Biography
Alban Maria Johannes Berg stands among the pivotal composers of the twentieth century. Alongside the other two members of the Second Viennese School, he left a compact catalog whose hallmark is an unabashedly Romantic temperament joined to a pronounced theatrical instinct.
His father worked as an export salesman; his mother was the daughter of the Austrian Imperial jeweler. Early instruction came chiefly through piano lessons given by an aunt. While still in his teens, however, he produced dozens of songs without any formal training in composition. Contemporaries remembered him as a dreamy and unremarkable pupil. In 1903 a stormy youthful romance ended, he failed his school-leaving examinations, and the death of his idol Hugo Wolf plunged him into despair, prompting a suicide attempt. He recovered, repeated his final year, and took a post as an apprentice accountant. The following year his brother Charley brought some of Alban’s scores to Arnold Schoenberg, who agreed to teach him. In 1907 Berg met the singer Helene Nahowski; despite her parents’ concerns about his frail health and uncertain future, the couple wed in 1911.
Conscripted into the Austrian army in 1915, he served eleven months before medical discharge. The experience prompted him to return to Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, whose tale of a cruelly mistreated soldier had long haunted him. Berg began an operatic setting in 1917 and labored on it for five years. After the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved at the close of World War I, he became business manager for Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances, an enterprise that gave Vienna’s musical modernists carefully prepared hearings before sympathetic listeners unaccompanied by critics.
Following delays caused by personal and family matters, Berg finished Wozzeck in 1922. Early reviews were harsh, yet the opera gradually found favor, traveling across Europe and earning recognition as a landmark score. His next large piece, the Chamber Concerto of 1923–1925, was among the first to reveal the impact of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, although the work never applies the technique with strict consistency. Between 1925 and 1926 he composed the Lyric Suite for string quartet, several movements of which adopt twelve-tone procedures systematically. The Suite has remained one of his most frequently played compositions; George Gershwin is reported to have held a special regard for it. Decades after Berg’s death, researchers verified that the final movement originally contained a vocal line, a private homage to his concealed lover Hanna Fuchs-Robertin. The work is now occasionally heard with that text restored.
Berg’s final compositions rank among his most significant. The Violin Concerto of 1935 bears the inscription “to the Memory of an Angel,” honoring Manon, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius. Its expressive lyricism and the integration of tonal material within a twelve-tone framework are especially notable. When blood poisoning claimed his life in 1935, he was still at work on the opera Lulu, a story of erotic terror begun in 1929. Friedrich Cerha completed the unfinished third act in 1976 after twelve years of labor.
His father worked as an export salesman; his mother was the daughter of the Austrian Imperial jeweler. Early instruction came chiefly through piano lessons given by an aunt. While still in his teens, however, he produced dozens of songs without any formal training in composition. Contemporaries remembered him as a dreamy and unremarkable pupil. In 1903 a stormy youthful romance ended, he failed his school-leaving examinations, and the death of his idol Hugo Wolf plunged him into despair, prompting a suicide attempt. He recovered, repeated his final year, and took a post as an apprentice accountant. The following year his brother Charley brought some of Alban’s scores to Arnold Schoenberg, who agreed to teach him. In 1907 Berg met the singer Helene Nahowski; despite her parents’ concerns about his frail health and uncertain future, the couple wed in 1911.
Conscripted into the Austrian army in 1915, he served eleven months before medical discharge. The experience prompted him to return to Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, whose tale of a cruelly mistreated soldier had long haunted him. Berg began an operatic setting in 1917 and labored on it for five years. After the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved at the close of World War I, he became business manager for Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances, an enterprise that gave Vienna’s musical modernists carefully prepared hearings before sympathetic listeners unaccompanied by critics.
Following delays caused by personal and family matters, Berg finished Wozzeck in 1922. Early reviews were harsh, yet the opera gradually found favor, traveling across Europe and earning recognition as a landmark score. His next large piece, the Chamber Concerto of 1923–1925, was among the first to reveal the impact of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, although the work never applies the technique with strict consistency. Between 1925 and 1926 he composed the Lyric Suite for string quartet, several movements of which adopt twelve-tone procedures systematically. The Suite has remained one of his most frequently played compositions; George Gershwin is reported to have held a special regard for it. Decades after Berg’s death, researchers verified that the final movement originally contained a vocal line, a private homage to his concealed lover Hanna Fuchs-Robertin. The work is now occasionally heard with that text restored.
Berg’s final compositions rank among his most significant. The Violin Concerto of 1935 bears the inscription “to the Memory of an Angel,” honoring Manon, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius. Its expressive lyricism and the integration of tonal material within a twelve-tone framework are especially notable. When blood poisoning claimed his life in 1935, he was still at work on the opera Lulu, a story of erotic terror begun in 1929. Friedrich Cerha completed the unfinished third act in 1976 after twelve years of labor.
Albums
Berg: Lulu Suite - Schoenberg: Theme and Variations, Op. 43b - Webern: Im Sommerwind
2025
Wozzeck
2001
Juilliard String Quartet
1995
Singles
