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Berg, Alban (Maria Johannes)
(b Vienna, 1885; d Vienna, 1935). Austrian composer whose output, though
small, is among the most influential and important of the 20th cent. One of four
children of a well-to-do family, had little formal mus. education but comp.
romantic songs when he was 15. In 1904 began private comp. lessons with Arnold
Schoenberg and decided to devote his life to music, giving up a job in the
Civil Service.
With his friend and fellow-pupil
Anton Webern, entered the avant-garde artistic
life of Vienna—the Sezession artists, the poet Peter Altenberg, the painter
Kokoschka—but the dominating figure was Gustav Mahler. Some of his songs were perf.
at a concert by Schoenberg pupils in Vienna, Nov. 1907, the pf. variations a year
later, and the str. qt. in 1911. When 2 of the 5 Altenberglieder with orch. were perf. in Vienna in Mar.
1913, cond. Schoenberg, the concert was continually interrupted and eventually
abandoned.
In May 1914 Berg attended a perf. of
Büchner's play Woyzeck and determined to make
an opera of it. Military service delayed work, but the mus. was eventually finished
in 1922 and was perf. in Berlin, Dec. 1925. It caused a furore but its success with
the public was never in doubt, despite critical polemics. In the next decade Berg's
powers were at their height and he comp. the Chamber Conc. (1925), the
Lyric Suite for str. qt. (1926), and the
concert aria Der Wein (1929). In 1929
began adaptation of 2 Wedekind plays as an opera lib. called Lulu. By 1934 he had completed the mus. in short
score and begun full instrumentation. In the spring of 1935 began vn. conc.
commissioned by Louis Krasner.
Impelled by news of the death of the
beautiful 18-year-old Manon Gropius, daughter of Mahler's widow by her 2nd
marriage, worked unwontedly quickly and finished the conc. in Aug. 1935, dedicating
it ‘to the memory of an angel’. Four months later he too died, through blood
poisoning from an insect-bite. It has recently been established that several of
Berg's works, incl. the Lyric Suite,
Lulu, and the Violin Concerto, contain mus.
cryptograms referring to his love for Frau Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (and
others).
Berg has become, to the
general public, the most acceptable of the so-called ‘12-note’ or ‘dodecaphonic’
composers, probably because he never was an orthodox atonalist. His work is nearer
to the Mahler idiom than to the Schoenbergian. In Wozzeck atonality is very
freely used and applied to a highly formal structure, each scene being in a
particular mus. form (variations, passacaglia, fugue, etc.). From the Lyric
Suite onwards, Berg used 12-note procedures nearer to, but still significantly
different from, the Schoenberg method. Technical methods notwithstanding, however,
it is the emotional content of Berg's mus. which has awoken a ready response in
listeners, particularly the Vn. Conc., which quotes the Bach chorale Es ist
genug at its climax.
His next work, the Chamber Concerto for violin, piano and 13 wind (1925),
moves decisively towards a more classical style: its three formally complex
movements are still more clearly shaped than those of the op.6 set and the scoring
suggests a response to Stravinskian objectivity. The work is also threaded through
with ciphers and numerical conceits, making it a celebration of the triune
partnership of Schönberg, Berg and Webern. Then came the Lyric Suite for string
quartet (1926), whose long-secret programme connects it with Berg's intimate
feelings for Hanna Fuchs-Robettin - feelings also important to him in the
composition of his second opera, Lulu (1929-35). The suite, in
six movements of increasingly extreme tempo, uses 12-note serial along with other
material in projecting a quasi-operatic development towards catastrophe and
annulment. The development of Lulu was twice interrupted by
commissioned works, the concert aria Der Wein on poems by
Baudelaire (1929) and the Violin Concerto (1935), and it remained unfinished at
Berg's death: his widow placed an embargo on the incomplete third act which could
not be published or performed until 1979. As with Wozzeck, he made his
own libretto out of stage material, this time choosing two plays by Wedekind, whom
he had long admired for his treatment of sexuality. Dramatically and musically the
opera is a huge palindrome, showing Lulu's rise through society in her successive
relationships and then her descent into prostitution and eventual death at the
hands of Jack the Ripper. Again the score is filled with elaborate formal schemes,
around a lyricism unloosed by Berg's individual understanding of 12-note serialism.
Something of its threnodic sensuality is continued in the Violin Concerto, designed
as a memorial to the teenage daughter of Mahler's widow.
Source : Some of the information on
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Documentation License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Alban
Berg - Manifestor - Biography
