In November, an insect stung him on the back. In December, his blood became infected. And just like that, he died simply and absurdly. At fifty.

Christmas Eve 1935, in a Vienna hospital, a man knows the end is near. This is the composer Alban Berg, and this is how the Belgian writer Pierre Mertens imagines him in his book Apocryphal Letters (translated by Yiannis Tivaios, ed. to the woman herself, his sister, his mistress, his mentor, the composer Arnold Schoenberg), thinking about music Schumann and Schubert, Wagner and Puccini – thinking primarily about his own music, which he managed to complete and those he left in half: the opera Wotzek, the Violin Concerto, mainly the Lyric Suite. This work is inspired by a passionate love born ten years ago, in 1925, for Hannah. The second special movement of the suite, Andante amoroso, is in itself a story of furious, desperate passion.

“When I was young,” says Berg Mertens, “I boasted that I knew a woman’s heart very well. I thought this continent had no secrets for me. I made a mistake not because of arrogance, but only because I was incurably naive. His occult love is (also) a small death, apart from the premature death of the young Manon, to whom he will dedicate an excellent Violin Concerto. “You don’t sing, you don’t praise the death of women so insistently if you claim to understand them,” he adds pointedly.

“You don’t sing, you don’t praise the death of women so insistently if you claim to understand them.”

Berg loves his wife Helene, wracked with guilt, but falls in love with “Hannah like the others in a terrifying riot”.

Listening to the symphonic suite “Lulu”, taken from “Wozek”, already from the first notes of the strings and metallophone one feels a dense, evocative atmosphere: Berg is ready to say goodbye to the “code of the world” (“and this music is unbearable with me, otherwise I would not write it “).

“Fifty: no age to die” – Berg’s monologue. But they were enough, he says, for him to experience “precious sufferings of passion.” This is one of those situations in which his always positive mentor Schoenberg understands little (even though he wrote the unimaginable Night in Delight…).

Berg, on the verge of death, has a final message to convey in his head to his old teacher: “Don’t trust melancholics, sometimes they are gluttons. Hedonism deceives them.”