We hear of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, one of the most memorable and least likeable characters in Jane Austen's novels, that 'she likes to have the distinction of rank preserved' (PP 161). The obsequious Mr. Collins enjoins her guest Elizabeth Bennet to dress simply, and not to emulate the elegant apparel of her high-ranking hostess: the differences in station are not only present, but must be seen to be present.

Class difference was of course a fact of life for Austen, and an acute observation of the fine distinctions between one social level and another was a necessary part of her business as a writer of realistic fiction. Nor would she have wished it away, although at the time of writing her novels, she herself - as the unmarried daughter of a deceased country clergyman, like Miss Bates - knew what it was to suffer from the class system. Her favourite niece, Fanny Knight, 'whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour' (E 375), was shamelessly patronizing after she married a lord, and said her aunt, but for the advantages she gained at Godmersham, would have been 'very much below par as to good Society and its ways'.

Jane Austen inherited no obvious, no precisely defined tradition: not the classical canon which her brothers studied at school, not (like so many of her literary granddaughters) the canon as studied for a B.A. in English literature; not the full sweep of her predecessors in English fiction, many of whom remained unknown to her; not the intellectual framework offered by any regular course of study. 'Her reading was very extensive in history and belles lettres' (NA, P7). But it was desultory. She was never in a position, even had she wished it, to work through the kind of subject-bibliography which Emma is always drawing up; instead, she was dependent on titles which happened to come her way.

What came her way was by no means negligible. She was luckier than some of her heroines: Marianne Dashwood, who thinks her family library 'too well known to me' to provide 'anything beyond mere amusement' (SS 343), or Catherine Morland, who says, 'new books do not fall in our way' (NA 41). Austen's first library, her father's, ran to more than 500 books. Though her school experience was brief and insignificant, most of the usual school books were accessible at home. Most importantly, the whole family were avid book-borrowers and book-exchangers. Chawton, scene of her most sustained and productive period of writing, had a better reading group than she had found at Steventon and Manydown, as she was at pains to point out.

As she recalls her own memories of Aunt Jane to help brother James-Edward Austen-Leigh construct his Memoir of Jane Austen, Caroline Austen questions the possibility of ever representing a 'life' that already seems too obscure to recover. 'I am sure you will do justice to what there is - but I feel that it must be a difficult task to dig up the materials, so carefully have they been buried out of our sight by the past generation.' She dismisses the more obvious 'materials' at hand: 'There is nothing in those letters which I have seen that would be acceptable to the public - They were very well expressed, and they must have been very interesting to those who received them - but they detailed chiefly home and family events: and she seldom committed herself even to an opinion - so that to strangers they could be no transcript of her mind - they would not feel that they knew her any the better for having read them -'.

What I find so compelling about Caroline Austen's scepticism is its applicability to Austen studies in every generation. Readers coming to her letters usually find something 'missing' that vexes them. In his introduction to the first edition of the letters, R. W. Chapman recites what will continue to be 'a familiar defence' of the letters. They have been 'robbed of their general interest by Cassandra Austen's pious destruction of all that she supposed might possibly excite general curiosity'. By blaming Cassandra for keeping us from the 'real' Jane Austen, we are able to sustain an idea of the writer regardless of materials, or lack of materials, that occlude the portrait of the artist. We look to the letters for deep feeling, but are kept relegated to the surface of things, rewarded with 'small matters' and 'momentous minutiae'.

'It would be a delightful thing if a magazine could be started which should be devoted entirely to Miss Austen . . . We are never tired of talking about her; should we ever grow weary of reading or writing about her?' So wrote Walter Stafford, 2nd Earl of Iddesleigh, in 1900, in an essay entitled 'A Chat about Jane Austen's Novels' (811). One hundred years onward, Jane Austen Societies around the world talk, read, and write about Jane Austen, and the two largest of them have for many years produced annual volumes 'devoted entirely to Miss Austen'. Furthermore, these volumes are only a small portion of the library's-worth of writing about Jane Austen, nearly all of it published since 1900. What follows is a guide to that library, discussing first biographies of Jane Austen and then criticism of the novels. As we shall see, the Earl would be delighted.

Once upon a time, as the story goes, there lived a beautiful young woman of modest rank and excellent manners, but no significant income to speak of, and a handsome young man of great rank, haughty manners, and an estate 'ten miles round'. The beautiful young woman and the handsome young man meet, his haughty manners improve, they fall in love, he proposes marriage, and, in the concluding pages, her very modest means are joined to his very great estate in an event that surpasses even the wildest dreams of her ambitious mother.

It's an irresistible story, so irresistible, in fact, that garbled accounts from the popular press fluttered readers for three years and more with rumours that Jane Austen's text was not only being readied for television, but was going to feature a nude Mr. Darcy - as if Austen's economic romance were not more complex, shaded, and, well, more passionate, than mere flesh. If sex were all there were to it, we've seen it before. But when the BBC camera turns its yearning gaze on Britain's Historic Houses, Castles, and Gardens, their vast acres smiling in the sunshine, their sweeping Capability Brown parks, the splendid house presiding over it all, then the blood begins to pump in earnest.

These words of Jane Austen to her brother Frank, written on July 3, 1813 (L 317) after she had published two novels, are those of a professional author who is acutely conscious of her sales (as well as the possible future value of her copyright) and eager to increase her profits. Austen's professionalism here exists in startling contrast to her brother Henry's earliest biographical accounts of her, accounts that helped to create the longstanding myth of Austen as a genteel amateur, the spinster lady author who sketched her novels in moments of leisure. Henry wrote in his first 'Biographical Notice' (printed with Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818):

'For what do we live', Mr. Bennet exclaims to his favourite daughter late in Pride and Prejudice, 'but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?' (PP 364). The question is rhetorical - an answer, not a proper question - and Jane Austen's moral critics have sternly remonstrated with those who read it as the novelist's own answer. They explain it away as an epigram, only Mr. Bennet's philosophy, to be read ironically - by which they mean dismissively. And indeed Mr. Bennet is particularly obtuse, his wit ill-advised, when he says what he does while chuckling over the letter in which Mr. Collins reports that his patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, disapproves of a marriage between Elizabeth and Darcy. Earlier in the novel, when her father read a letter from the same unctuous writer, Elizabeth was his pleased collaborator, asking, 'Can he be a sensible man, sir?', so Mr. Bennet could complacently reply, 'No, my dear; I think not. I have great hopes of finding him quite the reverse. There is a mixture of servility and self-importance in his letter, which promises well. I am impatient to see him' (64).

For Jane Austen and the majority of her contemporaries, religion and politics were inextricably intertwined and of central ideological and material interest, and had long been so. Austen belonged to the Church of England, or Anglican church, established as the state church in the sixteenth century. It was Protestant, headed by the monarch, and episcopal in structure. Its theology and ecclesiastical structure were a compromise between Roman Catholicism and non-Calvinist Protestantism. Anglican theology was Arminian, rejecting the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and affirming salvation by a combination of true faith and good works, free will and divine grace. There were some groups who rejected various aspects of the established church and its theology, however, and who were accordingly known as 'Dissenters' or 'Nonconformists' and excluded from certain civil rights. These differences and inequalities resulted in social, cultural, and political tensions that reached a particular crisis in Austen's day.

When Jane Austen moved to Chawton cottage in 1809 she sent off a poem to her brother Francis that celebrates the occasion:

It was at Chawton that Jane Austen, settled with her mother, sister, and friend, found the conditions that fostered the writing of three of her greatest novels. Mansfield Park, published in 1814, Emma, published in 1816, and Persuasion, published after Austen's death, in 1818, develop that complicating of a romantic narrative with social satire and psychological insight so characteristic of her earlier work. These novels also display a more intensified sense of the influence of place and environment on personality and action, a broader and more thoughtful social critique, and a much greater power of imagining her figures within the social and geographical spaces they inhabit. In the action of the novels that Jane Austen wrote at Chawton, communal, family, and physical settings - homes, houses, and, indeed, 'rooms concise or rooms distended' - play an important role.

In Jane Austen's unfinished Catharine, or the Bower, found in the notebook Volume the Third, we hear silly Camilla Stanley and her mother gushing over Camilla's correspondence with her friend Augusta:

Austen's abortive novel can be heard here making fun of the epistolary mode, and of both the opposing views regarding female letter-writing. Mrs. Stanley approves of female correspondence: 'I have from Camilla's infancy taught her to think the same ... Nothing forms the taste more than sensible & Elegant Letters' (C&O W202).

The phrase ‘musical language’, though in everyday use, begs many questions and carries a multitude of assumptions. There is naturally a rich and varied literature which attempts to give the topic its due and to work out its detailed implications from a number of perspectives. In this brief chapter, however, the phrase is used in its everyday sense, as a convenient shorthand for the investigation of technical matters in a musical work inasmuch as they relate to what is broadly familiar, embodying an assumption that such ramification of a specific work in a shared context both supports and to some extent reveals a kind of latent musical ‘understanding’. In the present context such discussion must also reckon with the fact that Wozzeck is an opera, even if the question of genre is far from one-dimensional in this of all such works. The subtitle of Janet Schmalfeldt's impressive monograph on Wozzeck – ‘harmonic language and dramatic design’ – explicitly conjoins the notion of musical language with the idea that operatic music serves a dramatic purpose. Both her book and an earlier study by George Perle seek to relate specific musical configurations to characters, situations and symbols in the drama. As the format of Perle's article acknowledges, this approach owes much to an exegetic line of writing about opera that developed in the post-Wagnerian period. Indeed, the examples of Berg's own guides to Schoenberg's Gurrelieder and Pelleas und Melisande serve to remind us that during his lifetime such writing frequently spilled over into discussions of non-operatic works.

In January 1977 the American composer and Berg scholar George Perle made a trip to Mifflinburg, Pennsylvania to visit Dorothea Robetin, “the daughter of Herbert and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, who had in her possession a previously unexamined copy of the first published score of the Lyric Suite given to her mother by the composer. Annotated in red, blue and green ink by Berg himself and consisting of ninety pages, only eight of which were without some annotation in Berg's hand, this extraordinary document revealed that the work had behind it a detailed extra-musical programme charting the course of a love affair between Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin.

For many years, scholars had known that extra-musical programmes of some kind lay behind much of Berg's music – Willi Reich's description of the programme of the Violin Concerto in the first article ever published about the work and Berg's own ‘Open Letter’ on the Chamber Concerto had made that much clear. Such things as the sequence of tempo directions that head the movements of the Lyric Suite (Allegretto giovale, Andante amoroso, Allegro misterioso and Trio estatico, Adagio appassionato, Presto delirando, Largo desolato), and the various musical quotations from Zemlinsky and Wagner that appear during the course of the work, had already led commentators to indulge in speculation about it. Only with the publication in the summer of 1977 of Perle's articles about his discovery, however, did the precise nature of the programme of what Adorno had called ‘a latent opera’ and the extent to which the details of the programme were incorporated into and influenced the structure of the final work become clear.

An opera and its satellites

Work on his second opera dominated the last eight years or more of Berg's life. Yet he accomplished much else besides. To this period also belongs his Violin Concerto – the earliest serial composition to gain the status of a modern classic – together with the concert aria Der Wein. Berg also compiled and orchestrated his set of Seven Early Songsy prepared a string orchestra version of three movements from the Lyric Suite, revised the Three Orchestral Pieces Op. 6 into the form in which they are generally heard, and produced the set of five symphonic pieces known today as the Lulu Suite; he also published several articles and carried out some smaller compositional tasks, such as the four-voice canon which he dedicated to the Frankfurt opera house. Most of these projects were touched to a lesser or greater degree by their chronological proximity to the composition of Lulu, and in turn the opera bears traces of some of the smaller projects.

Berg began his search for a new operatic subject within a month of the Wozzeck premiere, and following a suggestion from his friend Soma Morgenstern he began to consider the ‘glassworks fairy-tale’ Und Pippa tanzt! (1906) by Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946). He wrote to Hauptmann's publishers as early as 8 June 1926 about the matter of a royalty agreement, but pending these negotiations he also gave consideration to the two Lulu tragedies of Frank Wedekind (1864–1918) – responding after more than twenty years to the enormous impression that had been made on him as a young man by his literary idol Karl Kraus's private production of the second Lulu play, Die Büchse der Pandora, in May 1905. Nor were these the only sources he looked at; but by mid-1927 it seemed that Pippa and Lulu were the only serious possibilities.

The modern and the plural

As an ‘Age of Extremes’ with a vigorously diverse mainstream, the twentieth century – in music as in other respects – does not lend itself to straightforward summarising, or the tracing of unambiguously consistent tendencies and trajectories, involving clear-cut lines of influence and dependency. What can be demonstrated, if the musical history of the century is surveyed, are networks of shared concerns which involve many different composers in many different ways, with many degrees of connection and divergence. To tell the story of twentieth-century music with Berg as a central character would require a particularly sensitive interpretation of such networks. The possibility that Berg could be an ‘indispensable’ figure has nevertheless been acknowledged for some time – for example, in a striking assessment by Pierre Boulez, first published in 1958, and all the more important for the ways in which it modifies Boulez's own earlier (1948) and much more hostile ‘reception’ of the composer. Observing first that Berg's ‘influence’ was ‘at present less decisive than that of Webern, despite the greater immediate range of his music’, Boulez continued:

When Berg was in Frankfurt for the premiere of the Three Fragments from ‘Wozzeck’ in 1924 he was introduced to a twenty-one-year-old student named Theodor Wiesengrund. Wiesengrund was about to submit a doctoral dissertation in philosophy on the then fashionable topic of Husserlian phenomenology, but he also had some training as a musician and had published a number of journalistic pieces on contemporary music. Later, Wiesengrund would claim that at the time he saw in Berg a representative of the ‘true new music’ – ‘at the same time Schoenberg and Mahler’. He proposed to move to Vienna to study composition with Berg as soon as the formalities for the granting of his doctoral degree were completed. Berg agreed to take him as a student.

Wiesengrund was the only son of a wealthy Jewish wine merchant, Oskar Wiesengrund, and of Maria Calvelli-Adorno, a French singer. He was a highly intelligent, deeply cultured and aesthetically sensitive young man, but had in some ways a not very attractive character. Schoenberg found his oily, self-important manner, arrogance and beady-eyed stare repulsive, and certainly Wiesengrund's writings give the impression of being the work of a more than usually self-absorbed person. Despite this, Berg seems to have had a genuine affection for him and a high opinion of his compositions, although no interest at all in his philosophical speculations.