Alban Berg

Alban Berg wrote twelve-tone music that people cried at, which his teacher thought was a compromise and history has treated as the point. He came from a comfortable Vienna family, was largely self-taught and unhappy, and became Schoenberg's pupil at nineteen, studying with him for six years without paying because he could not afford to. He served in the war in the Austrian ministry of war after failing the physical for the front, and the experience went directly into Wozzeck, the opera he worked on for seven years: a soldier humiliated by his superiors murders the mother of his child and drowns. It is written in strict closed forms - a suite, a passacaglia, a symphony - that the audience never hears as such, and it was a genuine success at its 1925 premiere, which no one expected. Lulu, his second opera, was left unfinished. The Violin Concerto of 1935 was written in a few weeks after the death of Manon Gropius, Alma Mahler's daughter, quotes a Bach chorale, and is his farewell. He died at fifty of blood poisoning from an insect bite that went untreated. Wozzeck was performed in over a hundred European houses within a decade and the royalties supported him for the rest of his life, which is rare for atonal music. Lulu was completed in the third act by Friedrich Cerha and first staged whole in 1979, over Berg s widow s long objection. The Lyric Suite was discovered in the 1970s to contain a coded programme about his affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, with her initials worked into the pitches. The Nazis banned his music as degenerate the year he died, so his widow was left with little.

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