At Bard Festival, placing Berg at center of modern musical Vienna

Directly below Berg’s window, placed on the sidewalk and leaning against the building, is the famous full-length portrait of Berg painted by his teacher Arnold Schoenberg. The viewer’s gaze shuttles between the actual Berg and the Berg of the portrait. They compete for our attention, with the real Berg leaning slightly toward the camera, as if quietly imploring us to focus on him, without Schoenberg’s mediation.

That shifting of focus — viewing Berg and many of his contemporaries on their own terms — was, in short, the goal of this year’s Bard Music Festival. Every summer this distinctive festival, located on the Hudson Valley campus of Bard College less than 90 minutes from the Berkshires, chooses one composer and rolls out a heady array of concerts, talks, and panel discussions that cumulatively place him deep within the context of his times. This year’s festival, which concluded last Sunday, was devoted to “Berg and His World.’’ I caught the second of two densely packed weekends.

At first blush you might think a multiday event spotlighting a composer of challenging modernist music would be box office folly, but each of the six concerts I attended was full or nearly so, as were all of the panels and pre-concert lectures. Bard’s audiences in fact seem to come explicitly for what makes this festival unique: the unusual repertoire, the web of broader cultural connections spun around the music, and the festival’s noble attempt at bridging the chasm that often separates scholars of music from the general concert-going public. In just one telling detail, at the back of this year’s 80-page program book, the bios of performers and professors appear in one interwoven list. At Bard, both are essential to the show.

That same program book had the photo of the two Bergs on its cover, and seemed to signal the festival’s agenda as a whole. For decades since his death in 1935, Berg has been summarily grouped with Schoenberg and Anton Webern as the triumvirate that gave birth to modern music. Cementing their association has been the name with which it’s often tagged: the Second Viennese School.

It’s not a helpful phrase, and not just because in an effort to position these composers as linked to the likes of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, it suggests a First Viennese School that never really existed. It also came to imply a single valid pathway to modern music, one that obscures Berg’s own individuality as well as the true breadth of the musical world in which he lived.

Yes, all three men took up the torch of atonality and eventually employed Schoenberg’s revolutionary 12-tone method of composition, based on orderings of all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale. And like all good revolutionaries, they sought to rewrite not only the future of music but also its past, developing narratives that placed Schoenberg’s method as a culmination of music’s own internal evolution. In Webern’s phrase, music had given up tonality “just as a ripe fruit falls from the tree.’’

And yet, it turns out, Berg had ideas of his own. Or you might say that, when no one was looking, he picked up the tonal fruit and bottled some of its sweet nectar. Berg used 12-tone rows in his works but often in ways that still generated tonal allusions, and he turned to classical forms as a kind of hidden musical scaffolding. His music is dazzlingly complex and dissonant — it is “modern sounding’’ — yet also in its way tremendously sensual and lush. There are layers and codes accessible only to the most highly trained specialist, but the music’s core eloquence can be grasped by anyone familiar with the expressive contours of great Romantic music.

Think for instance of Berg’s 12-tone Violin Concerto, with its opulent textures, its soaring solo line, and its undisguised quotation from a Bach chorale. Ultimately, this bridging of sensibilities and of centuries is at the core of Berg’s enduring appeal as a 20th-century composer: While embracing a kind of radical modernity, his works glow with a subliminal memory of music’s past.

At Bard, the Violin Concerto and all of Berg’s other mature works were performed, but Berg’s catalog is so small that only a few major works were left by the time the second weekend arrived. In a way, this made the concerts all the more interesting, as lesser-known music by many other composers was used to fill in the picture of Berg’s world, and to advocate for a wider view of the modern Viennese musical experiment itself.

As if to underscore the point, almost no Schoenberg or Webern was played, and Berg’s music seemed to benefit from the fresh company. As Christopher Hailey, the festival’s scholar in residence, wrote in a volume of essays published for the occasion, Berg had long since “slipped out the back door of the Second Viennese School to take his place among the truants milling around the schoolyard.’’ And we in fact know Berg quite well in comparison with these “truant’’ composers, many of whom for various reasons have disappeared from the history books. It was perhaps then not surprising that the most memorable performances at Bard came largely from this vanished repertoire.

First and foremost was Franz Schreker’s opera “Der Ferne Klang,’’ which was staged by Bard earlier this summer (and which I reviewed). The Schreker premiered in 1912 and suggests a kind of dramatically fraught prewar impressionism. But by the 1920s, music seemed to inhabit a different cultural universe.

As Europe was careening through what one historian dubbed its “age of catastrophe,’’ composers grew skeptical about the grand 19th-century traditions. They started satirizing profundity, jumping on new musical fads, loving the foxtrot. Berlin and other cities witnessed a delirious parade of “Zeitopern’’ or “topical operas’’ on contemporary themes. Last Sunday night, between music drawn from Berg’s operatic masterpieces “Wozzeck’’ and “Lulu,’’ two outlandishly provocative one-acts from the era found their way onto Bard’s opera-themed final program led by Leon Botstein, the festival’s codirector and the president of Bard College. The first of the two was Weill’s mistily surrealist “Royal Palace’’ (in a version reconstructed by Gunther Schuller), followed by Hindemith’s “Sancta Susanna,’’ a compact grenade of an opera in which a nun seeks punishment by death after tearing off her habit and ripping a loincloth from the crucifix.

OK, so “Sancta Susanna’’ is not about to elbow out “La Boheme’’ in future opera seasons, but Hindemith’s score is brutally effective, and the music is well worth hearing on its own terms and as a way of deepening our sense of this tumultuous era as a whole. (And as it turns out, Opera Boston next season is presenting “Cardillac,’’ another Hindemith opera from the same period.)

The Zeitopern of Weill and Hindemith were not designed to last for the ages — and they didn’t. Schreker’s works were of greater scale and potential staying power but his posthumous reputation suffered from musical politics. A third grouping of the weekend’s rarely heard works have drifted into oblivion for other understandable reasons: because their creators cast their lot with the wrong side.

The Austrian composer Franz Schmidt, for instance, died just before the outbreak of World War II but his music was vociferously championed by the Nazis and, before his death, he returned the compliment by beginning a cantata called “German Resurrection.’’ On Saturday night, Botstein led the American Symphony Orchestra and additional vocal forces in a very rare performance of Schmidt’s “Book of the Seven Seals,’’ a massive sprawling oratorio about the end of days. This time, however, the listener was spared the need to grapple with thorny issues of music and morality, and whether great works of art can or should be divorced from the behavior of their creators. Despite some arresting moments, most of Schmidt’s oratorio came across as leaden and grimly literal-minded in its musical depiction of the apocalypse. Toss in the eerie parallels between Schmidt’s subject matter and its historical moment, and the piece’s obscurity starts to feel like no great injustice.

No such easy outs were provided last Sunday afternoon, when the Bard Festival Chamber Players and baritone John Hancock gave an arresting account of the rapturously beautiful song cycle “Notturno’’ by Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck. (It was written in the early 1930s, but Schoeck later became a blatant Nazi sympathizer.) The same chamber program, designed to explore the range of composer responses to dark times, also featured a riveting traversal of Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s rhapsodic First Quartet, a top-drawer piece whose neglect is more baffling. (Hartmann practiced a so-called inner emigration, remaining in Germany but withdrawing from public musical life.)

Berg on this program was represented by his iridescent treatment of a Theodor Storm poem, “Schilesse mir die Augen beide.’’ Soprano Ilana Davidson and pianist Anna Polonsky were the superb performers, both of the Berg and of Ernst Krenek’s “Durch die Nacht,’’ a gleaming setting of poetry by Karl Kraus that proved to be another stunner.

When it came to politics, Berg was no Nazi sympathizer but he was, like many artists, naive about the Third Reich. The companion book of essays brings to light Berg’s unpublished correspondence from 1934, when he tried to install a musical ally, Erich Kleiber, as conductor of the Vienna State Opera even though he thought Kleiber was a card-carrying member of the Nazi party. (Berg was wrong about Kleiber’s politics, but that’s almost beside the point.) To the extent it might help secure performances, Berg also went to great lengths to demonstrate his own good Aryan stock. “No proverbial moral stone need be cast,’’ Botstein summarized, but “Berg was neither a saint nor a hero.’’

Politics were a running theme of the weekend but only as part of a bigger Bergian picture. In his eloquent essay on the composer, the scholar Hailey mentions a telling personal detail. Once Berg became a celebrity following the success of “Wozzeck,’’ he had frosted glass installed in his windows — the very windows we see in the photograph with the portrait. Berg explained at the time that he valued his privacy, but he also confessed that the frosted glass spared him from having to see what was taking place in his own city.

It was perhaps of a piece with a longstanding penchant toward inwardness — a tendency to hold the hurly-burly of the outside world at a distance from the private depths of the self. That interiority is of course part of the Romantic inheritance Berg never abandoned even as he wrote music of fantastic modernity and complexity. It’s also one of the reasons his art still resonates long after the high-modernist tradition itself has been toppled from its throne, becoming just one of many styles battling for our attention. The dense, surging textures of the “Lulu’’ Suite were the final notes heard at Bard last weekend. After three days of listening to and around Berg’s remarkable art, it sounded all the richer.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.