Alban Berg

Austrian composer

• Born: February 9, 1885
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Austria)
• Died: December 24, 1935
• Place of death: Vienna, Austria

Berg was one of the pioneers in the creation of atonal and twelve-tone music. Though basing his work on the revolutionary system of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, Berg established a link between the new style and the Romantic past and demonstrated that atonal and twelve-tone music could still be lyrical and emotionally expressive. As a result, his works gained widespread acceptance and thus encouraged a whole generation of innovative and experimental composers.

Early Life

Alban Berg (AHL-bahn behrk) was born in Vienna to a prosperous businessman whose distinguished Bavarian Catholic ancestry included high-ranking military men and public servants. Even so, the Bergs were an artistic family, and Berg’s brother and sister both studied music. Berg himself, however, at first seemed more interested in poetry and drama, reading Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, and the Romantic German literature common at the end of the nineteenth century. Later, as a composer of operas, Berg was to realize his literary ambitions by writing his own librettos.

Despite circumstances that were apparently comfortable, Berg’s early life was not without difficulties. As a child, his health was generally frail, and, in 1900, the year his father died, he developed a severe form of asthma that plagued him throughout his life. Perhaps coincidentally, it was also in this year that he first tried his hand at composition, setting three German poems to music. From that point on, composing became his primary interest, and, over the next four years, he created some seventy works, mostly songs and piano duets. Though influenced initially by the Romantic music of Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, and Gustav Mahler, Berg had, as yet, no formal musical training. He was, in fact, far too high-strung and moody to be an especially good student: At age eighteen, for example, he failed his general humanities examination and then attempted suicide.

In the following year, 1904, Berg finally completed his schooling and obtained a position working for the government. After a few months at this job, he saw a newspaper advertisement for students placed by Arnold Schoenberg, a thirty-year-old composer and teacher who had already begun to rock the musical world. Berg immediately submitted several of his works to Schoenberg, who recognized Berg’s talent and accepted him as a student. Over the next six years, Schoenberg became both mentor and friend to the younger man, and through patient encouragement shaped his whole approach to composition.

Life’s Work

At the time Berg became his pupil, Schoenberg was just beginning to break away from the Wagnerian Romantic tradition and would soon work out an entirely new approach to musical composition. Since the time of Johann Sebastian Bach at least, nearly all Western music had been written from the basis of tonality. Essentially, this means that the construction of a piece of music was centered on a single tone, called the “key.” Tension and interest were created by moving away from the key, but, by the end, the tension was resolved by returning to the initial tone. The tools used in the tonal system were the notes of the diatonic scale (do, re, mi, fa, sol, and so on) and chords. A diatonic scale includes any seven tones in order, which are sounded by the white keys on a piano. The notes sounded by the five black keys in between are called “chromatic” tones. The twelve tones together are called a “chromatic scale.” Using the chromatic notes increases the emotional energy in a piece of music.

Chords are a combination of tones played simultaneously. In the tonal system, chords are usually built of three notes (triads), each one full tone apart (do-mi-sol, re-fa-la, and so on). A chord can be made out of each note in the diatonic scale. The first chord (do-mi-sol) is called the tonic and is the chord of rest. Like tones that move away from the key, each of the other chords in the scale, which move away from the tonic, creates tension or activity. The fifth chord (sol-ti-re) is called the dominant, and it represents the most tension. Music theorists say that the dominant chord seeks to be resolved by the tonic. Moving away from the tonic chord is called “dissonance,” while coming back to the tonic is “consonance.”

Many composers of the Romantic period, such as Ludwig van Beethoven and Hector Berlioz, had sought to express great emotion in their music by increasing the amount of dissonance before finally returning to the tonic. Among their methods was creation of new, more dissonant chords using the chromatic notes. In the last half of the nineteenth century, Wagner had taken this technique to its logical endpoint, employing more and more “chromaticism” and delaying the return to the tonic until a nearly unbearable tension had been created. However, Wagner had still remained within the general system of tonality, ultimately resolving the tension by returning to the fundamental key.

At the beginning of their careers, both Schoenberg and Berg wrote music within this Wagnerian tradition. By 1904, however, Schoenberg had begun to believe that the time had come to do away with consonance and the distinction between the diatonic and chromatic tones. He wished to treat all twelve tones of the scale equally and relate them in music freely to one another, rather than to some central tone. Within a few years, Schoenberg had completely abandoned the tonal system, and his music became increasingly dissonant, always operating at a maximum level of tense, unresolved emotion. His approach became known as atonality.

Soon, however, Schoenberg became dissatisfied with atonality, too: Abandoning the keys and consonant harmonies that were the basis of the tonal system had left nothing but musical anarchy. He now insisted that a whole new set of rules of composition had to be fashioned. Thus, he created the concept of the “tone row,” any arbitrary arrangement of twelve tones. The tone row served as the unifying idea of a composition, and its tones were always used in the same order, though each new appearance of the row could start on any note of the scale. The tone row also might be turned upside down (inversion), backward (retrograde), or both (retrograde inversion), but both the melody and the harmony of a piece were always based on the original twelve-tone pattern. This system of composition is known as the twelve-tone system, or the serial technique, and is the foundation for much of the music of the twentieth century.

The impressionable young Berg enthusiastically embraced Schoenberg’s new methods, and the music he wrote under Schoenberg’s tutelage followed the creative evolution of his teacher. Berg’s first significant atonal work was Five Songs with Orchestra, written in 1912. It was first performed on February 23, 1913, in a concert of music all written by Schoenberg and his pupils. While a few of the music critics present viewed the new works favorably, the audience reacted with such violent hostility that a riot ensued. One woman fainted, and a horn player in the orchestra vowed that he would never again play such trash. While Schoenberg was apparently unaffected by these responses, this first contact with the general public made a deep and lasting impression on Berg. Though throughout his life, Berg wrote many articles praising both Schoenberg’s music and the twelve-tone system, his own compositions soon began to develop a distinct style of their own.

In May, 1914, Berg saw a production of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck (1836; English translation, 1927), and he resolved to create an opera out of this tragic story of a poor soldier who jealously murders his love and then commits suicide. Berg began working on the libretto immediately, but his efforts were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. Despite his fragile health, Berg was drafted into the Austrian army for limited duty at the War Ministry. After the war, he became a teacher and finally completed Wozzeck in 1921. It was not until December, 1925, however, that Wozzeck was first performed. Scorned in Vienna, Berg arranged for its presentation by the Berlin State Opera. The performance was a tremendous success, and overnight Berg became an international celebrity. Wozzeck was repeated several times in Berlin and then moved on to a triumphant world tour. By 1936, it had been performed 166 times in twenty-nine cities, including Philadelphia and New York. For many years, it remained the most popular opera composed in the twentieth century.

Berg’s newfound fame seems to have had little effect on him. He continued to teach and write in Vienna, despite the fact that he was largely ignored in his own country. In 1930, he was appointed to membership in the prestigious Prussian Academy of Arts, and, by 1932, he had finally gained enough financial security to purchase a small summer home on the Wörthersee, a lake in Carinthia. He was bitterly disappointed, however, when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, in January, 1933. The Nazis immediately branded Berg’s works as “anti-German” and banned them. The growing influence of Nazism in Austria also frightened him, and he was especially disturbed when Schoenberg, whose ancestry was Jewish, was forced to emigrate to the United States.

In the last decade of his life, Berg composed a relatively small number of works, but each one was crafted with consummate skill and artistry. Shortly after the premiere of Wozzeck, he wrote the Chamber Concerto for piano, violin, and thirteen wind instruments. This work was dedicated to Schoenberg and written almost completely in the serial technique. In 1926, he produced the Lyric Suite, a six-movement work for string quartet that is much more expressive and lyrical and that uses a combination of atonal, twelve-tone, and even tonal methods. So popular did the Lyric Suite become that, in 1928, Berg arranged three of its movements for orchestra.

For most of his last seven years, however, Berg concentrated on the development of one work, an opera called Lulu . As with Wozzeck, he himself wrote the libretto, using material from two plays by the German writer Frank Wedekind. Lulu is a violent story full of murder, blackmail, sexual perversion, imprisonment, and degradation ideally suited to the social and intellectual ferment of the 1920’s and early 1930’s.

In the spring of 1935, Berg was commissioned by the American violinist Louis Krasner to write a violin concerto. Absorbed by the effort to finish Lulu, the composer procrastinated about the concerto until the death of a young lady friend inspired him to express his grief through music. The Violin Concerto was written with uncharacteristic rapidity and was dedicated “to the memory of an Angel.” This was to be Berg’s last completed work and perhaps his most beautiful and gentle. In it, he successfully reconciles the twelve-tone method with traditionally tonal harmony by using an Austrian folk tune and the chorale from a Bach cantata as formative elements. Though the piece utilizes a twelve-tone row, the row itself is based on the traditional triad chord structure. The Violin Concerto was first performed in April, 1936, four months after Berg’s death, and, ironically, it became his own requiem.

After completing the Violin Concerto, Berg was exhausted and went off to his summer home for a short rest. At some point in the ensuing weeks, he received an insect bite that became infected and abscessed. When he returned to Vienna to work on the Lulu score, he was in great pain, and, finally, on December 17, he entered a hospital, where he was diagnosed as suffering from blood poisoning. Despite several transfusions, he weakened and died on December 24, 1935. His final thoughts were given over to the unfinished Lulu; as he died, he went through the motions of conducting the music, and his final words instructed the orchestra to play more firmly.

Significance

Though never completed, Lulu, like Wozzeck, became a worldwide success. A suite for orchestra and soprano has been adapted from the finished portions of the score and has been performed frequently. The first two acts of the opera were presented in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1937, and the entire completed portions have been staged many times since to great acclaim. Today, Berg is generally regarded as the greatest of the atonal/twelve-tone composers, and his works have influenced those of many other modern composers.

This impact has resulted primarily because Berg became the mediator between the innovative atonal and twelve-tone approaches of Schoenberg and the Romanticism of the nineteenth century. Though almost slavishly loyal to Schoenberg’s overall approach, Berg’s music retained much of the Romantic outlook, and he proved that atonality can express a variety of moods. His twelve-tone works are gentler and more spontaneous than those of Schoenberg. In Wozzeck, tonal and atonal methods are intertwined and dramatically juxtaposed. In Lulu and the Violin Concerto, Berg showed that the twelve-tone row could be used flexibly to create both melodic and harmonic materials with a link to the past. In all three of these works, he assimilated folk-tune elements and displayed a highly developed sense of instrumental color often reminiscent of Impressionist composers such as Claude Debussy. The success of Wozzeck, the Violin Concerto, and the Lyric Suite have proved that modern serious music does not have to be ugly and can appeal to the average listener. This is, perhaps, Berg’s greatest contribution.

Bibliography

Deri, Otto. Exploring Twentieth-Century Music. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. A well-written text that attempts to aid readers and listeners in understanding and appreciating twentieth century music by explaining how its aesthetic principles and materials evolved. Contains an excellent chapter on the life and works of Berg and offers a detailed analysis of several of Berg’s major works. Includes an extensive bibliography and discography.

Hall, Patricia. “Berg’s Sketches and the Inception of Wozzeck, 1914-1918.” Musical Times 146, no. 1892 (Autumn, 2002): 5. Examines the sketches and other documents related to the opera that Berg created from 1914 and 1918, measuring the impact of World War I on Berg’s evolution as a composer.

Hansen, Peter S. An Introduction to Twentieth Century Music. 4th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1978. A standard text on modern music. Presents an appreciative summary of the major movements and musical developments since 1900. Includes a separate chapter on Berg.

Lambert, Constant. Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline. 1934. New ed. London: Hogarth, 1985. Lambert, himself a prominent British composer before his premature death in 1951, offers a challenging view of twentieth century music. He argues that the loss of traditional values in modern society has tended to encourage composers who violate and destroy the traditional rules pretentiously and simply as a pose. He also praises Berg as a composer. Includes a new introduction for this edition.

Machlis, Joseph. Introduction to Contemporary Music. 2d ed. London: Dent, 1982. An excellent, extremely well-written text. Introduces modern music through comparison and contrast with earlier periods, creating a painless introduction to music theory. European and American composers are grouped by types; each receives a concise biographical treatment and analysis of important works. Includes an excellent bibliography and discography, and texts and translations of vocal works.

Redlich, Hans F. Alban Berg: The Man and His Music. London: J. Calder, 1957. Berg’s most important biographer. This work is extremely detailed and informative, but readers unfamiliar with music theory will find Redlich’s analyses of Berg’s work to be very difficult. In addition, Redlich is opinionated, and many other critics of Berg’s works have disagreed with Redlich’s highly politicized analyses of Wozzeck and Lulu.

Reich, Willi. The Life and Work of Alban Berg. Translated by Cornelius Cardew. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1981. Reich is less enlightening than Redlich about Berg’s personal life, but his analyses of Berg’s music are both more thorough and more objective. For advanced students, this is a superior work.