Read on for our introduction to the life and work of the composer Alban Berg (1885-1935), one of the leading lights of the Second Viennese School.
Who was Alban Berg?
One of the great triumvirate of composers of the Second Viennese School – along with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern – Alban Berg’s compositional style moved from rich Romanticism to atonalism and, eventually, 12-tone serialism. Even in later composition, however, he retained elements of Romanticism in his writing, giving it a more humane feel than that of his colleagues.
Two of his operas – Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (left incomplete at his death in 1935) – are regularly performed today, as is his Violin Concerto (1935), one of the modern masterpieces for the instrument, and his Lyric Suite (1926) for string quartet. A deeply suspicious man, much of his music is full of cleverly concealed symbolism – not least revolving around the number 23.
What are Alban Berg's most famous works?
A short list of Berg's best known and most accomplished works would include one instrumental work (the Piano Sonata No. 1), one piece of chamber music (the Lyric Suite for string quartet), an orchestral work (Three Pieces for Orchestra), an opera (Wozzeck) and a concertante work (the beautiful, supremely evocative Violin Concerto).
Where was Alban Berg born?
Alban Berg was born on 9 February 1885 in Vienna, Austria. He was born into a prosperous family, which from early on had decided to propel him into a respectable bourgeois career.
Young Alban had quite other ideas, however, immersing himself in the more radical areas of the city’s burgeoning artistic and musical scene. He was also composing voice-and-piano songs which, while showing no great individuality as yet, were accomplished for a self-taught young composer.
In 1906, while training as a civil servant, he began taking composition lessons with Schoenberg. A large inheritance soon enabled him to take up composing full-time.
Did Alban Berg marry?
Yes: in 1910 he married Helene Nahowski, the daughter of a weatlhy family.
What was the 'Skandalkonzert'?
In 1913, Berg's Altenberg-Lieder (or Five Orchestral Songs after Postcards by Peter Altenberg) caused a riot when they were first performed at a concert in Vienna, later known as the ‘Skandalkonzert’. With Schoenberg conducting, members of the audience were so taken aback by the music that they rioted. Berg's feelings were so wounded that he never again allowed the Altenberg-Lieder to be performed.
Another sensation would follow 12 years later, in 1925, when his opera Wozzeck got its premiere in Berlin.
Who inspired Berg's Violin Concerto?
In 1935 the death of Alma Mahler’s daughter Manon inspired Berg to compose his eloquent, passionate Violin Concerto.
The influence of Schoenberg
Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), performed to much controversy (with anti-Semitic undertones) in Vienna in 1902, had made his name as a gifted post-Wagnerian composer.
Schoenberg set a tough standard for his pupils, insisting that they each set about discovering their creative individuality as he himself had – by learning how, in the work of the great composers, musical and technical values were different aspects of the same thing.
Schoenberg was also an exceptionally strong and combative personality, demanding total loyalty and support for his own cause. From the start he regarded Alban Berg as an ultra-willing acolyte, and his pupil responded with the devotion of one who, aged 15, had lost his own father. In their early correspondence, Berg’s self-abasing contributions gush along at several times the length of Schoenberg’s brisk replies.
Meanwhile his pupil’s musical progress, though gradual, was impressive. The single-movement Piano Sonata Op. 1 of 1908 was already a much stronger and more intense creation than Berg’s early songs had suggested.
Then came his ‘graduation piece’, the String Quartet Op. 3 of 1910. The two-movement design of this, breaking free from Schoenberg’s preferred single-movement example, was the crucible for the unmistakable emergence of Berg’s mature voice. But the Quartet’s first performance in 1911 wasn’t a success – and its composer wasn’t at all sure, in his own mind, that he had ‘arrived’.
'A legendary disaster'
In 1912, Alban Berg completed his first orchestral work: the five Altenberg-Lieder Op. 4, based on the short, cryptic poems that the Viennese writer Peter Altenberg liked to scribble onto postcards. The first and last of these settings find Berg magnificently lengthening his musical stride: the cycle’s finale, ‘Hier ist Friede’ (Here is peace), is a statement of astonishing strength by a composer who not yet heard a note of his own orchestral music.
Yet when Schoenberg conducted a concert of his own and his former pupils’ new works in Vienna’s Musikvereinsaal in March 1913, he programmed only the second and third songs of Berg’s cycle.
Given Schoenberg’s usual and admirable insistence on absolute fidelity to a composer’s intentions (not least his own), it seems extraordinary that he short-changed Berg’s work in this way, even allowing for the rehearsal-consuming demands of the first and fifth songs.
The concert itself then turned into a legendary disaster. Baleful audience whistling had been going on throughout the Six Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6 by Anton von Webern. Then, after only one of Berg’s songs, the audience’s facetious derision erupted into a substantial riot that needed the police to restore order. The concert was abandoned, and Berg never allowed his Altenberg-Lieder to be performed again during his lifetime.
Tough love
It took Schoenberg’s pugnacious brand of tough love to get Alban Berg beyond his post-concert trauma. Summoning his charming, diffident ex-pupil to a private meeting in Berlin, where he was now teaching, Schoenberg appears to have harangued Berg along the lines that the (mostly) terse forms of the Altenberg-Lieder, or of his ex-pupil’s newly written Clarinet Pieces, Op. 5, were a wrong direction: while it was fine for Webern and, currently, Schoenberg himself to be exploring such aphoristic musical thinking, Berg’s true future lay in tackling large forms. (Had Schoenberg belatedly taken on board the evidence of the unperformed ‘Hier ist Friede’?)
Retiring hurt to Vienna, Berg first attempted and abandoned a symphony, and then set about composing the Three Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6, fulsomely dedicating them to his former teacher.
Their complexity, virtuosity, and firepower amounted to another startling advance on Berg’s earlier music – particularly the formidable ‘March’, which takes the example of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony (described by Berg as ‘the only Sixth, despite the Pastoral’) and sends it hurtling into the darkest heart of 20th-century chromaticism.
In 1915, with World War I preventing any chance of the Three Pieces’ premiere, Berg wrote a vast, self-justifying letter about the work to Schoenberg, to which the Master apparently did not reply for some time. Perhaps this was his way of conveying that Berg now had to stand on his own two feet.
The success of Wozzeck
Just before the war, Alban Berg had seen the Viennese premiere of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, and had instantly written to Webern that he wanted to set it to music. During his wartime army service (which he hated) he brooded on the idea, beginning serious work on it while on leave in 1917. After the war, working as a civil servant and only able to compose in his spare time, he completed his opera in 1922.
Following its premiere in Berlin three years later, Wozzeck became a success that earned Berg substantial German royalties (until the Nazis banned it in 1933). Everything in his armoury of skills here came together – the sovereign technical command of a complex idiom; the brilliantly devised deployment of an abstract formal outline (five-movement suite, five-movement symphony, five inventions) to cross-brace the structure of each of the three Acts and their crisply intercut scenes; and the encompassing of expressionist extremes of drama, satire, horror, and compassion.
Schoenberg now had to come to terms with the fact that Berg had achieved a level of conspicuous success that he had not managed. Despite their new sense of colleagueship, the Master soon revealed a competitive response. Berg, having completed a Chamber Concerto (1923-25) and the Lyric Suite for string quartet (1925-26), had embarked on a second opera.
The Lulu years
Assembling his own libretto from two avant-garde plays by Frank Wedekind, one of which he had seen as early as 1904, Alban Berg worked on Lulu for six years before finishing the unorchestrated score in 1934.
By then Schoenberg had composed the first two Acts of an opera of his own. Although the final act of Moses and Aaron was never written, and the unfinished torso was not performed until after Schoenberg’s death in 1951, the work stands as his greatest single achievement.
But he must have known that an opera about a biblical prophet’s inability to communicate the essence of God to his followers was not likely to be as successful as an opera about sex, death, murder and mayhem – Berg’s time-honoured recipe in both Wozzeck and Lulu (although, in its ‘Dance round the Golden Calf’ episode, Moses and Aaron has its share of those qualities).
The full score of Lulu was unfinished when Alban Berg died in December 1935. His moving Violin Concerto, completed just a few months earlier, caused an international stir at its posthumous premiere in Barcelona in 1936. And within less than a year Schoenberg, now a US refugee from Nazi Germany, had planned and completed a Violin Concerto of his own.
Again, given the complex relationship between the two composers, it is impossible to believe that this was coincidence. Without Schoenberg’s overbearing, perceptive understanding of the young Berg’s potential, we probably wouldn’t have Wozzeck.
And without the inner resilience and self-knowledge which enabled Berg to survive both his Altenberg-Lieder experience and Schoenberg’s domineering response, eventually to create Wozzeck and Lulu, we probably wouldn’t have Moses and Aaron either. Genius will out.
How did Alban Berg die?
Alban Berg's death came early and tragically. On Christmas Eve 1935, at the age of just 50, he succumbed to septicaemia as a result of an insect sting.
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