Alban Berg

Alban Berg was born in Vienna on 9 February 1885 into a comfortable family: his father, Conrad, ran a business exporting books and religious objects. He grew up in a cultured household passionate about literature, theatre and music. At fifteen he began composing, with no training at all, many songs for voice and piano. His father’s death in 1900 left the family in financial difficulty. A tormented teenager, he suffered from asthma, an illness that stayed with him all his life.

In 1904 his brother Charly sent some of his songs, without telling him, to Arnold Schoenberg, who had advertised for pupils. Schoenberg immediately recognised his talent and agreed to teach him free of charge, since the family could not afford to pay. Berg became, with Anton Webern, the master’s most loyal pupil and friend. He then worked as a civil servant until an inheritance allowed him to devote himself to music. In 1908 he composed his single-movement Piano Sonata Op. 1.

In 1911 he married Helene Nahowski, a young singer of great beauty, despite her father’s opposition. His Altenberg Lieder, on short poems written on postcards by the poet Peter Altenberg, were partly premiered at the concert of 31 March 1913 in Vienna, which turned into a riot: the audience hissed, jeered and fought, and the concert had to be stopped. Berg was deeply hurt.

In May 1914 he saw a performance of Woyzeck, a play by Georg Büchner written in 1836: the story of a poor soldier humiliated and exploited by everyone, who ends up killing his companion Marie. Overwhelmed, Berg decided to make it into an opera. During the First World War he was called up into the Austrian army, but his poor health led to his being assigned to an office in the War Ministry. His army experience fed his compassion for the character of Wozzeck.

He worked on the opera for seven years. Wozzeck was premiered at the Berlin State Opera on 14 December 1925 under Erich Kleiber, after more than 130 rehearsals. Despite its very difficult atonal music it was an immense success, and the work was soon performed in many countries. Each scene is built on a classical musical form — suite, passacaglia, sonata, fugue — but the audience feels only the emotion of the drama. Wozzeck is now regarded as one of the greatest operas of the twentieth century.

Berg then adopted Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, but used it flexibly and expressively, often with chords and melodies reminiscent of tonal music. In the Lyric Suite for string quartet (1926) a secret programme was discovered after his death: the work tells of his love for Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, with their initials hidden in the music. Berg loved symbolic numbers: he notably hid the number 23, his lucky number, in the structure of his works. He then began a second opera, Lulu, after Frank Wedekind.

In 1933 the Nazis banned his music in Germany, depriving him of much of his income. In 1935 he interrupted Lulu to compose a Violin Concerto at the request of the violinist Louis Krasner. Devastated by the death at eighteen of Manon Gropius, Alma Mahler’s daughter, he dedicated it “to the memory of an angel”. The concerto ends with a Bach chorale, “Es ist genug”. A few months later an insect bite caused an abscess and then blood poisoning. Berg died in Vienna on 24 December 1935, aged fifty, leaving Lulu unfinished; the opera was not completed until 1979.