Alban Berg, with Anton Webern and their teacher Arnold
Schoenberg, together make up the group of composers generally known as the
Second Viennese School in the early years of the twentieth century. The
technical compositional systems developed by Schoenberg, a logical extension of
Wagnerian chromaticism, had a profound effect on the course of music throughout
the century, as traditional tonalities and keys were seemingly abandoned,
dissonances differently handled and principles of musical unity developed into
a very different language.
Born in Vienna in 1885, Berg was the son of a prosperous
businessman. He had little formal musical education, although he attempted his
first compositions in 1901, but owed the training he had to Schoenberg, whose
pupil he became in 1904, after he left school and began unpaid work as an
apprentice civil servant. Bergs father had died in 1900 and he persuaded his
mother to allow him to give up the government career for which he had been
trained in order to manage the family properties, enhanced by inheritance that
settled them in the comfortable suburb of Hietzing, near the Palace of
Schnbrunn. The cultural milieu in Vienna was a stimulating one, with
innovative writers and artists. While Mahler presided at the Court Opera, aesthetic
boundaries were extended by composers such as Richard Strauss and Franz
Schreker. Schoenbergs Verklrte Nacht,
written in 1899, had its first performance in Vienna in 1902, but it was chance
that brought Berg to study with him at a time when he was developing his own
revolutionary musical ideas. Other strong influences on him were the writer and
satirist Karl Kraus, whose private production of Wedekinds Die Bchse der Pandora (Pandoras Box),
the later source of Bergs unfinished opera Lulu,
he saw in 1905, the writer Peter Altenberg, the architect Adolf Loos, the
critic and dramaturg Hermann Bahr and the painter and writer Oskar Kokoschka.
Under the tutelage of Schoenberg Berg continued, with some
diffidence, to develop his own distinctive musical language. His studies came
to an end in 1911, when Schoenberg moved once more to Berlin, and the following
year he wrote his Altenberger Lieder,
Opus 4, works of exemplary brevity and intensity. Two of the songs were
performed in 1913 in Vienna under the direction of Schoenberg, but the concert
could not be continued, when a vocal clique in the audience made its objections
clear. Schoenberg, who had come from Berlin for the occasion, expressed his own
criticism of the work.
Military service during the war put an end to composition
for the moment, but in 1914 Berg had attended a performance of the play Wozzeck, by Georg Bchner, the first
staging in Vienna of the fragmentary work, after its first performance in
Munich the previous year. He immediately felt the need to use this as the basis
of an opera, making early sketches, which he was able to continue only in 1917.
He finished the initial work in 1921 and the orchestral score early in the
following year, and wider interest gradually grew, leading to the performance
of three fragments from the opera in a 1924 concert performance in Frankfurt
under Hermann Scherchen. The year 1925 brought the first staging of the whole
work at the Berlin State Opera under Erich Kleiber. Performances in Prague were
interrupted by Czech nationalist protests, but in 1927 Berg travelled to Russia
for successful performances of Wozzeck
in Leningrad, although the opera was soon dropped from the repertoire as
changes in Soviet cultural policy were introduced. A production at Oldenburg persuaded a number of provincial
opera-houses to stage the work, which was establishing itself as an accepted
part of repertoire. In 1930 Wozzeck had its premire at the Vienna
State Opera, a success in spite of the previous hostility of some, and in 1931
it was given in America for the first time.
Berg had, meanwhile, been working on a second opera, Lulu. In 1934, a suite from the new
opera was performed in Berlin under Kleiber, but the work became the object of
National Socialist condemnation, not only of the music itself but also of those
who had written favourable criticisms of it. Vienna, of course, was still free,
but performances of music by Berg were discouraged and finally forbidden in
Germany, a ban extended to Austria after the Anschluss. In 1935, Berg completed
his remarkable Violin Concerto,
a commission from the violinist Louis Krasner, a work in memory of Manon
Gropius, the daughter of Mahlers former wife Alma and the Bauhaus architect
Walter Gropius, who had died of infantile paralysis in April of that year. By
Christmas Eve Berg, himself was dead, having contracted blood-poisoning from an
infected insect bite.
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Discography
