Alban Berg, Free Sheet Music, Recordings, Biography and Program Notes

• Alban Berg's World of Passion and Order

On March 31, 1913, in the grand Musikverein hall in Vienna, a concert of new music was underway. The conductor was Arnold Schoenberg, and the program was a showcase for the radical new sounds of his students. When the soprano began to sing two songs by the 28-year-old Alban Berg—the Altenberg Lieder—the already restless audience erupted. Hisses and catcalls turned to shouts and scuffles. The music’s strange, compressed, and intensely emotional language was too much for the Viennese public. The concert descended into a full-blown riot, with punches thrown and furniture smashed, a scandal that would go down in history as the Skandalkonzert. For Berg, it was a public humiliation, but it was also a declaration. His music, which fused the most advanced modern techniques with a heart of pure, bleeding romanticism, was too potent and too personal to be ignored. He was the most lyrical and dramatic voice of musical modernism, a composer who gave Schoenberg's revolution a human face.

A Viennese Son

Alban Maria Johannes Berg was born into a comfortable, cultured middle-class family in Vienna in 1885. His childhood was steeped in the city's rich artistic atmosphere during its fin-de-siècle golden age. He was a talented youth, passionate about literature and music, but his early years were marked by personal struggles, including poor health and a deep depression following the death of his father in 1900. With little formal training, he began composing songs in a lush, late-Romantic style heavily indebted to Richard Wagner, Hugo Wolf, and Gustav Mahler. These early efforts, while showing a natural gift for melody, gave little hint of the revolutionary he would become.

His life's direction changed irrevocably in the autumn of 1904. His brother, seeing an advertisement, secretly submitted some of Alban's compositions to Arnold Schoenberg, the most controversial and important music theorist in Vienna. Schoenberg saw the immense, raw talent in the young man's work and agreed to take him on as a pupil. Crucially, as the Berg family was financially insecure, Schoenberg taught him for the first several years without charge. This was the beginning of the most important relationship of Berg's life.

The Schoenberg School

For the next six years, Berg, alongside his fellow student Anton Webern, was immersed in Schoenberg’s rigorous and all-encompassing tutelage. Schoenberg was more than a teacher; he was a mentor, a father figure, and a demanding artistic guide who shaped every aspect of their musical thinking. He took Berg through a systematic study of harmony, counterpoint, and form, starting from the fundamentals and progressing toward the limits of traditional tonality. Under Schoenberg’s guidance, Berg’s music evolved rapidly, moving from the romanticism of his Piano Sonata, Op. 1, to the compressed, chromatic language of his String Quartet, Op. 3.

Together, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern formed the nucleus of what became known as the Second Viennese School. They embarked on a shared journey into uncharted musical territory. As Schoenberg began to abandon the traditional key system, leading to free atonality, Berg followed. His works from this period, like the Altenberg Lieder of the Skandalkonzert and the Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6, are characterized by their extreme emotional intensity, their complex, dissonant harmonies, and their brilliant orchestration, which showed the clear influence of Gustav Mahler, whom Berg revered. While Webern’s atonality led to crystalline, aphoristic miniatures, Berg’s led to vast, महाकाव्य, and often terrifying emotional landscapes.

Wozzeck: An Operatic Revolution

After serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I—an experience that left him with a deep sympathy for the downtrodden—Berg began work on a project that would secure his place in history: his first opera, Wozzeck. Based on a fragmented, shockingly modern play by the 19th-century writer Georg Büchner, the opera tells the story of a poor, tormented soldier who is abused and dehumanized by his superiors until he is driven to madness and murder.

Berg’s musical language for Wozzeck was revolutionary. He used free atonality to create a sound world of terrifying psychological intensity, perfectly mirroring the main character’s fractured mental state. Yet, in a stroke of genius, he structured the entire opera with an almost obsessive formal rigor. Each scene is built upon a traditional musical form: a suite, a rhapsody, a passacaglia, a sonata, a set of inventions. This underlying classical structure gave the searingly dissonant music a powerful coherence and dramatic arc. Completed in 1922, Wozzeck premiered in Berlin in 1925 to sensational success. It was a landmark of 20th-century opera, a work of profound social commentary and overwhelming emotional power that proved atonal music could be a vehicle for compelling, large-scale human drama.

The Twelve-Tone Romantic

In the early 1920s, Arnold Schoenberg unveiled his "method of composing with twelve tones," a systematic way of organizing atonal music. Berg, ever the loyal student, adopted the technique, but he did so in his own, highly personal way. While Schoenberg and Webern often used the twelve-tone method to create abstract, objective structures, Berg used it to serve his inherently romantic and dramatic impulses. He became a master at crafting his tone rows in such a way that they could suggest tonal harmonies, allowing him to embed references to traditional music—like a Bach chorale or a folk song—within a complex serial texture.

This lyrical approach to serialism is evident in his Lyric Suite for string quartet (1926). For decades, the work was admired as a masterpiece of modernist form. It was only in the 1970s that a secret annotated score was discovered, revealing a hidden narrative: the suite is a detailed, passionate, and ultimately tragic account of Berg’s love affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the wife of a wealthy industrialist. The music is filled with secret codes, musical ciphers (using their initials A-B and H-F), and quotations that tell the story of their impossible love. It is perhaps the most perfect example of Berg’s aesthetic: a work of intense, secret passion encased within a structure of breathtaking intellectual complexity.

An Unfinished Requiem

Berg's final years were dominated by two major works. He worked for years on his second opera, Lulu, a dark and complex portrait of a femme fatale, based on plays by Frank Wedekind. However, he set it aside in 1935 to fulfill a commission for a violin concerto from the American violinist Louis Krasner. The composition of the concerto became an intensely personal act of mourning. Manon Gropius, the beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler (Gustav Mahler’s widow) and the architect Walter Gropius, had just died of polio. Berg, who had adored Manon, was devastated.

He dedicated the Violin Concerto "To the memory of an angel." The work is a stunning synthesis of his life’s work. It is a twelve-tone piece that is also deeply tonal, masterfully weaving an Austrian folk song and, most movingly, J.S. Bach’s chorale "Es ist genug" (It is enough) into its serial fabric. The concerto serves as a musical portrait of Manon’s life and death, and ultimately, as a requiem for Berg himself. Shortly after completing it, he suffered an insect bite that led to a fatal blood infection. Alban Berg died on Christmas Eve, 1935, at the age of fifty, leaving Lulu unfinished. His Violin Concerto, a work of heartbreaking beauty and profound spiritual acceptance, stands as his own epitaph.

Section 4: References and Further Reading

• Pople, Anthony. Berg: Violin Concerto. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

• Jarman, Douglas. The Music of Alban Berg. University of California Press, 1979.

• Adorno, Theodor W. Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link. Translated by Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

• Stuckenschmidt, H. H. Arnold Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work. Translated by Humphrey Searle. John Calder, 1977.

• Hailey, Christopher. "Berg, Alban." Grove Music Online. Oxford University Press, 2001.