Alban Maria Johannes Berg ( BAIRG, German: [ˈalbaːn ˈbɛʁk]; 9 February 1885 – 24 December 1935) was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with the twelve-tone technique. Although he left a relatively small oeuvre, he is remembered as one of the most important composers of the 20th century for his expressive style encompassing “entire worlds of emotion and structure”.
Alban Maria Johannes Berg ( BAIRG, German: [ˈalbaːn ˈbɛʁk]; 9 February 1885 – 24 December 1935) was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style accumulate Romantic lyricism subsequently the twelve-tone technique. Although he left a relatively small oeuvre, he is remembered as one of the most important composers of the 20th century for his expressive style encompassing “entire worlds of emotion and structure”.
Berg was born and lived in Vienna. He began to compose only at the age of fifteen. He studied counterpoint, music theory and pact with Arnold Schoenberg in the midst of 1904 and 1911, and adopted his principles of developing variation and the twelve-tone technique. Berg’s major works count up the operas Wozzeck (1924) and Lulu (1935, finished posthumously), the chamber pieces Lyric Suite and Chamber Concerto, as with ease as a Violin Concerto. He then composed a number of songs (lieder). He is said to have brought more “human values” to the twelve-tone system, his works seen as more “emotional” than Schoenberg’s. His music had a surface glamour that won him admirers later Schoenberg himself had few.
Berg died from sepsis in 1935.
Berg was born in Vienna, the third of four kids of Johanna and Konrad Berg. His daddy ran a well-to-do export business, and the family owned several estates in Vienna and the countryside. The family’s financial situation turned to the worse after the death of Konrad Berg in 1900, and it particularly affected youngster Berg, who had to repeat both his sixth and seventh grade to pass the exams. Berg was more enthusiastic in literature than music as a child and did not begin to compose until he was fifteen, when he started to tutor himself music. With Marie Scheuchl, a maid in the family land of Berghof in Carinthia and fifteen years his senior, he fathered a daughter, Albine, born 4 December 1902.
Berg had little formal music education since he became a student of Arnold Schoenberg in October 1904. With Schoenberg, he studied counterpoint, music theory, and harmony. By 1906 he was studying music full-time; by 1907 he began composition lessons. His student compositions included five drafts for piano sonatas. He in addition to wrote songs, including his Seven Early Songs (Sieben frühe Lieder), three of which were Berg’s first publicly performed proceed in a concert that featured the music of Schoenberg’s pupils in Vienna that year.[citation needed]
The early sonata sketches eventually culminated in Berg’s Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (1907–1908); it is one of the most formidable “first” works ever written. Berg studied taking into account Schoenberg for six years until 1911. Among Schoenberg’s teaching was the idea that the unity of a musical composition depends upon everything its aspects physical derived from a single basic idea; this idea was well along known as developing variation. Berg passed this on to his students, one of whom, Theodor W. Adorno, stated: “The main principle he conveyed was that of variation: everything was supposed to produce out of something else and nevertheless be intrinsically different”. The Piano Sonata is an example—the entire sum composition is derived from the work’s opening quartal gesture and its opening phrase.
Berg was a allowance of Vienna’s cultural elite during the heady fin de siècle period. His circle included the musicians Alexander von Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker, the painter Gustav Klimt, the writer and satirist Karl Kraus, the architect Adolf Loos, and the poet Peter Altenberg.
In 1906 Berg met the singer Helene Nahowski (1885–1976), daughter of a wealthy family (rumoured to show fact the illegitimate daughter of Emperor Franz Joseph I from his liaison following Anna Nahowski). Despite the outward ill will of her family, the couple married upon 3 May 1911.
In 1913 two of Berg’s Altenberg Lieder (1912) were premièred in Vienna, conducted by Schoenberg in the infamous Skandalkonzert. Settings of aphoristic poetic utterances, the songs are in the middle of a unconditionally large orchestra. The take effect caused a riot, and had to be halted. Berg effectively withdrew the work, and it was not performed in full until 1952. The full score remained unpublished until 1966.
From 1915 to 1918 Berg served in the Austro-Hungarian Army. During a era of leave in 1917 he accelerated work upon his first opera, Wozzeck. After the decrease of World War I, he settled once more in Vienna, where he taught private pupils. He furthermore helped Schoenberg govern his Society for Private Musical Performances, which sought to Make the ideal quality for the exploration and admission of peculiar new music by means of approach rehearsals, repeat performances, and the abstraction of professional critics.
Berg had a particular immersion in the number 23, using it to structure several works. Various suggestions have been made as to the defense for this interest: that he took it from the biorhythms theory of Wilhelm Fliess, in which a 23-day cycle is considered significant, or because he first suffered an asthma attack on the 23rd of the month.
In 1924 three excerpts from Wozzeck were performed, which brought Berg his first public success. The opera, which Berg completed in 1922, was first performed on 14 December 1925, when Erich Kleiber conducted the first play-act in Berlin. Today, Wozzeck is seen as one of the century’s most important works. Berg made a Begin on his second opera, the three-act Lulu, in 1928 but interrupted the play-act in 1929 for the concert aria Der Wein which he completed that summer. Der Wein presaged Lulu in a number of ways, including vocal style, orchestration, design and text.
Other renowned Berg compositions intensify the Lyric Suite (1926), which was unconventional shown to employ elaborate cyphers to document a secret adore affair; the post-Mahlerian Three Pieces for Orchestra (completed in 1915 but not performed until after Wozzeck); and the Chamber Concerto (Kammerkonzert, 1923–25) for violin, piano, and 13 wind instruments: this latter is written hence conscientiously that Pierre Boulez has called it “Berg’s strictest composition” and it, too, is permeated by cyphers and posthumously disclosed hidden programs.
Life for the musical world was becoming increasingly hard in the 1930s both in Vienna and Germany due to the rising tide of antisemitism and the Nazi cultural ideology that denounced modernity. Even to have an connection with someone who was Jewish could help to denunciation, and Berg’s “crime” was to have studied in the same way as the Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg. Berg found that opportunities for his work to be performed in Germany were becoming rare, and eventually his music was proscribed and placed upon the list of degenerate music.
In 1932 Berg and his wife acquired an unaccompanied lodge, the Waldhaus on the southern shore of the Wörthersee, near Schiefling am See in Carinthia, where he was skilled to accomplish in seclusion, mainly on Lulu and the Violin Concerto. At the terminate of 1934, Berg became in force in the embassy intrigues all but finding a replacement for Clemens Krauss as director of the Vienna State Opera.
As more of the performances of his law in Germany were cancelled by the Nazis, who had come to facility in in advance 1933, he needed to ensure the additional director would be an advanced for modernist music. Originally, the premiere of Lulu had been planned for the Berlin State Opera, where Erich Kleiber continued to champion his music and had conducted the premiere of Wozzeck in 1925, but now this was looking increasingly uncertain, and Lulu was rejected by the Berlin authorities in the spring of 1934. Kleiber’s production of the Lulu symphonic suite upon 30 November 1934 in Berlin was plus the occasion of his abandonment in excitement at the extent of conflation of culture considering politics. Even in Vienna, the opportunities for the Vienna School of musicians was dwindling.
Berg had interrupted the orchestration of Lulu because of an unexpected (and financially much-needed) commission from the Russian-American violinist Louis Krasner for a Violin Concerto (1935). This profoundly elegiac work, composed at unaccustomed enthusiasm and posthumously premiered, has become Berg’s best-known and most-beloved composition.[citation needed] Like much of his grow old work, it employs an idiosyncratic familiarization of Schoenberg’s “dodecaphonic” or twelve-tone technique, that enables the composer to manufacture passages openly evoking tonality, including quotations from historical tonal music, such as a Bach chorale and a Carinthian folk song. The Violin Concerto was dedicated “to the memory of an Angel”, Manon Gropius, the deceased daughter of architect Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler.
Berg died aged 50 in Vienna, on Christmas Eve 1935, from blood poisoning apparently caused by a furuncle on his back, induced by an insect headache that occurred in November.[failed verification] He was buried at the Hietzing Cemetery in Vienna.
Before he died, Berg had completed the orchestration of by yourself the first two of the three acts of Lulu. The completed acts were successfully premièred in Zürich in 1937. For personal reasons Helene Berg following imposed a ban upon any try to “complete” the unchangeable act, which Berg had in ambition of fact completed in terse score. An orchestration was in view of that commissioned in nameless from Friedrich Cerha and premièred in Paris (under Pierre Boulez) only in 1979, soon after Helene Berg’s own death.