1885–1935 · Austria · 20th century
Alban Berg (1885–1935) was an Austrian composer, a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg and a member of the Second Viennese School. He is best known for the operas Wozzeck and the unfinished Lulu, and for his Violin Concerto. For a player, he is notable as the composer of the song "Nacht" — a rare case of his music available without an orchestra.
Alban Berg was born in Vienna on 9 February 1885, into a merchant family with roots in Nürnberg. His musical gift showed early — he had already begun trying to compose around 1900. He did not receive a systematic musical education: starting in 1904 he spent several years studying music theory and composition under Arnold Schoenberg, who remained his only teacher and main authority in music.
Berg was the third of four children. Money in the family came from his father's export trade, which had also brought a few country estates near Vienna. After his father died in 1900, when Alban was fifteen, the family's situation grew markedly worse, and he even had to sit his sixth- and seventh-grade school exams twice. In 1906 Berg met the singer Helene Nahowski; despite opposition from her family, the couple married on 3 May 1911.
Even as a student, Berg sketched five draft versions of a piano sonata; out of these sketches grew his first published work, the Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (likely composed in 1908–1909, published in 1910), later described as one of the most mature "first" works in the history of music.
From 1911 to 1915 Berg earned a living as a proofreader at the Viennese publishing house Universal Edition, while also helping Schoenberg — preparing arrangements of his works and writing explanatory guides to his music.
Berg's first truly individual work in style was the vocal cycle Five Songs on Picture-Postcard Texts by Altenberg, Op. 4. Its 1913 Vienna performance was accompanied by a loud scandal — the audience's outrage was such that the police had to be called, and the evening went down in twentieth-century music history as one of its loudest. Although Schoenberg conducted these songs, he spoke rather sharply about his pupil's new compositions, which undermined Berg's confidence in his own abilities.
After serving in the Austro-Hungarian army from 1915 to 1918, Berg contributed from 1919 to the Viennese music journal Anbruch. In 1918–21 he was also involved in Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances, where he organised rehearsals and put together concert programmes.
Even before the full premiere, in June 1924, the conductor Hermann Scherchen performed three excerpts from Wozzeck in Frankfurt, bringing Berg his first real public success; that same year he received the Art Prize of the City of Vienna.
Berg's true worldwide fame came from the opera Wozzeck, based on Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck, on which he worked for several years. The world premiere in Berlin on 14 December 1925 came about thanks to the conductor Erich Kleiber. Alma Mahler financially supported the printing of the score, and the composer dedicated the opera to her. The Berlin production caused a huge public response, and the opera quickly spread to opera stages across Europe and America; today Wozzeck is considered a classic example of twentieth-century opera.
From 1928 until the end of his life Berg worked on his second opera, Lulu, based on two plays by Frank Wedekind, Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box. He composed all the music in full and set it down in piano score, but never finished the orchestration. At the centre of the plot is an alluring and depraved "femme fatale", an image rooted in the atmosphere of Viennese decadence. The opera's dramaturgy is built on a loosely understood principle of symmetry — paired roles and a branching web of echoing motifs — and reveals itself without distortion only in the complete three-act version.
While preparing the premiere, the composer's widow asked Schoenberg, Webern and Zemlinsky to orchestrate the piano score of the third act, but all three declined, citing lack of time. As a result, the 1937 premiere at the Zurich Opera featured only the first two acts and an orchestral fragment of the third. The success of that production convinced Helene Berg that the opera worked even in that incomplete form, and for many years afterwards she did not allow musicians to complete the score. Only after Helene Berg's death was the finished score of Lulu finally heard in full: it was completed by the Czech composer Friedrich Cerha, and the first performance of the complete version took place in Paris on 24 February 1979, conducted by Pierre Boulez.
Apart from his operas, Berg's creative legacy is not particularly large. Among his purely instrumental scores, the best known is the 1935 Violin Concerto, dedicated "to the memory of an angel" — Berg's name for his dedication to Manon Gropius, Alma Mahler's daughter, who died very young. The concerto was first performed in 1936, with Louis Krasner playing the violin part and Webern conducting, and his contemporaries heard in this music something like a requiem for the composer himself.
Berg's other works include the Chamber Concerto for piano, violin and thirteen wind instruments (1925), the Lyric Suite for string quartet (1926), whose score conceals a personal love story between the composer and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, and the concert aria Der Wein for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, on poems by Baudelaire (1929).
In the 1930s it became increasingly difficult to work: antisemitic sentiment was rising in Vienna and Germany, and Nazi cultural policy rejected anything it considered too modern. The mere fact of having studied with Schoenberg, a Jewish composer, became grounds for attacks on Berg, and his works were admitted to German stages ever more rarely. In 1932 the composer bought a remote house called the Waldhaus, above the Wörthersee's south bank in Carinthia, close to Schiefling; there he could work undisturbed for long stretches, devoting most of that time to Lulu and to his Violin Concerto.
Berg died unexpectedly, apparently of blood poisoning caused by a boil on his back that became inflamed after an insect bite. The composer was buried in Vienna, at the Hietzing Cemetery, next to Schönbrunn Palace.
Berg was a representative of musical expressionism and the Second Viennese School: he continued the line begun by his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, but kept a romantic lyricism in his own music. He did not write a great deal: the most important place in his legacy belongs to two operas, Wozzeck and the unfinished Lulu, along with a handful of major instrumental scores — the Violin Concerto, the Chamber Concerto and the Lyric Suite for string quartet. Among his purely orchestral scores, the Three Pieces for Orchestra stand out, completed in 1915 but not performed for the first time until after Wozzeck.
Critics see in his music a combination of Mahler's late-Romantic expressiveness with Schoenberg's free tonality and twelve-tone technique; Berg's twelve-tone writing is considered more human and more emotional than Schoenberg's own, and audiences accepted his music more readily than Schoenberg's. Once fiercely controversial, it is now recognised as a classic of musical modernism, valued for combining strict construction with sensuous, expressive sound.
A pianist might find it interesting that Berg's first published work was the Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (likely written in 1908–1909, published in 1910) — critics called it one of the most mature "first" opuses in music history. It is not yet on the site, but it is worth keeping in mind as a rare example of solo piano music from a composer who wrote mainly for orchestra, opera and chamber ensembles.
All of his mature scores were written for orchestra, the opera stage or a chamber ensemble: his only solo piano piece is the early Piano Sonata, Op. 1, and it is not on the site either. For a player, the way into Berg's music runs through voice and piano: the site has his song "Nacht", for voice and piano, at an upper-intermediate level. It is worth starting with this piece: there is no other route here, and a vocal-instrumental ensemble requires a partner and teaches you to listen not only to your own part but to someone else's as well.