Alban Berg

A disciple of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Maria Johannes Berg was born in 1885 in Vienna, Austria. He began study under Schoenberg in his late teens and remained under Schoenberg’s mentorship for life, studying music theory, composition, harmony, and counterpoint. Berg was enamoured of form, and his first composition was Seven Early Songs (Sieben Frühe Lieder), for soprano with piano accompaniment, which he later orchestrated. This, and most of Alban Berg‘s other compositions, were steeped in the tradition of Strauss, Mahler, and Wolf, and as much as Schoenberg tried to dissuade this tendency, Berg never abandoned his German Romantic tendencies.

Alban Berg is best known for his two operas, Wozzeck and Lulu. Wozzeck, an opera about a soldier whose sweetheart is unfaithful to him, and  whom he subsequently murders. However, the larger themes of poverty and social inequality, and how they lead to immorality and madness, are the main focus of the opera. Where Wozzeck is innovative is that it is atonal by not establishing a key, and in its use of form. Whereas most operas are composed in a combination of recitative, aria, and ensemble, Berg composed Wozzeck using a variety of forms which had previously been used only for instrumental works: suites, marches, passacaglias, fugues and scherzos; and the entire third act is a series of inventions.

Berg’s other famous opera, Lulu, was completed, but only the first two acts were fully orchestrated. However, after the death of Berg’s wife, who had restricted access to his papers, the orchestration for the opera was not completed until 1979. Lulu is an opera in a mirror-image form, where the midpoint (orchestra with a silent film) divides the opera in two: the first half is the title character’s rise to fame and fortune; the silent film shows her entering and then leaving prison; and the last half shows her fall as swiftly as she had risen (and is mirrored by the fact that her hubands in Act I are the same singers as her clients in Act III). Lulu incorporates dodecaphony into the leitmotifs of the opera, in that each character has a unique twelve-tone row.