Alban Berg - Biography
Alban Berg the great modernist composer was born on February 9th 1885 in Vienna and died on December 24th 1935 in Vienna. His family was solidly upper middle class and Berg’s youth ful interest centered more around literature then music .Berg taught himself how to read music when he was a teenager. Also at the age of seventeen he fathered a child with a household servant. Berg as a young man was an ‘artistic type’ very tall elegantly clothed and bearing a strong resemblance to Oscar Wilde. He became a student of Arnold Schoenberg in 1904 first studying theory and harmony after a few years of Schoenberg’s strict supervision eventually was taught composition. His first works were Piano Sonata Op. 1 (1907) and the Seven Early Songs (1907). While still tonal (Schoenberg was not to invent the twelve tone system for a while) they are fully characteristic of Berg. Berg was an ardent admirer of the compositions and the conducting of Gustav Mahler who was then the director of the Vienna Opera. In fact he was a member of Viennese in intellectual group known historically as Fin de Siècle (end of an era) that included writers, architects, painters and musicians. A young musician a few years older than Berg Anton Von Webern who was to have a huge effect on modern music joined Schoenberg’s circle collectively they were to be known as the Second Viennese School. Berg in 1911 was to marry wealthy women Helene Nohawski (who may well have been the daughter out of wedlock of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph she allowed him to have financial security. Berg for a composer of his stature has a small amount of works to his credit but amongst them for that period were the String Quartet (1911), Altenburg Lieder (1912) and a towering masterpiece Three Pieces for Orchestra (1915 revised 1925).
Berg was drafted into the Austrian army in 1915 to serve in the First World War. Barracks life must have been challenging for this aristocratic aesthete but it served as inspiration for one of the greatest of operas. During a leave in 1917 he started to write his first opera Wozzeck based on the avant garde play of the 1830’s by playwright physician Georg Buchner. The play concerns the miserable life of a lowly German soldier who is abused by his superiors (and experimented upon by a quack army doctor) and the only thing he has to cling to be his common law wife (who he murders in a fit of mad jealousy) and his little son. The gestation of this masterpiece was to take seven years. The work though tremendously dramatic is structurally an extraordinarily disciplined work using Baroque forms such as Theme and Variations, Passacagalias and Rondos. When the work was first presented in Berlin under conductor Erich Kleiber it took an unprecedented amount of rehearsal and the actual performance caused a riot and a torment of abuse for Berg along with some far sighted praise.
Berg’s next major work after Wozzeck was the six movement Lyric Suite for string quartet (he orchestrated movements two, three and four for string orchestra).The work was partially inspired by a an extra marital love affair he had with a married women and originally had a vocal part in the last movement that was suppressed because the text was associated with the affair. Berg revised the Three Pieces for Orchestra and that wrote a Chamber Concerto for Piano Violin and 13 Wind Instruments, along with an extended piece for soprano and orchestra entitled Der Wien.
In the 1930’s Berg started work on his second opera Lulu that was to be even more controversial then Wozzeck. The story was based on a fusion of two plays by expressionist playwright Frank Wedekind about a femme fatale Berlin prostitute Lulu (this theme also inspired a celebrated movie starring Louise Brooks Pandora’s Box). The plot outlines a young women who seduces and murders a powerful publisher, seduces his young son along with a love smitten countess and at the operas end is destitute in London and is murdered by Jack the Ripper; hardly La Boheme. Berg died before he could complete the opera. After the first scene of the uncompleted Third Act there is a substantial outline along with indication for orchestration. His widow Helene initially asked Schoenberg now in America to complete the opera. Schoenberg was not sympathetic to the opera and found an offhand anti Semitic in the text offensive. Helene Berg who believed in spiritualism felt that this was an omen that the work was not meant to be completed and refused to have anyone complete it. She lived into her nineties and upon her death in 1976 the work was finally completed and premiered in 1979 by Pierre Boulez in Paris with Teresa Stratas as Lulu (prior to this it was presented in truncated form). Berg before his death created an orchestral suite from the opera that has an independent concert life.
Berg was affected by the rise of the Third Reich where he was banned for his musical radicalism and by ignorant Nazi officials who believed that Berg was Jewish because of his Jewish sounding name. His final work was to be his beautiful Violin Concerto, subtitled as a Requiem for Angel. Berg was a close friend of Alma Mahler-Werfel (Mahler’s widow) she had a very beautiful daughter Manon with famed architect Walter Gropius who died of polio at seventeen. This deeply affected Berg who wrote the Violin Concerto as a memorial. Little did Berg realize that it would be his own requiem, he died of blood poisoning from a minor abscess on Christmas Eve 1935.
Berg composed hardly eight hours of music in a tyhirty ear career almost all it on an extraordinarily high level. Berg is difficult composer to understand he uses a very concentrated musical language derived from Schoenberg atonality and elements of Mahler’s late style. Luckily there are many outstanding recordings from conductors like his friend Karl Bohm, Pierre Boulez, Claudio Abbado and singers Fischer-Dieskau, Anna Silja, Teresa Stratas and Evelyn Lear for us to explore.
