Secret Song: the story of Alban Berg's Lyric Suite
A film by Hilan Warshaw with Renée Fleming and the Emerson Quartet
Cast
Renée Fleming — Soprano
Eugene Drucker — Violinist
Lawrence Dutton — Violist
Philip Setzer — Violinist
Paul Watkins — Cellist
Program notes
How much do you know about Alban Berg's Lyric Suite? Did you know that, far from the realm of abstraction, it was inspired by a passionate extramarital affair between the composer and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin? Or that the sixth movement was intended to contain a soprano part? In Secret Song by filmmaker Hilan Warshaw, amid dramatic reenactments and interviews with experts—as well as performance by Renée Fleming and the Emerson Quartet, who reconstruct the final movement as conceived by Berg—uncover all the mysteries around this work that is one of the indisputable masterpieces of 20th-century music.