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 Alban Berg is a key fixture in the maelstrom that is 20th century art music: as a champion of two compositional disciplines that were to revolutionize and forever change traditional Western art music, and as a member of the Second Viennese School, the aesthetic fraternity which served as the vanguard of these disciplines. The other members of this "school," Schoenberg, the teacher, and the other pupil, Anton Webern, are historically significant composers in their own right. But Alban Berg was the only one of the three of them to compose a work that has been accepted and included in the standard repertoire of what is widely regarded as the most conventional and conservative of classical music genres: the world of opera. And he did it twice.
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was born in Vienna (Wien), Austria on February 9th, 1885. Apart from a stint in the army and the occasional jaunt to an estate in the country, he lived there his entire life, although he loved the countryside, especially the mountains (his surname suited him). He was a man of physical beauty, but was plagued with health problems, particularly in the form of asthma and a remarkable tendency towards skin infections. His bouts with sickness were so frequent and severe that he spent a good amount of his life bedridden. His father died when he was fifteen, meaning that the young Berg would have to work to survive. In 1903, after failing to get into college, and plagued with constant ill health, he despaired and attempted suicide. Needless to say, the attempt failed. Of the years leading up to Berg's studies with Schoenberg, there is not much else of note (though it is worth mentioning that Berg had a fondness for poetry as a youth and even, for a time, considered pursuing a career in it; this interest helps to explain Berg's literary knack, as was demonstrated in the libretto, or script, of Lulu). Some of the songs he wrote during these early years survive, but reflect a "negligible" musical education when compared to his later work.
It was Alban's older brother Charley that pointed out to his younger brother the newspaper advertisement for composition lessons; it was also Charley who secretly took some of Alban's manuscripts to Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg accepted young Alban into his studio in 1904, and there began what was to be one of the most significant artistic and personal relationships in Berg's life. Schoenberg became his mentor in life as well as art, and even served as a sort of surrogate father. It was through Schoenberg that Berg met Anton Webern, who was to be Berg's closest colleague and best friend. This was before Schoenberg had written many of his most significant works, so these two students, who began studying with Schoenberg at about the same time, were there to experience the creative processes and the conflicts behind the creation of Schoenberg's finest achievements.
Under Schoenberg's tutelage, Berg completed his Seven Early Songs, the single movement Piano Sonata Op. 1, and Four Songs Op. 2, in which the first fully "atonal" work of Berg can be found. The last piece Berg completed as a student was the String Quartet Op. 3 (1910), which was a piece of such expression and innovation that it established him as a colleague of the composer who was formerly his master. By now, Berg's work was entirely "atonal," as was the work of Schoenberg and Webern, and art music would never be the same.
Surprisingly, Berg's next composition, Altenberg-Lieder Op. 4, was met with disapproval from Schoenberg. The experience of this disapproval was so traumatic for Berg that he did not again bring this work to performance for 17 years. His self-doubt lingered for many years, although he did continue to compose. In 1914, Berg saw a performance of the play Woyzeck, and immediately decided to set it to music. However, not long after that decision he was drafted into the military. Because of his ill health, he was eventually assigned to a guard post in Vienna, and he was released from service at the end of the war in 1918. It was during this four to five years that he met, courted and married Helene Nahowski, who would be his wife and friend until his death.
Berg began to compose the opera Wozzeck in earnest soon after his release from active duty. His experiences as a soldier only served to further solidify his identification with the title character. Due to family and financial responsibilities, he did not complete the opera until 1922. At that time, he still had no publisher, so with the help of Gustav Mahler's widow Alma, he published the score himself. It wasn't long before Universal Edition, Schoenberg's publisher, got wind of the buzz surrounding the new work and gathered it up. By the end of the war, the play had become more than simply an attraction for avant-garde enthusiasts, and an opera on the subject seemed all the more appealing. Wozzeck received its premiere performance at the Berlin Staatsoper in 1925, and enjoyed critical success (and significant box office success, as well), and was brought back the following season.
In the years 1923-1930, Berg completed five new works (excluding a "concert" arrangement of a portion of Wozzeck); most notable among these are the Chamber Concerto for piano, violin and winds, the Lyric Suite for string quartet, and Der Wein, a concert aria for soprano soloist and orchestra (a significant motivic and stylistic precursor to Lulu). The Chamber Concerto is a nod to the trend of neo-Classicism, which was in fashion at the time (the concerto being a musical form that was largely abandoned with the rise of Romanticism), but it also served to help introduce serialism as a compositional tool, and as a replacement system for tonality. Although the Chamber Concerto is not strictly "serial", it does make use of some of the devices. Berg's first fully serial piece was actually a setting of the poem "Schliesse mir die Augen beide" (Storm), which Berg had given a "tonal" setting in 1907.
The Lyric Suite followed that setting. Composed in 1925-26, it is considered by many to be, next to the operas, Berg's greatest masterpiece. It is a six-movement work (an unusual number of movements), with the tempo markings of each movement being "increasingly divergent," which creates an "intensification of mood" from beginning to end. The use of the title "Lyric Suite," rather than simply "String Quartet," implies the programmatic (meaning that it follows a sort of story) nature of the work. This piece makes both strict and digressive uses of the principles of serialism, and is a dramatic and wholly compelling work.
Composition on the opera Lulu was begun as early as 1928, months before Berg had even secured permission to draw from the plays on which it was to be based. The "Lulu" plays of Frank Wedekind had impacted Berg at an early age, and to many scholars it seems inevitable that he would have set them to music. This new project, however, provided a dramatic new obstacle for Berg: the creation of a libretto. The concise language of Büchner's drama had afforded Berg an easy task in the creation of Wozzeck, for he was able to set the text with very little alteration. The reduction of Wedekind's two plays to one dramatic work would not be a simple feat, but the composer followed the model created by Richard Wagner and wrote the libretto himself. As it turns out, the difficulty was not in combining the two plays-they were originally conceived as a single work by the author. Berg's difficulty was in maintaining the integrity of Wedekind's style and leaving the idiomatic characteristics intact while having to pare down the original material. Even as Berg continued to compose the music for the opera he worked on the reduction of the text, allowing musical decisions to dictate his editing.
By 1934, Berg had completed the short score of Lulu, which left the orchestration, or instrumentation, to be done. Wozzeck had been performed in 17 German cities by 1932, but the Nazis were taking control, and the opera was later censored. In 1933, Jewish musicians in civil posts lost their jobs, including Schoenberg. The Nazis disapproved of Alban Berg's work (despite the fact that Berg was Roman Catholic), which made the possibility of a German premiere of Lulu increasingly unlikely. Another interruption arose in 1935 with the death of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler. Berg had been commissioned by an American violinist to write a violin concerto, and Berg stopped work on Lulu to compose the piece as a memoriam to Manon. This was to be the last piece Alban Berg would complete. Sometime before August 1935, Berg was stung on the back by a wasp. The sting abscessed, and the infection led to Berg's death on December 24th, 1935. He died with the orchestration of Lulu incomplete. A Viennese composer named Friedrich Cerha later completed the orchestration, taking over a decade to finish. However, Helene Berg, the widow, refused to allow the previously unfinished portion of the opera to be published. An incomplete version of the opera was first staged in Zurich, Switzerland in 1937, and the completed opera was performed three years after Helene's death, in 1979.
Alban was appointed to the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1930, and it was virtually the only "official" recognition he received during his life. Unofficially and otherwise, the impact of Alban Berg's work on the world of art music is still felt. Classical musicians of today (orchestral players, conductors, singers) are divided into two camps on the subject: those who love this music, and those who hate it. The modern classical musician who has no opinion on the subject is extremely rare. Artists throughout history have aspired to have this kind of impact on their chosen hemisphere. The composers of the Second Viennese School are forever immortalized for this impact, and Alban Berg, singularly among this school, will be remembered as one of the very few important representative composers of 20th century opera. He and his few peers are responsible for the modernization of an otherwise antiquated musical genre.
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