Love Quote by Alban Berg

Berg is practically winking as he confesses to contraband. The word "smuggled" does heavy lifting: it suggests a border patrol between the abstract dignity of "absolute" music and the messy, narrative appetite of programme music. In early 20th-century modernism, that border mattered. Schoenberg's circle was busy proving that new harmonic languages could be rigorous, not merely decorative mood-setting. Berg, the most romantically inclined of the Second Viennese School, insists he can play that game while secretly packing his scores with human freight.

The line is also a sly jab at factions. "Adherents of programme music - should there be any left" is a little stab of cynicism aimed at a supposedly outdated camp. Then he flips it: if they only knew, they'd "go mad with joy". It's teasing, but it signals genuine desire to be understood. Berg isn't rejecting meaning; he's rejecting the demand to spell it out in a tidy plot synopsis. His ideal listener is both intimate ("dearest friend") and conspiratorial, someone who can recognize private symbols without a press release.

Contextually, those "three movements" point to the era's anxiety about what music could legitimately carry after late Romanticism: confession, friendship, erotic attachment, metaphysical yearning. Berg's subtext is that modern technique doesn't drain music of feeling; it can encrypt it. He frames references as spiritual and human not to sentimentalize, but to claim emotional legitimacy for a style often caricatured as cold. The joke lands because it's true: the most "abstract" music often hides the most personal life.