Alban Berg

Born in Vienna in 1885, Alban Berg was at first drawn more to literature than to music, but this changed during his teenage years. In 1904 he began a six-year period of private composition study with Arnold Schoenberg. The older composer’s teaching skills and powerful personality propelled Berg towards early mastery of a technically elaborate and hyper-expressive modernist idiom. Some orchestral songs setting texts by local poet Peter Altenberg were hissed off the concert platform in Vienna in 1913, but Berg recovered from this traumatic experience to complete his large-scale and highly dramatic Three Pieces for Orchestra in 1915. For the next seven years, with interruptions due to wartime army service, Berg worked on his opera Wozzeck; after its 1925 Berlin premiere it was widely performed in Germany, and was soon recognised as a modern masterpiece. Beginning with the Lyric Suite for string quartet (1926), Berg included Schoenberg’s 12-note method of musical construction as part of his technical armoury, adapting it in his own individual and expressive way. In 1935, his second opera Lulu was still unfinished when the sudden death of Manon Gropius, the young daughter of Mahler’s widow Alma, inspired Berg to compose and complete a Violin Concerto in her memory. A few months later Berg himself died from blood poisoning caused by an insect bite, leaving Lulu incomplete.