Berg wrote the first movement of the work in 1909, when it was ‘tried out’ by an ad hoc quartet; the second movement was completed in 1910. Schoenberg’s Quartet No 2 had received its first performance in December 1908 and from the outset Berg recognised the implications of what Schoenberg had achieved. He would go on to produce a work that was even more radical.

In 1936, soon after Berg’s death, Schoenberg wrote about Op 3 that 'obviously Alban, who had occupied himself extraordinarily intensively with contemporary music, with Mahler, Strauss, perhaps even Debussy, whose music I did not know, but certainly with my music—it is sure that Alban had a burning desire to express himself no longer in classical forms, harmonies, and melodic forms and their proper schemata of accompaniment, but in a manner in accordance with the times and wth his own personality which had been developing in the meantime … One thing is sure: his string quartet (opus 3) surprised me in the most unbelievable way by the fulness and unconstraint of its musical language, the strength and sureness of its presentation, its careful working and significant originality.'

Formally the first of the two movements of Op 3 bears some semblance to that of a traditional sonata form but without any suggestion of the functional harmonies or tonal centres that would usually support such a structure. The second movement has no such formal background and, while it has its own distictive material, is best understood as a development and reworking of material from the first movement—indeed the basis of the whole work is the Schoenbergian concept of ‘developing variation’ in which an idea is constantly modified and varied, giving rise, through compressing or extending, inverting or realigning the material, to new motives and new variants. Thus, for example, the fff theme on viola and cello at bar 5 of movement 2 is based on an inverted and rhythmically changed version of the lyrical theme on first violin at bar 6 of movement 1. The relationship between the two movements gradually become more clear as the second movement progresses until, towards the end, it quotes directly from the opening of the first movement.

Berg was a moderately good pianist when playing piano duets, describing himself as the 'last of the great four-hand players'. He was not a string player but one notable feature of the score of Op 3 is the detailed technical instructions as to exactly how it was to be played. Thus we have not only directions that a passage should be played on the bridge, as harmonics on the bridge, played on the finger board, struck or played with the wood of the bow, spring Bogen, with a dense or light tremolo and so on, but also stipulations about which of the strings a figure should be played on. The whole work thus also acts as a demonstration of the colouristic possibilities of the medium. Op 3 received its premiere in Vienna in April 1911 but it was not until its performance by the Havemann Quartet at the ISCM Festival in Salzburg in 1923, almost a year after the publication of the piano score of Wozzeck, that it received a warm reception; 18 months earlier, by April 1922, the work, which had been had been published at the end of 1920, had sold only 10 copies of the score and 10 sets of parts. The premiere of Wozzeck in Berlin in December 1925, just over two years after the Salzburg performance of Op 3, would of course establish Berg as a major figure.

from notes by Douglas Jarman © 2022