Listen for … the Chorale
Berg’s Violin Concerto concludes with a set of variations on the Lutheran chorale “Es ist genug! Herr, wenn es
Dir gefällt” (“It is enough! Lord, when it pleases you”). As he was composing the piece, Berg discovered that the
final four notes of his tone row corresponded exactly with the opening notes of that chorale’s melody, which he
knew through its harmonization in Bach’s Cantata No. 60. The chorale melody begins with a succession of three
whole tones, which together describe the interval of the augmented fourth — the tritone, anciently forbidden
as the “devil in music.”
Berg also realized that his current project enjoyed not just a musical connection to the chorale, but a poetic
one as well, since the text of the chorale supremely expressed an emotion he was endeavoring to articulate
about Manon Gropius’s inevitable resignation to untimely death:
It is enough!
Lord, when it pleases you
Unshackle me at last.
My Jesus comes;
I bid the world goodnight
I travel to the heavenly home.
I surely travel there in peace,
My troubles left below.
It is enough! It is