BergPresentation.pptx a composer of the 20th century classical music

Alban Maria Berg - a chronological history of his life and some of his works. From the Second Viennese School of Expressionist Music.

1. (1885-1935) … a report by Alexander Jabbar I. Marohombsar

2. Alban Maria Johannes Berg (1885-1935), Austrian composer, and of the Second Viennese School , known principally for his operas Wozzeck (1921) and Lulu (1935) . Although he left a relatively small oeuvre, he is remembered as one of the most important composers of the 20 th -century for his expressive style encompassing “entire worlds of emotion and structure”.

3. He was born in 1885, in Vienna, and together with Anton Webern he became one of the first composition pupils of Arnold Schönberg . Berg brought to his serial music a sense of Romantic lyricism that added a new, attractive dimension to it, and he often used serial technique in only parts of his composition. His works are seen as more “emotional” than Schönberg’s .

4. Berg was the son of well-to-do parents and born on Feb. 9 in the heart of Habsburg, Vienna. He did not begin to compose until he was fifteen, when he started to teach himself music. While still in his teens he wrote a large number of songs ( Lieder ), some seventy of which were found in manuscript after his death.

5. These songs were expressions of Berg’s Romantic feelings which are traditionally brought on by spectacular scenery. Indeed, the image of beautiful love—Helene Nahowski —and the image of beautiful nature figured largely in his early music: mainly songs about the nostalgia for love, the landscape as an expression of love, and of poetic wonder. The Sieben frühe Lieder or (“Seven Early Songs”) (1905-1908) are representatives of this readily perceptible Romanticism.

6. Two things emerged clearly even from Berg’s earliest compositions, however awkward they may have been: first, that music was to him a language and that he really expressed himself in that language, and secondly, overflowing warmth of feeling. Berg had little formal music education before he became a student of Arnold Schönberg in October 1904. With Sch ö nberg , he studied counterpoint, music theory, and harmony.

7. By 1906 he was studying music full-time; by 1907 he began composition lessons. Studying with Schönberg was a crucial step both for him personally and, indeed, for the development of 20 th century music. Over the years Berg and Anton Webern became the chief left tenants of their revered teacher. They remain linked to the “Trinity” to this day.

8. The teaching of Schönberg provided Berg’s musical language with the sinew and muscle it so badly needed. And it also stimulated the complementary side of his Romantic nature: the delight in expressing powerful emotion through extreme elaboration and formal complexity. Berg completed his studies in 1911, but his friendship for Schönberg and enthusiasm for his work was not diminished;

9. throughout the next decade a great part of Berg’s life was devoted to the propagation of his friend’s work and detailed commentaries on Schönberg’s developing theories of chromatic harmony ( the 12-tone system ). Berg’s student compositions included draft sketches of sonata movements. They eventually culminated in Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (1909). The Sonata is Berg’s only piano work to which he gave an opus number.

10. It consists of a single movement centered in the key of B minor. The composition also relies heavily on Arnold Schönberg’s idea of “ developing variation ”, a method to ensure the unity of a piece of music by deriving all aspects of a composition from a single, basic idea. One of Berg’s students, Theodor W. Adorno, stated: “The main principle he conveyed was that of variation: everything was supposed to develop out of something else and yet be intrinsically different”.

11. In the case of the Piano Sonata , much of the composition can be traced back to the two opening gestures. The piece is one of the most formidable “first” works ever written. In 1906 Berg met the singer Helene Nahowski at the Vienna Hofoper (the Royal Opera). By Easter 1907, a friendship had been firmly established. Despite the outward hostility of her family, the couple married on May 3, 1911.

12. In 1913 at a concert in the Wiener Musikvereinssal two of Berg’s Altenberg Lieder, Op. 4 (1912) were premiered with his teacher Schönberg conducting. The songs were based on scraps of Peter Altenberg’s poetry sent to friends on picture postcards. The performance caused a famous riot and had to be halted. Two parties, one very much in favor and very aggressive, and the other, who didn’t like it, fought each other everywhere almost with their fists.

13. The incident deeply wounded Berg’s feelings that he withdrew the work from publication. The songs had to wait for 40 years for a complete (all five songs) performance. Berg spent three years in service in World War I (1915-1918). He became a reluctant and very bored soldier at the very moment when he had decided on the subject of his first opera.

14. Wozzeck, Op. 7 (1921) is based on the dramatic fragment “ Woyzeck” of the 19 th -century revolutionary writer Georg Büchner. It is the story of a soldier, stupid, lost, and helpless; harried by his superiors into murder and madness. He is an emblem for all the oppressed. Berg was a great humanitarian. He responded to the story in the only way a liberal artist knows: with a humanity and compassion, which were given hard substance by his War service.

15. Wozzeck is generally regarded as the first opera produced in the 20th-century avant-garde style and is also one of the most famous examples of atonality (music that avoids establishing a key) and Sprechgesang . Berg was following in the footsteps of his teacher, Schönberg , by using free atonality to express emotions and even the thought processes of the characters on the stage. The expression of madness and alienation was amplified with atonal music.

16. Following Franz Wozzeck’s death in the opera is an orchestral interlude freely composed and firmly grounded in D minor. For Berg it is the heart of the opera. Here the audience to which Berg is appealing to is meant to represent humanity itself. The opus was one of the undisputed masterpieces of the 20th-century—an epoch-making work.

17. As in Berg’s early music, culminating in the Three Orchestral Pieces, Op.6 (1914) and the Altenberg Lieder, Op. 4 (1912) , the structure of Wozzeck, Op. 7 shows a predilection for miniaturistic forms—not classic operatic forms such as aria or trio, but forms more commonly associated with abstract instrumental music, e.g. Prelude and triple Fugue in Act 2, Scene 2—and for subtly divided orchestral canvases of huge dimensions.

18. Berg celebrated his veneration of his teacher and their three-fold alliance with Anton Webern with a Chamber Concerto in 1925. Here he worked out his formal, even numerical, obsessions to the full. The Kammerkonzert or (“Chamber Concerto for Piano, Violin, and 13 Wind Instruments”) (1923-1925) was a birthday tribute to Arnold Schönberg . What the instruments actually play are musical equivalence of the names ArnolD SCHönBErG , Anton wEBErn , and AlBAn BErG .

19. But more than musical material there is also musical characterization going on. The piano plays Arnold Schönberg , very precise. The violin plays Anton Webern, terribly nervous and high-strung. The horn plays Alban Berg, very introverted and retiring man. Three types of music: precise, nervy, and brooding. These Berg then elaborates into a marvelous theme for the full orchestra.

20. Because of the way this piece was composed, like for instance taking sequences of notes and playing them back to front or upside down, there aren't too many recognizable groups of notes, or “tunes” in this piece. But the gestures are very noticeable. One could always recognize them whenever they occur. The whole piece is a theatre of gestures. Theme and variations in this piece refers not only to a compositional procedure but to a dramatic process as well.

21. The variations are a sequence of scenes, variations of dramatic view point, and insights into possible interrelationships, exactly the same thing that Berg had done in his opera Wozzeck . A strong degree of individual involvement combined with a highly developed sense of collaboration are needed from the players themselves and their conductor, in order for the piece to “work”, so to speak. More than just a virtuosity of technique, the piece entails a virtuosity of response.

22. Alongside the rudiments of Schönberg's method (of composing with 12 tones), the four polyphonic procedures of basic shape, retrograde (that’s reverse), inversion (upside down), and retrograde-inversion; aspects of tonality, atonality, palindrome, number symbolism, musical cyphers, classical forms like sonata, rondo, theme and variations; all these established procedures/ received conventions/ bits of musical reality Berg takes out from their usual contexts, their usual locations, and rebuilds them into a fantastic creation—

23. —a sort of hybrid piece of a musical architecture. The complex multi-layering is very hard on the listeners as well as the players. The words ‘chamber’ and ‘concerto’ would have seemed incompatible in the 19th-century. It’s a new idea to turn a chamber piece into a concert piece. And what Berg is proposing is a new form of participation in music. All music in the 20th-century demands that one be an active listener.

24. And with Berg’s Kammerkonzert one has to be a positively virtuoso listener. Quite simply with a piece like this the listener becomes a co-producer of the piece. In the second setting of Theodor Storm’s poem, “Schließe mir die Augen beide ” (1925), Berg for the first time wrote a full-fledged 12-tone composition, and he re-used its tone row, or rather its secondary set, in the first movement of the Lyrische Suite for string quartet of 1926.

25. “Music, as in Karl Kraus’ poem, does not emerge from a state of ecstatic intoxication as the dilettante imagines, but from the ecstasies of logic. And for me, that is the 12-tone system.” –Alban Berg Aside from the Kammerkonzert , Berg wrote such fine instrumental works as the Lyrische Suite or (“Lyric Suite for string quartet”) (1926) and the Violin Concerto (1935).

26. But it was his opera Lulu (based on two plays by Frank Wedekind ) which claimed his major energies. Lulu is especially notable for using serialism at a time that was particularly inhospitable to it. This work, Berg’s first full-scale opera in the 12-tone technique, was never completed, except in short form as the Symphonische Stücke aus der Oper “Lulu” (Lulu Suite) for soprano and orchestra.

27. Before Berg died, he had completed the orchestration of only the first two of the three acts of Lulu . For personal reasons Helene Berg subsequently imposed a ban on any attempt to “complete” the final act, which Berg had in fact completed in short score. An orchestration was therefore commissioned in secret from Friedrich Cerha and premièred in Paris (under Pierre Boulez) only in 1979, soon after Helene Berg’s own death.

28. Lulu is “the destoyer of all because everyone destroys her”. That was how one of Berg’s favorite poets, Karl Kraus, described the character of Lulu. And Berg followed this interpretation to the letter—Lulu is just that, she is woman as sex object. Like Wozzeck , Lulu is social criticism, a tragedy in which the protagonists are portrayed as victims, gradually becoming enslaved to social forces they are too weak to deal with.

29. Although some of Lulu is freely composed, Berg also makes use of Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique. Rather than using one tone row for the entire work, however, he gives each character his or her own tone row, meaning that the tone rows act rather like the leitmotifs in Richard Wagner’s operas. Life for the musical world was becoming increasingly difficult in the 1930s both in Vienna and Germany due to the rising tide of antisemitism and the Nazi cultural ideology that denounced modernity.

30. The Nazis splintered Berg’s brief material success and eventually his music was proscribed and placed on the list of degenerate music. Berg had interrupted the orchestration of Lulu because of an unexpected (and financially much-needed) commission from the Russian-American violinist Louis Krasner for a Violin Concerto (1935). This requiem, composed at unaccustomed speed and posthumously premiered, has arguably become Berg’s best-known and most-beloved composition.

31. The Violin Concerto (1935) was dedicated “to the memory of an Angel”, Manon Gropius, the deceased daughter of architect Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler, who contracted polio and died in 1935 at the age of 17. The work employs an idiosyncratic adaptation of Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique, that enables the composer to produce passages openly evoking tonality, including quotations from historical tonal music, such as a Bach chorale and a Carinthian folk song.

32. Berg, who had suffered poor health since his adolescence (severe asthma), developed blood poisoning in the summer of 1935, and died the following winter (Dec. 24, 1935) in Vienna, survived by his wife, the former Helene Nahowski . The number 23 had a deep and personal meaning for Berg. It was he believed his ‘Fate’ number.

33. On the 23rd he had had his first attack of asthma (July 23, 1900); from that time on, 23 and its multiples (46, 69, etc.) was given a special significance in his scores; he nearly always seemed to begin or end a new work on the 23 rd , and on the 23rd of December, half-conscious in the hospital, he said, “Today will be the crisis”. In fact, he died at 1:15 in the morning of the 24th. He was 50.