Biography
Born in 1885 in Austria, the young Alban Berg soon realised that he wanted to spend the rest of his life composing music.
He was fortunate enough to receive a private income for many of his early years, thereby giving him the time and means to pursue his calling.
However, this money ran out shortly after the Second World War, and he had to scrape a living from teaching and performance royalties.
In his twenties, Berg could always be found in the company of the avant-garde Viennese intellectuals of the time such as the architect and founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, and Mahler’s widow, Alma.
It was in such circles that he met Arnold Schoenberg, who became a guide and friend, and for whom Berg composed his Chamber Concerto on his mentor’s fiftieth birthday.
Berg is probably best remembered for his opera Wozzeck, which is seen as being one of the more accessible modern works.
Both Wozzeck and his other opera, Lulu, are regarded as significant contributions to the development of opera in the twentieth century.
Three Orchestral Pieces
1914, Orchestral
Berg learnt many of his skills and abilities as composer from his teacher and friend, Arnold Schoenberg, who became something of a hero to him and, on the event of his mentor’s fortieth birthday, Berg hoped to produce a suitable composition. But rather than save it as a surprise, Berg found himself consulting Schoenberg on many aspects of a work that later became the ‘Three Orchestral Pieces’.
Although suitably flattered, the master stuck to his role of teacher and gave realistic and occasionally cutting advice and criticism as Berg progressed. Consequently, in a desperate bid to please, Berg spent longer than normal on the work, to the unfortunate extent that on the actual birthday, 13 September 1914, only the first and last of the ‘Three Pieces’ were actually finished. In the accompanying letter Berg wrote:
‘For years it has been my secret but strong wish . . . to dedicate something to you. The works written under your supervision . . . were automatically eliminated, having been received by you. My hope to write something more independent and yet as good as these first compositions . . . has been repeatedly disappointed for several years . . . I cannot tell whether I have succeeded or failed. Should the latter be the case, then in your fatherly benevolence, Mr Schoenberg, you must take the goodwill of the deed.’
The first piece begins with a misty sound that is soon filled out by other instruments until the principal theme is introduced by the violins and bassoons in unison. At the end, the movement fades back to its original haze. The second section is set at a waltz-like pace and has some noticeable connections with the beer-garden scene from Berg’s opera ‘Wozzeck’.
The final piece is a March and is as long as the first two movements combined. It constantly seems to rise to series of catastrophic climaxes, often with loud and crashing kettle-drums.
On the original score, Berg wrote: ‘To my teacher and friend Arnold Schoenberg, in immeasurable gratitude and love’.
Wozzeck
1921, Opera
Berg’s ‘Wozzeck’ is often seen as one of the most influential operas of this century and also the only Expressionist opera to be accepted into the standard repertoire. Berg took as his source the tragedy ‘Woyzeck’, written by Georg Buchner in 1837, which was seen as a very reactionary piece of literature for its day. It tells the story of Wozzeck, a simple-minded soldier, who is shown to us as a helpless victim of his environment. He has a captain who mocks him, a garrison doctor who performs scientific experiments on him, a drum major who regularly beats him, and a mistress who is unfaithful to him. In his despair, Wozzeck murders his mistress and then drowns while trying to wash her blood off his hands in a pond.
The work was finished in 1921, and at first no opera house would touch it, claiming that it was simply too difficult to perform. So, on the advice of a friend, Berg chose three excerpts that he could present in concert form. A performance took place in June 1924 in Frankfurt, and was a resounding success – so much so, that the Berlin State Opera decided that they would stage the entire opera, which they did in December 1925.
The first excerpt begins with a scene in the room of Wozzeck’s mistress, Marie. We hear the approach of a military band, which Marie watches intently while holding her baby. As she is admiring the drum major who is leading the band, her neighbour begins to shout insults at her until Marie slams shut the window, thereby shutting out the sound of the band. She sings the child to sleep with a beautiful lullaby.
The next excerpt is also set in Marie’s room, in the evening. A single, muted viola introduces a theme upon which seven variations follow.
In the final section we are at the end of the opera, where Wozzeck is drowning. The horror of this scene is enhanced by slow, rising scales for strings and woodwinds that soon becomes a powerful orchestral lament for all the down-trodden Wozzecks of this world.
Lulu
1934, Opera
Alban Berg’s opera ‘Lulu’ is based on two plays by the German Expressionist writer Frank Wedekind, ‘Earth Spirit’ and ‘ Pandora’s Box’. By skilful cutting and careful arrangement, Berg was able to construct a libretto and a produce a three-act opera with a strong story line, though governed essentially by musical forms.
The main character, Lulu, is a dangerous woman who uses her sex and cunning to climb the social ladder. Up to the middle of Act II, we see Lulu destroy three husbands in quick succession as she strives for social recognition, yet it is in the second half that she begins to suffer for her crimes, for she herself is eventually destroyed by three men, corresponding to her husbands.
Lulu’s first husband dies of a heart attack when he discovers her with a portrait painter. The painter, who becomes her second husband, shoots himself when he discovers that she is the mistress of the local doctor. When the doctor, her third husband, discovers that she has seduced his son, he tries to make her commit suicide, but Lulu shoots him first and is imprisoned.
After a year she is rescued by a trio of her admirers and flees with them to Paris and eventually to London, where she has fallen so far down the social scale that she is nothing more than a common prostitute. In the last scene, we see Lulu meet a horrible end at the hands of Jack the Ripper.
The Suite is set in five movements and was put together after the success of the opera.
The first movement is a Rondo and introduces the main Lulu theme, while the Allegro of the second movement stresses the turning point of the opera, where Lulu begins to fall from social grace, i.e. her arrest and imprisonment for the death of the doctor. The third section is called ‘Lulu’s Song’ and is her self-defence and justification for the killing, which sadly does her no good as she is still thrown in jail. The ‘Variations’ follow in the fourth part to prepare the observer for the hopelessness of the final scene. The theme Berg uses here is actually from a collection of Berlin prostitute songs. The final Adagio is the tragic end of Lulu’s life, when she meets her doom with her last customer, Jack the Ripper. After we hear Lulu’s screams, her friend, a down-and-out Countess, rushes to her aid – only also to be killed by the Ripper. As she dies, she is accompanied by astonishingly tender music, to which she murmurs:
‘Lulu my angel – let me see you once more! – I am near to you. I will always be near to you, in eternity . . .’
Violin Concerto
1935, Concerti, Orchestral
On the original manuscript of Berg’s Violin Concerto is the inscription ‘To the Memory of an Angel’. The work is in fact dedicated to the eighteen-year-old Manon Gropius, the daughter of the famous architect Walter Gropius and his wife, Alma Maria Mahler, formerly the wife of Gustav Mahler.
In February 1935 Berg was shocked and dismayed to learn of the death of Manon, who had been a devoted friend. He was told that she had been struck with infantile paralysis and, though she struggled bravely against it as best she could, had sadly passed away. Berg was deeply moved and decided that he would write a violin concerto as memorial to his dead friend.
He began work at an incredible pace which, for Berg, was rather unusual, and interrupting the composition of the last act of his opera ‘Lulu’. In July he wrote to his friend Anton Webern, saying:
’ . . . and then I was so dead tired after an almost thirteen-hour work day, that I was incapable of absorbing any more music, so I went to bed. For on that day [July 12] I had practically completed the composition of the Violin Concerto and I had been sitting at the piano or my desk from seven o’ clock that morning until nine o’ clock at night almost without interruption.’
The concerto is in two movements of two parts each, the first being a musical portrait of Manon Gropius, the second ‘The catastrophe of death and the transfiguration in heaven.’
The first movement (Andante – Allegretto) begins with a quiet string introduction before the solo violin takes up its musical position. In the Allegretto we hear a light-hearted display of dance tunes that Berg hoped would capture and represent Manon’s natural cheer and love of life. In the second section (Allegro – Adagio) the musicians are instructed to allow the rhythm to fluctuate to re-enact Manon’s struggle with death.