Alban Berg

Rising to international prominence with the first performances of his opera Wozzeck under Erich Kleiber at the Berlin Staatsoper in December 1925, Alban Berg became the most commercially successful of the pupils taught by Arnold Schoenberg. In music that combines tonal, atonal, and twelve-note techniques, characterized by a rich emotional and dramatic language and a fondness for abstract, often secretive, intellectual restraints, Berg’s works—and in particular the two string quartets, two operas and two concertos—have now become an important part of both chamber and orchestral repertoire.

Early Years: Tuition

Berg was born in the center of Vienna (a plaque on the wall of a house on Tuchlauben now marks the place of his birth) at a time when the intellectual and artistic world was dominated by figures such as the composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, the painters Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and the writer Karl Krauss.

The Berg family was a typical upper-middle class Viennese family. Berg’s father ran a successful religious and art bookshop, and was able, a few years after Berg’s birth, to buy a holiday house (the ‘Berghof’) in the countryside of Carinthia. It was thanks to a relationship with a maid at the Berghof that the young Berg, at the age of 17, became the father of a daughter (christened Albine).

Although his musical leanings were encouraged by family and friends, Berg was initially self-taught as a composer. In late 1904, his brother Charly, answering a newspaper advertisement, took five of Berg’s songs to Schoenberg, with whom Berg would study until late 1909.

Until then Berg had written only songs but, while continuing to write songs (the Seven Early Songs for piano and voice, and the orchestral arrangement of the same set published in 1928, originally date from 1907), his studies with Schoenberg covered traditional contrapuntal techniques and instrumental forms. Berg’s first published works—the one-movement Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (1907–08), the Four Songs, Op. 2 (1909–10), and the String Quartet, Op. 3 (1910)—were written during his years under Schoenberg’s tutorship.

The model for Op. 3’s language was the last movement of Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2, of 1908, in which Schoenberg had first written “free” atonal music. From the outset Berg recognized the implications of what Schoenberg had achieved. Berg would go on to produce a work that was even more radical—indeed as Schoenberg himself wrote shortly after Berg’s death “his String Quartet surprised me most by the fullness and unconstraint of its musical language and the strength and sureness of its presentation.”

1911 saw the completion of his studies with Schoenberg, Berg’s marriage to Helene Nahowski, and their move into the ground-floor flat in Trauttmannsdorffgasse, where they would live for the rest of their lives. The flat was near the house of Helene’s parents; it was also near Schönbrunn, the residence of the Emperor, who was said to have been Helene’s father.

Middle Period: The Skandalkonzert

In the period between the end of his time as a student of Schoenberg and the declaration of the First World War in August 1914, Berg supported himself and his wife by taking on a number of short-term jobs, among them making piano arrangements and analytical guides and writing essays on music.

More important, however—in terms of both his artistic development and his often tenuous relations with Schoenberg—was the disastrous performance of two of his Five Altenberg Lieder, Op. 4 (1912), at a concert conducted by Schoenberg on March 31, 1913. During the concert, which has become known as the “Skandalkonzert,” Berg’s songs were interrupted by laughter and even fighting, and the concert was eventually abandoned with the final works left unperformed.

Apart from the string quartet, the only other chamber composition from this period, the Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 5 (1919), was written in the months immediately after the Skandalkonzert. A set of unusually brief pieces (the longest only 20 bars, the shortest a mere 9 bars) that has few of the technical or dramatic features that characterize most of Berg’s music, this work perhaps represents a reaction to the large orchestral forces employed in the Altenberglieder.

Berg: Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 5

Late Period: Lyric Suite

The Lyric Suite for String Quartet (1925–26) marks a decisive point in the further development of Berg’s musical language since it represents his first attempt (apart from one short experimental song) at using his own version of Schoenberg’s twelve-note system.

A characteristic feature—and part of the fascination—of Berg’s music, and especially of late works such as the Lyric Suite and the opera Lulu, is that it combines the lush textures and overt emotional and programmatic characteristics of much late Romantic music (Berg described himself as an “incorrigible Romantic”) with seemingly abstract, intellectual, but often personally significant restraints embodied in technical features such as number symbolism, ciphers, and large-scale palindromes.

In 1977 the American composer and Berg expert George Perle discovered a score of the Lyric Suite, annotated by Berg himself, revealing that the work had a secret program concerning Berg’s affair with a married woman named Hanna Fuch-Robettin, and that the work embodies cryptographic statements of their initials through musical notes—A-natural and B-flat (“B” in German notation) representing the composer; B-natural (“H” in German notation) and F representing Hanna Fuchs. The piece also contains references to Berg’s numerological beliefs, with much of the structure being based on 23s and 10s, which he regarded as his and Hanna’s fateful numbers. Thus in the third movement, Allegro misterioso, the pitches of the thematic material, the numbers of bars in a section, the metronome markings, and even the con sord instrumental indications (telling the player to dampen the strings with a mute)—all of which embody references to this affair—exemplify this typically Bergian combination of rigorous technical features, Romantic expression, and private allusions.

Dying at the age of 50 (of blood poisoning he contracted from an insect sting), shortly after writing the Violin Concerto, Berg neither heard this last completed work performed nor finished the orchestration of his second opera, Lulu, much of the final act of which was eventually completed by the Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha.

Legacy

Having been banned in Nazi-occupied Europe (Kleiber’s performance of the Symphonic Pieces from Lulu, the Suite which Berg had arranged from his second opera, in Berlin 0n November 30, 1934, was the last time Berg’s music would be performed in Germany for 10 years), Berg’s music returned to the concert halls after the war in a period when young composers, influenced primarily by Anton Webern, regarded it as outdated. Such times have passed, and Berg is now acknowledged as one of the classic composers of the 20th century.

Watching and Listening

Apart from the Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano and the Lyric Suite, all of Berg’s works after Op. 3—the Altenberglieder, Op. 4, the Three Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6, the operas, the concertos, and concert aria Der Wein—demand a large (and, in the case of Op. 4 and Op. 6, a very large) orchestra; even the so-called Chamber Concerto for Piano and Winds demands a wind and brass orchestra of 13 players and requires a conductor.

The most substantial and important of Berg’s chamber works are the two string quartets. Despite being separated by some 16 or 17 years, both quartets mark turning points in Berg’s development as a composer. Berg wrote the first of the two movements of the String Quartet, Op. 3, in 1909, when it was tried out by an ad hoc quartet; the second movement was completed in the following year, although the whole work was not performed until 1923. 

Although Berg was not a string player, a notable feature of the score of the Op. 3 Quartet had been the detailed technical instructions as to exactly how it was to be played, the whole work acting as a demonstration of the coloristic possibilities of the medium. Such coloristic effects also play an important role in Berg’s second quartet, the Lyric Suite, and especially in the Allegro misterioso third movement. (Berg was enormously proud of the fact that, shortly after having heard the Lyric Suite, Bartók employed similar effects—sul ponticello, glissandi, mutes, pizzicati—in his Third and Fourth Quartets.)

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