2004 Grammy Award – Best Chamber Music Performance

Released to celebrate Kronos Quartet’s 30th anniversary, the recording of Austrian composer Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite – a major 20th century work that the quartet has performed numerous times over the years – features Dawn Upshaw singing a setting of Baudelaire’s poem “De profundis clamavi” during the final movement. Berg had deleted from the vocal part his final version, and it had been lost until its discovery 50 years later.

In 1925, the long-married Alban Berg experienced a turbulent, clandestine eight-day love affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, who also was married. As divorce was impossible, the composer sought solace in the creation of a new string quartet—the six-movement Lyric Suite. The piece, completed in 1926, traces the tumultuous narrative of the relationship and includes several private symbols of the affair, including the ciphered initials of the two lovers and thematically resonant quotations from Wagner and Zemlinsky. The meaning of those references and the lost vocal part, along with the romance, remained hidden from the public until 1977, when American composer and scholar George Perle discovered a specially annotated copy of the score that had been sent from “Alban” to “Hanna.”

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