The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001.
Berg, Alban (Maria Johannes)
(b Vienna, 9 Feb 1885; d Vienna, 24 Dec 1935). Austrian composer. Along with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg and fellow pupil Anton Webern in the years before and immediately after World War I, he moved away from tonality to write free atonal and then 12-note music. At once a modernist and a Romantic, a formalist and a sensualist, he produced one of the richest bodies of music in the 20th century, and in opera, especially, he had few equals.
1. 1885–1911.
2. 1911–1914.
3. ‘Wozzeck’.
4. The ‘Kammerkonzert’ and ‘Lyrische Suite’.
5. ‘Lulu’ and the final years.
6. Conclusion.
WORKS
WRITINGS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DOUGLAS JARMAN
Berg, Alban
1. 1885–1911.
He was the third of four children of Johanna and Conrad Berg, at 8 Tuchlauben in the central district of Vienna, a few hundred yards from the Stephansdom. With an estate in Carinthia (the Berghof), a number of properties in Vienna and the income from a thriving export business, the Berg family lived comfortably until the death of Berg's father, in 1900, ushered in a difficult time for the family as a whole and for the young Berg in particular. A disastrous school career culminated in his having to repeat both his sixth year in 1901–2 and later his seventh year before he was finally able to pass the necessary exams, while an early sexual relationship with Maria Scheuchl, the kitchen-maid at the Berghof, resulted in the 17-year-old Berg becoming the father of an illegitimate daughter.
All four Berg children had been taught the piano by their governess, and the young Alban had already begun to compose for performance in the family circle; a number of piano duets and almost 80 songs, the earliest of them dating from 1901, were written before he began his studies with Schoenberg. Though passionately interested in music, he was, at that time, little more than an enthusiastic amateur. Clearly unsuited to an academic career, uninterested (unlike his two elder brothers) in business and without qualifications to enter the conservatory, he had little choice, on leaving school, but to take an unpaid post as a trainee civil servant. Not until October 1904, when, as a result of his sister and brother replying to a newspaper advertisement, he became a pupil of Schoenberg, did he receive any formal musical training, and not until two years later, as a result of his mother inheriting both money and property on the death of her unmarried sister, was he able to give up his work with the civil service and concentrate on music.
He studied with Schoenberg from 1904 to 1911, first as a student of harmony, counterpoint and music theory (though he continued to write songs during this period), then from 1907 onwards as a composition student. Writing to his publisher Emil Hertzka in 1910, Schoenberg observed: ‘Alban Berg is an extraordinarily gifted composer, but the state he was in when he came to me was such that his imagination apparently could not work on anything but lieder. Even the piano accompaniments to them were songlike. He was absolutely incapable of writing an instrumental movement or inventing an instrumental theme’. It was a flaw Schoenberg sought to correct in the first years of Berg's composition studies, during which he was required to write a host of minuets, variations, scherzos, impromptus and other small-scale instrumental pieces. Among these early pieces are the drafts (all of them incomplete) of five piano sonatas dating from 1907–8. It is a measure of how far and how rapidly Berg's musical language had developed in the previous four years that – unlike the fluctuating mixture of Brahms, Schumann, Debussy and Wolf that had characterized the pre-Schoenberg songs – the musical language of the five sonatas is that of their op.1 successor, and so close to that of Berg's maturity that he was to use the opening of the fourth as the theme of the D minor interlude in Act 3 of Wozzeck.
Of the works published during his lifetime, the Sieben frühe Lieder date from the beginning, and the single movement Piano Sonata op.1, the Four Songs op.2 and the String Quartet op.3 from the close of his time with Schoenberg. The Sieben frühe Lieder (1905–8) reveal the impact of Schoenberg's teaching and of Berg's growing acquaintance with music. Still essentially diatonic (though the first song, Nacht, strikes a balance between diatonic and whole-tone writing), even the earliest of the set – Im Zimmer (1905) and Die Nachtigall (?1905–6) – demonstrate a piano style far more idiomatic than anything in earlier songs, and whereas the piano accompaniments of the pre-Schoenberg songs frequently lack distinctive melodic figurations, here the handling of motivic ideas is skilful and highly developed. The motivic concentration of Liebesode (1907), for example, in which the right hand of the piano part is restricted to a single three-note figure and its inversion, or Traumgekrönt, which concentrates on a single melodic idea and a four-note cell, looks forward to the motivic complexity not only of the Piano Sonata but also of the mature Berg.
Though the String Quartet op.3 was the last work Berg wrote directly under his teacher's guidance, the Piano Sonata was in effect his graduation piece, the work in which he set out to demonstrate what he had learned from both Schoenberg's teaching and Schoenberg's music. The period of Berg’s studies was a particularly important time in Schoenberg's own creative development, during which he produced the First Quartet (1905), the first Kammersymphonie (1906) and the Second Quartet (1908–9) – a series of works which, with their exploration of cyclic forms and their concentrated motivic and intensely contrapuntal textures, were to have a lifelong influence on the younger composer. Among the most immediate lessons Berg learned from these pieces, and from the Kammersymphonie in particular, were how to handle an extended harmonic language that combined post-Wagnerian chromaticism with quartal, whole-tone and similar tonally ambiguous, ‘floating’ harmonies and how to structure a large-scale instrumental movement in such a way that it was both formally clear and thematically integrated. One of the basic tenets of Schoenberg's teaching was the necessity of what he would later call ‘developing variation’, the belief that the logic and coherence of a work depended on all its aspects being derived from a single basic idea. It was a belief that Berg would later pass on to his own students, as his pupil T.W. Adorno confirmed when he wrote: ‘The main principle he conveyed was that of variation: everything was supposed to develop out of something else and yet be intrinsically different’ (Adorno, Eng. trans., 33). It is a principle that stands at the heart of both the Piano Sonata, in which, within the confines of a clearly defined sonata structure, a wealth of distinctive thematic ideas is generated from a minimum of motivic material, and the two-movement String Quartet.
Between these works came the Vier Lieder op.2, the last of which marks the point at which Berg's music moved from the extended tonal language of the Sonata to the free atonality of the following works. The Vier Lieder also, for the first time, reveal some of the compositional preoccupations that became a feature of Berg's later music: the linking of the movements of a multi-movement work through harmonic, melodic and rhythmic motifs in such a way as to form a single entity, the fondness for retrogrades and palindromic designs (the final bars of the first song are a retrograde restatement of the opening bars) and a fascination with the structural potential of interval cycles. Much of the second song, for example, is concerned with exploiting the structural and cyclic possibilities inherent in the French 6th chord, with the opening bars systematically transposing the chord halfway around the cycle of 5ths (at which point the original collection of notes is reinstated), the following bars recapitulating the same chord sequence in retrograde (but with the spacing changed so as to emphasize the two major 3rds in the chord) and the final six bars demonstrating that the sequence produced when the chord is transposed around the semitone cycle is identical to that resulting from the original cycle of 5ths transposition. What is equally characteristic of the later Berg is the fact that what, when described, seems a calculated and abstract procedure should produce a piece whose most immediately striking feature is its emotional spontaneity.
Berg's formative years coincided with one of the most exciting periods in Viennese cultural life. In his autobiography Die Welt von Gestern Berg's Viennese contemporary Stefan Zweig described the passion for art and literature that seized him and his classmates in their mid-teens, a passion ‘to discover the latest, newest, the most extravagant, the unusual which had not yet been dwelt on at length, particularly by the official literary circles of our daily newspaper … . We were the vanguard and shock troops of every sort of new art merely because it was new’. Even before meeting Schoenberg, Berg had, like his siblings, cultivated a lively interest in everything that was new in the arts, attending Mahler's performances at the opera, seeing new plays and reading Ibsen, Strindberg and the newly published Reigen of Schnitzler and Erdgeist of Wedekind (the first of the two plays that would later form the basis for Lulu). Once released from the drudgery of school, as a pupil of the man at the centre of one of the most radical musical developments of the period and the colleague of fellow students of the calibre of Webern, Wellesz and Jalowetz, Berg threw himself with enthusiasm into all artistic activities. He attended the first Vienna production of Wedekind's second Lulu play, Die Büchse der Pandora in 1905, travelled to Graz the following year to hear the Austrian première of Strauss's Salome and became acquainted not only with musicians of the standing of Zemlinsky and Schreker but also with Peter Altenberg, Gustav Klimt (with whom he attended the great Kunstschau exhibition in 1908), Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos and other leading figures in Vienna's artistic and literary circles. He also, at the end of 1906, met for the first time Helene Nahowski, herself a friend and dedicatee of two of his Altenberg poems, whom, after a difficult courtship in the face of opposition from her family, Berg married on 3 May 1910.
Berg was, said Schoenberg in the letter to Hertzka cited above, ‘enthusiastic and uncritical, receptive of the beautiful whether old or new, whether music, literature, painting, sculpture, theatre or opera’. The enthusiasm and the curiosity were to last throughout his life, so that he remained in touch with, and receptive to, the influence of, areas of music, literature and theatre by which Schoenberg and Webern remained unaffected. It is indicative of the range of his interests that he was familiar with the music of Debussy at a time when Schoenberg hardly knew the work of the French composer, that he went to the first Vienna performance of Büchner's Woyzeck (the name then misread as ‘Wozzeck’), and that later in life he showed an interest in jazz and the ‘new opera’ of Weill and Brecht.
Berg, Alban
2. 1911–1914.
Berg's relationship with his teacher was and remained a difficult one. Schoenberg became a father figure whose approval he craved and whose disapproval or interference he dreaded for many years after his studentship had ended. The years following Schoenberg's move to Berlin in 1911 were particularly difficult, with the newly married Berg, still painfully conscious of his own lack of practical professional skills, torn between awareness of his debt to Schoenberg and the need to assert his personal and artistic independence.
Even when no longer in Vienna, Schoenberg expected his students to carry out various musical and non-musical tasks on his behalf, and the majority of letters from Schoenberg to Berg during this period consist of abrupt and peremptory demands requiring Berg to oversee various domestic tasks, run errands and organize his teacher's musical and financial affairs in Vienna, while frequently complaining about Berg's inefficiency and untrustworthiness in these matters. Berg's long and rambling replies (about both the nature and the illegibility of the handwriting of which Schoenberg also complained) are witness to his desperate desire to please his teacher. The growing personal difficulties between the two finally came to a head in late 1915 when communication more or less ceased for a while. The rift was gradually healed over the next three years, but it remained a thorny relationship, on both a personal and professional level; it was, Berg told his friend Soma Morgenstern ‘the great problem of my life – a problem that I've carried around for decades without being able to solve and which will be my downfall’ (Morgenstern, 1995, p.41). The letters between Berg and Schoenberg only begin to acquire the feeling of correspondence between equals in the late 1920s, when Berg had achieved some measure of international fame with the success of Wozzeck and the Lyrische Suite, but it is indicative of the continuing unease of the relationship that, while Webern was allowed to address Schoenberg by the familiar ‘Du’ in 1912, Berg had to wait until 1918 before being granted the privilege, and that while Schoenberg dedicated his Violin Concerto to Webern, and Berg dedicated four works to his teacher, there is not a single work by Schoenberg dedicated to Berg.
During the years from 1911 to 1915 Berg was devoting much of his time to paid and unpaid efforts on Schoenberg's behalf. His income came partly from administering the family properties, partly from private teaching and partly from his work for music publishers Universal Edition – work which included correcting the parts for and making a piano reduction of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder in advance of its 1913 Vienna première, preparing an index for Schoenberg's Harmonielehre and a guide to the Gurrelieder, and making piano arrangements of, among other things, the third and fourth movements of Schoenberg's Second Quartet. But despite the fact that Schoenberg's constant demands left him little time for his own work, he found it possible in the summer of 1912 to start work on a new composition, the Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtkartentexten von Peter Altenberg op.4.
The first of Berg's works to be written without Schoenberg's guidance, this remains one of Berg's most perfect scores and his greatest achievement before Wozzeck. Uncharacteristically brief (even the two longest songs, the first and last, are only 38 and 55 bars long respectively), the cycle nevertheless contains large-scale dramatic and emotional gestures that are typically Bergian. Equally so is the formal and motivic complexity of the work, which is bound together by a host of recurring harmonic, melodic and rhythmic figurations.
Formally the set has an overall arch shape, with the first and last songs, though very different, having a large part of their musical material in common. Ex.1 shows the opening bars of the final song, a passacaglia. Theme A of the example has already appeared (with the same pitches but a different rhythm) as the main thematic idea of the first song, where it originally emerged out of the ‘snowstorm’ of overlapping ostinatos that formed the introduction; theme B2 is a motif that has also been heard in the introduction to the first song and appeared briefly in the second song, while theme B1 determined the transpositional levels of the motif in the upper part of the introduction to the first song, appeared on the celesta as the final melodic gesture of that song and reappeared in the fourth number. The climax of the introduction to the first song is marked by a harmonic shift from a vertical statement of B1 to a chromatic expansion of the same chord (with the four upper notes ascending and the lowest note descending a semitone); the final moments of the last song have this same chord sequence in reverse. This larger arch shape, resting on the relationship between the two outer songs, is reflected in the individual symmetrical formal designs of the three central songs. Especially interesting is the use of a rhythmic motif (embodied in theme C in the above example) that, originally announced as a repeated single note, acquires a number of thematic shapes during the course of the work. A similar rhythmic motif had made a fleeting appearance in the op.2 songs as a way of binding the set together; the more extensive use of such a motif here looks forward to the use of such independent structural rhythms (or ‘Hauptrhythmen’, to use his own term) in Berg’s later works. Significantly, in view of what was to happen, both the complexity of the formal design and the brevity of the individual songs militate against their being performed other than as a complete cycle.
There is, in much of the work of the Viennese artists of the period, a distinct desire to shock – a reaction, perhaps, to the complacent philistinism of Viennese bourgeoise cultural life. Berg's later decision to set Wedekind's scandalous Lulu plays is symptomatic of this reaction. Certainly his choice of Altenberg's aphoristic and slightly scurrilous texts, at a time when the poet was known to be in an asylum, was a provocative gesture, as was the musical language of the songs, their employment of so large an orchestra for such tiny poems and their use of unusual orchestral effects such as the col legno open string bariolage and the ‘noises’ (a glissando in harmonics on the violins and an effect on low strings produced by bowing on the holes of the tailpiece) that end the first number. The imagination, subtlety and sure-footedness of the instrumentation of the songs seem little short of miraculous in a composer's first work for orchestra. At the time even Schoenberg expressed doubts about what he called ‘their too overt striving to employ new orchestral effects’. Whether or not Berg intended the songs to be provocative, he was unprepared for the public reaction that greeted a performance of two of them in Vienna on 31 March 1913, in a programme Schoenberg conducted that also included Zemlinsky's Maeterlinck Lieder, Schoenberg's own first Kammersymphonie, the first performance of Webern's op.6 and Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. The concert, in which the performance of Berg's songs led to a riot, with fisticuffs in the hall, the police called in and the concert organizer arrested, has gone down as one of the great musical scandals of the 20th century.
Two months after the ‘Skandalkonzert’, on the last day of a visit to Berlin, Schoenberg took Berg to task about the ‘insignificance and worthlessness’ of his recent compositions. The exact nature of Schoenberg's criticisms is unclear, though it has generally been assumed that Schoenberg criticized the brevity of his pupil's pieces. In the wake of the public reaction, Schoenberg's criticism provoked a crisis of confidence and destroyed what was left of Berg's belief in the Altenberg songs: ‘My self doubt’, he wrote to Schoenberg, ‘ is so strong that the least criticism from you, who alone are qualified to give it, robs me of almost all hope’ (The Berg–Schoenberg Correspondence, 257). He never published or tried to have the songs performed in their entirety in his lifetime. The fifth song appeared in vocal score in 1921 as a supplement to the Dresden periodical Menschen, but there was no complete performance until 1953.
The precise date of Berg's next composition, the Vier Stücke op.5 for clarinet and piano, is unclear. The score gives spring 1913, early writers (including Reich and Redlich) summer, Berg himself, in a chronology written in a letter to his wife, June 1913. The pieces, which are even shorter than the Altenberg songs, were probably written before the traumatic discussion with Schoenberg in Berlin in the early summer of that year. Like the Altenberg songs, the clarinet pieces again compress large-scale dramatic gestures into tiny forms (many writers have described the work as a miniature four-movement sonata); unlike the songs, with their intricate motivic structure, the op.5 pieces represent the furthest step Berg took in renouncing distinct thematic and motivic features in favour of a music whose material is generated from the manipulation of small cells, and where various more or less systematic techniques (wedge formations, interval series, progressive transformations) govern smaller, and in some cases larger, structures.
If Schoenberg's criticism of the Altenberg songs centered on their brevity, Berg's next work, the Drei Orchesterstücke op.6, was a deliberate answer, the model for which lay immediately to hand in Mahler's Ninth Symphony, whose first performance Berg had heard in June 1912. The pieces, on which he worked from the summer of 1913 until the autumn of 1915, are Berg's most Mahlerian work, adopting not only the ländler and march idioms that characterize so much of Mahler's music but also, in the final piece, the hammer blow of the finale of the Sixth Symphony. Like the Altenberg songs and the movements of the op.3 quartet, the three pieces (‘Praeludium’, ‘Reigen’ and ‘Marsch’) are linked by a network of recurring themes and motives – including a purely rhythmic theme – that binds the set into a single entity and provides a series of audible signposts within the proliferation of apparently new thematic ideas to which the constant motivic development gives rise. Much of the most important material in all three pieces grows initially from the basic three-note cell (the minor 3rd and semitone E–G–A ) that emerges to form the opening themes of both the ‘Praeludium’ and ‘Reigen’ and that starts the ‘Marsch’, but the complexity of the transformation processes and the profusion of seemingly new ideas result, especially in the ‘Marsch’, in what is perhaps the most texturally, motivically and thematically complex of all Berg's works.
Berg, Alban