Alban Berg

Abstract Alban Berg (1885–1935) studied with Schoenberg from 1904 to 1911, and although their subsequent relationship was nothing if not complex, Berg was able to achieve significant creative independence without rejecting the association between an expressionistic atmosphere and intricate structures based in traditional concepts of musical design which Schoenberg himself had favoured in his most radical works. Although Berg’s early compositions, from the many songs and the Piano Sonata Op. 1 to the Three Pieces for Orchestra Op. 6, are far from negligible, it was his first opera Wozzeck which fully revealed his originality and greatness for the first time. Berg began it in 1914, soon after seeing the play by Buchner from which he adapted his own libretto, and it occupied him until 1922: it was first performed, with great success, in Berlin in 1925. On one level Wozzeck continues the progress away from Wagnerian heroics begun by Richard Strauss in Salome and Elektra. Wagner’s last music drama dealt with Parsifal, the saviour in spotless armour, the fool who becomes wise. Wozzeck is a fool who goes mad, a common soldier who saves no one but kills his mistress and, apparently, commits suicide. The three acts of Wozzeck together are shorter than the first act of Parsifal. The contrast would be even greater had Berg adopted the kind of musical approach which emerged in the 1920s in the more determinedly anti-romantic operas of Hindemith and Weill, but he had no desire to keep his audience at a distance from the drama. Rather, the justification for showing so much squalor and brutality was to evoke feelings of compassion even more intense than those usually inspired by Wagner’s larger-than-life mythological characters.