AlbanBerg

In 1904 Berg’s brother Charly secretly took some of Alban’s songs to Arnold Schoenberg. Their sister Smaragda had spotted an advertisement for lessons in harmony and counterpoint. Alban was nineteen, a bookseller’s son from Vienna, writing songs and working in the civil service. His father had died four years earlier, and there was little money for tuition. Schoenberg accepted him all the same, though he could not pay the fee. Recalling their first meeting in a recording made in 1949, Schoenberg described “a very tall youngster and extremely timid”, whose songs stood stylistically between Hugo Wolf and Brahms.

An inheritance in 1906 allowed Berg to leave the office. When his mother proposed the conservatoire, Schoenberg heard, he wept until she agreed he could stay with his teacher. Lessons lasted until 1910. The Piano Sonata, Op. 1, completed in 1908, shows Schoenberg’s developing variation at work: small phrases change and grow, through whole-tone passages to a final B minor. The String Quartet, Op. 3, shares its themes between two movements; its opening idea returns near the close.

1911–⁠14Altenberg songs and Three Orchestral Pieces

Berg married Helene Nahowski in May 1911. He knew Adolf Loos and Peter Altenberg, and read Karl Kraus’s attacks on Vienna’s newspapers and respectable morals. He set texts from Altenberg’s picture postcards as five songs for a very large orchestra. Two were played under Schoenberg in Vienna on 31 March 1913, at a concert that broke up in uproar. When Berg visited Schoenberg in Berlin that June, he received a bruising criticism of the songs and of his Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano.

His teacher wanted a larger work. Berg began a symphony, then turned to the Three Orchestral Pieces. The Präludium opens with quiet percussion, and the climaxes of the march recall Mahler’s Sixth. He sent these two pieces to Schoenberg for his fortieth birthday in September 1914, and in his anxiety asked him to accept the good intention if the music fell short. Reigen, the waltz, was not yet finished.

1914–⁠25Wozzeck

On 14 May 1914 Berg saw Büchner’s Woyzeck in Vienna and decided to make an opera of it. The edition he used called the soldier Wozzeck. A year later Berg was in uniform. Ill health brought him from army training to the War Ministry, where he served until 1918. “There is a part of me in this figure too,” he wrote to Helene on 7 August that year, adding that he too was “dependent on people I detest”. He worked on the opera during leave.

The full score was finished in 1922. At Marie’s murder, B♮ swells through the orchestra after Wozzeck has cut her throat. When he drowns in the pond where he has tried to hide the knife, an interlude brings his music together in D minor. Then children are playing outside Marie’s door. They hear that her body has been found and run off to look; her son carries on with his game before following them.

Erich Kleiber conducted the première at the Berlin State Opera on 14 December 1925. Further productions followed across Europe, and their royalties supported Berg while he worked on Lulu. He had also completed the Chamber Concerto, a belated fiftieth-birthday gift for Schoenberg. Its opening spells out musical letters from the names of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg. The piano leads the first movement and the violin the second. In the finale the two soloists play their earlier music together, accompanied by thirteen wind instruments.

1925–⁠26The Lyric Suite and Hanna Fuchs

In Prague in 1925, Berg stayed with Herbert and Hanna Fuchs-⁠Robettin while Zemlinsky conducted excerpts from Wozzeck. He fell in love with Hanna. Both were married. The Lyric Suite, which he wrote afterwards, had two dedications, Zemlinsky’s on the published score and Hanna’s in a copy covered with private annotations. In German note names, A–B♭ spells Alban Berg and B♮–F spells Hanna Fuchs. In the third movement the strings play these four notes. Across the six movements, the fast music grows faster and the slow music slower.

1929–⁠35Lulu and the Violin Concerto

For his second opera Berg joined Wedekind’s Erdgeist to Die Büchse der Pandora, which he had seen in Karl Kraus’s production in 1905. The first scene of Lulu takes place in a painter’s studio. Her portrait goes with her through successive households and finally to a London garret. Men marry her and bargain over her. At the centre of Act II a silent film shows her imprisonment and escape, accompanied by music that reverses around its midpoint. The singers who played her husbands return as her clients in the final scene, and the baritone who sings Dr Schön also sings Jack the Ripper.

In November 1934 Kleiber conducted the Lulu symphonic excerpts in Berlin, amid growing Nazi hostility to Berg’s music. German performances were disappearing, and his income with them. The American violinist Louis Krasner’s commission arrived early in 1935, while Berg was still orchestrating the opera. On 22 April Manon Gropius, Alma Mahler’s daughter by the architect Walter Gropius, died of polio, aged eighteen. Berg put Lulu aside and wrote on the concerto’s title page: “To the memory of an angel”.

1935The Violin Concerto

That June Krasner visited Berg at his house by the Wörthersee and improvised for hours so that the composer could learn his playing. The concerto begins with the violin playing its open strings, G–D–A–E. These notes underlie the overlapping triads in its twelve-note row. On 16 July Berg told Krasner he had finished the composition the previous day. “The work was giving me more and more pleasure,” he wrote.

Lulu lay complete in short score, with much of Act III not yet orchestrated. Zurich staged the two finished acts in 1937. Friedrich Cerha’s completion reached the Paris Opéra in February 1979, with Pierre Boulez conducting and Teresa Stratas as Lulu. In the final scene, set in a London room, Countess Geschwitz sings the last words after Jack has stabbed her.