg had with Freud, and also with Freud's one-time colleague Alfred Adler; Berg's wife Helene also underwent psychoanalytic treatment. Both composers documented their experiences with and feelings about psychoanalysis, offering critical insights into the reception of psychoanalysis in musical circles in Vienna, and into the actual connections between psychoanalysis and Vienna's most important musical figures. This paper examines Berg and Webern in the context of Freud's Vienna, Adler's musical background and his treatment of Webern, and Berg's knowledge of psychoanalysis and strong ambivalence towards his wife's psychoanalytic treatment, and concludes by considering Berg's opera Wozzeck (1925) as an example of a musical work influenced by contemporary Viennese attitudes towards psychoanalysis.

Key words:

• music
• Vienna
• Sigmund Freud
• Alfred Adler
• Arnold Schoenberg
• Anton Webern
• Alban Berg
• Second Viennese School

Acknowledgements

The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the Alban Berg Stiftung, the Arnold Schoenberg Center, the Freud Museum (London) and the Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna) for providing access to materials and assistance with research. An early version of this article was presented as a public lecture at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, on May 31, 2012.

Notes

¹ The Werndorffs were evidently quite close to Schoenberg and his circle around this time; Schoenberg’ s Catalogue Raisonné (2005) indicates that he even painted portraits of both Etta and Karl, some time prior to October of 1910.

² Mühlleitner and Reichmayr (1997) indicate that there were 34 members as of 1911, but it is not clear that this number accounts for the 10 members (including Adler's supporters) who withdrew in from the society that same year (pp. 75–78).

³ Berg's knowledge of psychoanalysis was likely later enhanced through his relationship with Theodor Adorno, which began in 1924. Adorno was Berg's composition student, briefly, in 1925. Throughout their relationship, Adorno sought to promote the music of the Second Viennese School while developing a philosophy of music that combined Marxism and psychoanalysis. Berg was apparently not particularly interested in Adorno's psychoanalytic interpretations of music: there are virtually no responses from Berg on the subject in the surviving correspondence between them (Dwyer, 2007).

⁴ Reich's date is evidently incorrect: Freud was vacationing in Ossiachersee in late summer of 1907, not in 1908; in 1908, Freud and his family took spent their summer holiday in Berchtesgaden, until Freud left for England in September (see McGuire (1974, pp. 79–82, 164–171).

⁵ Berg may have originally come into contact with Alfred Adler through the infamous Viennese coffeehouse with Peter Altenberg. A well-known writer, poet and aesthete in fin-de-siècle Vienna, Altenberg was a friend and artistic mentor to Berg, and he may also have been closely acquainted with Adler. Certainly, Adler and Altenberg frequented the same cafés, and may even have been good friends: Bottome (1957) describes Altenberg as “one of Adler's most intimate friends” (p. 75), and Hoffman (1994) remarks on the fact that Adler and Altenberg were regulars at the Café Central, part of a group of intellectuals – including Leon Trotsky, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Karl Kraus – that met for discussion and debate about politics, science, and the arts (pp. 85–86). Freud also patronized Café Central (Baur, 2008). Before becoming a regular at Café Central, Adler's favorite cafés were the Café Dom and Café Griensteidl (Bottome, 1957). The latter – just a few hundred meters along Herrengasse from Café Central – was also frequented in the 1890s by Altenberg, and by the young Arnold Schoenberg and his brother-in-law, the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky (Barker, 1996). This is likely where Schoenberg became acquainted with Altenberg; it is also quite possible that Café Griensteidl was where Adler and Altenberg may have first encountered one another.

⁶ It so happens that the Bergs’ family physician as of 1920 was a “Dr. Sch”: Dr. Fritz B. Schweinburg. There is some confusion about what kind of doctor Schweinburg actually was: according to Berg, Schweinburg was a nose and throat specialist (cited in Brand et al., 1987, p. 290); Seaburg (2011), however, identifies Schweinburg as a pathologist, noting that he worked at the Austrian army's epidemic hospital, and later at Vienna's Pasteur Institute; Floros (2008) describes Schweinburg as an “internist” (p. 121). Whatever the case may be, given that Berg apparently had ongoing concerns about the psychosomatic nature of his own illnesses, and given the profusion of untrained “psychoanalysts” at that time, it is certainly conceivable that his own family doctor may have been something of a dabbler in psychoanalysis. Schweinburg is reputed to have attended some of Freud's lectures at the University of Vienna, according to Seaburg (2011), who also claims that Freud and Schweinburg were acquaintances in Vienna, and kept in contact after both moved into the same neighborhood in London following the Anschluss.

⁷ Interestingly, Floros (2008) also cites a letter from Helene Berg to Alma Mahler, written shortly after Berg's death, in which Helene writes about Berg's affair and speculates – in vaguely psychoanalytic terms – about Berg's “subconscious” motivations for keeping Hanna as his “distant beloved,” namely that she served his artistic imagination as an idealized lover (pp. 121–122).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexander Carpenter

Author

Alexander Carpenter is a musicologist and an associate professor of music at the University of Alberta, Augustana campus. His research focuses on the historical connections between psychoanalysis and music in early twentieth-century Vienna.