Alban Maria Johannes Berg ( , ; 9 February 1885 – 24 December 1935) was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with the twelve-tone technique. Although he left a relatively small oeuvre, he is remembered as one of the most important composers of the 20th century for his expressive style encompassing "entire worlds of emotion and structure".
Berg was born and lived in Vienna. He began to compose at the age of fifteen. He studied counterpoint, music theory and harmony with Arnold Schoenberg between 1904 and 1911, and adopted his principles of developing variation and the twelve-tone technique. Berg's major works include the operas Wozzeck (1924) and Lulu (1935, finished posthumously), the chamber pieces Lyric Suite and Chamber Concerto, as well as a Violin Concerto. He also composed a number of songs (lieder). He is said to have brought more "human values" to the twelve-tone system; his works are seen as more "emotional" than those of Schoenberg. His music had a surface glamour that won him admirers when Schoenberg himself had few.
Berg died from sepsis in 1935.
Life and career
Early life
Berg was born in Vienna, the third of four children of Johanna and Konrad Berg. His father ran a successful export business, and the family owned several estates in Vienna and the countryside. The family's financial situation turned to the worse after the death of Konrad Berg in 1900, and it particularly affected young Berg, who had to repeat both his sixth and seventh grade to pass the exams. One of his closest lifelong friends and earliest biographer (under the pseudonym Hermann Herrenried), architect Hermann Watznauer, became a father figure (partly at Konrad's request), being ten years Berg's senior. Berg wrote him letters as long as thirty pages, often in florid, dramatic prose with idiosyncratic punctuation. Berg was more interested in literature than music as a child and would consider a career as a writer several times, turning to music slowly and at times unconfidently until the success of Wozzeck. He did not begin to compose until he was fifteen, when he started to teach himself music, although he did take piano lessons from his sister's governess. With Marie Scheuchl, a maid in the family estate of Berghof in Carinthia and fifteen years his senior, he fathered a daughter, Albine, born 4 December 1902.
In 1906 Berg met the singer (1885–1976), daughter of a wealthy family (rumoured to be in fact the illegitimate daughter of Emperor Franz Joseph I from his liaison with Anna Nahowski). Despite the outward hostility of her family, the couple married on 3 May 1911.
Early works (1907–1914) With little prior music education, Berg began studying counterpoint, music theory, and harmony under Arnold Schoenberg in October 1904. By 1906 he was studying music full-time; by 1907 he began composition lessons. His student compositions included five drafts for piano sonatas. He also wrote songs, including his Seven Early Songs (Sieben frühe Lieder), three of which were Berg's first publicly performed work in a concert that featured the music of Schoenberg's pupils in Vienna that year.
The early sketches eventually culminated in the Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (1907–1908); it is one of the most formidable "first" works ever written. Berg studied with Schoenberg for six years until 1911. Among Schoenberg's teachings was the idea that the unity of a musical composition depends upon all its aspects being derived from a single basic idea; this idea was later known as developing variation. Berg passed this on to his students, one of whom, Theodor W. Adorno, stated: "The main principle he conveyed was that of variation: everything was supposed to develop out of something else and yet be intrinsically different". The Piano Sonata is an example—the whole composition is derived from the work's opening quartal gesture and its opening phrase.
Berg was a part of Vienna's cultural elite during the heady fin de siècle period. His circle included the musicians Alexander von Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker, the painter Gustav Klimt, the writer and satirist Karl Kraus, the architect Adolf Loos, and the poet Peter Altenberg.
In 1913 two of Berg's Altenberg Lieder (1912) premiered in Vienna, conducted by Schoenberg in the infamous Skandalkonzert. Settings of aphoristic poetic utterances, the songs are accompanied by a very large orchestra. The performance caused a riot, and had to be halted. Berg effectively withdrew the work, and it was not performed in full until 1952. The full score remained unpublished until 1966.