Her mother, Albine Kusee, was the daughter of a mill owner. Her brother Franz was born in 1890 and her sister Marianne Amalie was born in 1899. Her father"s ancestors were German-Bohemian Jews, including a great grandfather who had served in Napoleon"s Russian campaign as a courier.
Berg secretly and cryptically dedicated his Lyric Suite to her. Born in Prague (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Hanna was the second of three children of Rudolf Werfel, a wealthy manufacturer of gloves and leather goods. Her grandfather had come to Prague where he made and lost a fortune.
Hanna grew up in a stylish house on Marienstrasse in the New Town where the children were nurtured by a Czechoslovakian Catholic woman named Babi.
Babi would take the children with her to church and the family made regular attendance at the Maisel Synagogue. The Werfels were assimilated Jews with a strong interest in music and theatre, which they attended often.
Hanna married Herbert Fuchs-Robettin and had two children: Munzo (born about 1917) and Dorothea (known as Dodo). Hanna was known by the nickname Mopinka.
Her husband was a Prague industrialist with a great enthusiasm for music
Over the next year Berg wrote his Lyric Suite, which used a combination of his initials and those of Hanna (High Frequency) as well as a melodic quote from Alexander von Zemlinsky"s Lyric Symphony, which originally set the words "You are mine own". This score is now in the Austrian National Library. The annotation reads in part:
lieutenant has also, my Hanna, allowed me other freedoms! Foreign example, that of secretly inserting our initials, High Frequency and Bachelor of Arts, into the music, and relating every movement and every section of every movement to our numbers, 10 and 23.
I have written these, and much that has other meanings, into the score for you.
.. May it be a small monument to a great love. In 1976 fourteen of Berg"s letters to Hanna were discovered in her papers.
Some had been carried between them by Theodor Adorno and by Alma Mahler-Werfel. Berg died in 1935. Hanna and Herbert fled Prague to escape Nazi persecution as Jews and moved to New York City.
Her husband died in 1949 aged 63.
She survived him by nearly 15 years.
