Alban Berg Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was born in Vienna on February 9, 1885. Drawn early to literature and music, he began composing songs in his teens, largely self-taught, before meeting the figure who would define his artistic direction: Arnold Schoenberg. From 1904 he studied harmony, counterpoint, and composition with Schoenberg, entering a rigorous apprenticeship that reshaped his craft and linked him to the Second Viennese School alongside Anton Webern. Under Schoenberg's guidance, Berg moved from late-Romantic idioms toward the new atonal language and, later, the disciplined possibilities of twelve-tone technique, all while retaining an unmistakably lyrical and dramatic voice.

Emergence in the Second Viennese School
By the 1910s Berg's works began to appear in public, sometimes amid controversy. His Five Orchestral Songs to postcard texts by Peter Altenberg (Op. 4) helped trigger the notorious "Skandalkonzert" in Vienna in 1913, when a program led by Schoenberg provoked a public uproar. Yet the scandal also announced Berg as a formidable voice. The String Quartet (Op. 3), Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano (Op. 5), and Three Orchestral Pieces (Op. 6) consolidated his reputation for precision of craft and intensity of expression, pairing structural sophistication with a sound world of compressed drama. He was active in Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances after World War I, working alongside Webern to champion new music under exacting rehearsal standards.

Wozzeck and International Recognition
Berg served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, an experience that sharpened his sensitivity to social and psychological fracture. He turned to Georg Buchner's fragmentary drama Woyzeck as the basis for his first opera, Wozzeck, composed over much of the 1910s and early 1920s. The score unfolds as a sequence of rigorously structured scenes, passacaglia, suite, invention on a single note, while its orchestral palette and vocal writing place human dignity and despair in vivid relief. The premiere in Berlin in 1925, conducted by Erich Kleiber, made Berg an international figure almost overnight; it was quickly taken up across Europe, admired for both its modernist daring and its deep theatrical humanity.

Works of the Mid-1920s
Berg's music of the mid-1920s shows how he fused new techniques with historical memory. The Chamber Concerto for piano, violin, and 13 winds encodes musical ciphers of Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Berg himself, a tribute to their intertwined artistic identities. The Lyric Suite for string quartet (1926) marries a finely wrought architectural plan with an intensely expressive idiom; its chromatic richness and hidden numerological designs became a touchstone for performers and analysts alike. Throughout these years, Berg sustained productive relationships with performers and publishers, notably Universal Edition, which helped disseminate his scores.

Lulu and a Fractured Cultural Landscape
Berg embarked on a second opera, Lulu, based on plays by Frank Wedekind, aiming to portray both the allure and the brutality of modern urban life. He evolved a flexible twelve-tone dramaturgy that let characters bloom psychologically while maintaining strict musical logic. Political changes in German-speaking Europe in the early 1930s complicated performance prospects for new music, and some planned productions of Berg's works encountered censorship or institutional resistance. Nevertheless, conductors of stature such as Erich Kleiber continued to advocate for him, and concert performances of orchestral excerpts from Lulu kept the project in public view even as the opera itself remained unfinished.

Violin Concerto and Final Year
In 1935 the violinist Louis Krasner commissioned a concerto, and Berg produced one of the century's most affecting memorials. The Violin Concerto, completed months before his death and dedicated "to the memory of an angel", commemorates Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius. The piece integrates a twelve-tone row that embraces tonal triads and culminates in a radiant quotation of the Bach chorale Es ist genug, binding old and new in a gesture of consolation. Berg died in Vienna on December 24, 1935, from complications of an infection that led to blood poisoning. The concerto was premiered the following year with Krasner as soloist and quickly entered the core repertoire.

Posthumous Fate of Lulu
At his death, Lulu remained incomplete in orchestration for the third act. For decades the opera circulated in two acts, along with a concert suite that Berg had drawn from the score. Only after many years was a full performing version realized by Friedrich Cerha, whose completion allowed audiences to experience the complete dramatic arc. The first productions using Cerha's edition revealed the structural ingenuity Berg had laid out and reconfirmed his stature as a dramatist of rare psychological acuity.

Teaching, Influence, and Circle
Berg's influence radiated not only through his scores but also through his mentorship. Among those who studied with him was Theodor W. Adorno, who later became a leading philosopher and critic and wrote influentially about Berg's music. Within the Second Viennese School he stood as a mediator between Schoenberg's radical innovations and performance traditions, collaborating closely with Webern while remaining committed to a communicative, theatrical immediacy. Performers such as Krasner and conductors including Kleiber were central to bringing his works to audiences during a period when modernism often met institutional headwinds.

Style and Legacy
Berg's language combines structural rigor with an unmistakably personal lyricism. While he absorbed the atonal and serial methods fostered by Schoenberg, he often framed them with echoes of tonal harmony, dance forms, and historical allusions. This synthesis is audible in Wozzeck's precisely designed scenes, the numerological intricacy of the Lyric Suite, the layered tributes of the Chamber Concerto, and the elegiac arc of the Violin Concerto. His operas brought modernist technique into direct contact with the stage, demonstrating that new music could be viscerally dramatic as well as intellectually exacting.

Berg's legacy rests on a compact but extraordinarily influential oeuvre. He expanded the expressive reach of the twelve-tone method without diluting its discipline, and he proved that a modernist vocabulary could sustain profound human feeling. Through the advocacy of colleagues and students, the scholarship of figures like Adorno, and the later completion of Lulu by Friedrich Cerha, his art has remained central to twentieth-century musical history and continues to shape how composers and performers think about the marriage of technique and expression.

Our collection contains 2 quotes who is written by Alban, under the main topics: Music - Friendship.

Other people realated to Alban: Theodor Adorno (Philosopher), Gustav Mahler (Composer), Karl Amadeus Hartmann (Composer)