Alban Berg was born to a wealthy Austrian family in 1885. As a child, he preferred literature to music, and began composing Lieder on his own as a teenager - a genre to which he would remain attached as he evolved. He became Arnold Schoenberg‘s student in October 1904, studying harmony and counterpoint with him, always from a historical perspective. By twenty-one, he had decided to devote himself exclusively to music, and began composing in earnest a year later, deeply inspired by the revolutionary aesthetics of his teacher: while Sept Lieder de jeunesse retain some elements of tonality, Sonate op. 1 is already experimenting strongly with its elimination. And while Berg remained strongly influenced by Wagner, Mahler, and Strauss), his audacious Opus 1 above all bears the mark of his mentor and friend Schoenberg.

Berg became a central figure in the liberal Vienna so vividly captured in Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie, published in 1908. His social circle included Alexander von Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker, the painter Gustav Klimt, the architect Adolf Loos, and the poet Peter Altenberg. He was a great reader of the satiric writing of Karl Kraus. He married Hélène Nahowski in 1911, not with little difficulty, as her family had its doubts about the match, similar to Schumann’s pursuit of Clara. It was Schoenberg who in a storied concert in 1913 conducted Fünf Orchesterlieder von Altenberg, “Uber die Grenzen des All,” which sent the concert hall into total chaos and earned Berg the reputation of being a “radical composer.” The work was less shocking for its language than for the luxuriant excesses of the orchestra, which seemed to spin off and throw itself into countless brief melodies at once.

War broke out. Berg’s initial patriotic enthusiasm was quickly dashed by his experience of military life (1915-1918), which laid the groundwork for the libretto of his opera Wozzeck, inspired by Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck (1837), which stages the misadventures of a psychologically unstable soldier. Berg began work on the opera during the traumatic years of the war, advancing slowly until its completion in 1922. It was to be his masterwork, and premiered on 14 December 1925, masterfully conducted by Erich Kleiber, after a period of unusually intensive rehearsals. It achieved rapid renown, first at home and then abroad. Berg the student seemed finally to have surpassed Schoenberg the master, particularly in the social sphere. Among Schoenberg and his two celebrated students, Berg and Webern, Berg was the only one to see such enthusiasm from audiences of the time.

His second string quartet, Lyric Suite, was his first fully dodecaphonic piece, after attempts in Chamber concerto. Berg, despite his popular success, remained faithful to Schoenberg and his system of 12-note composition, a “method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another,” which he presented in 1923. The main inspiration for the piece was Berg’s romantic entanglement with Hanna Fuchs. She, like Berg, was married, and the true nature of their fleeting, thwarted relationship has never been known.

After the success of Wozzeck, Berg’s next major project was a second opera, which also took years to come to fruitition. Titled Lulu, it was based on Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1902), two scandalous plays by the playwright Munich Frank Wedekind. Threaded into this second masterwork are two commissions, Der Wein, based on Stefan George’s translation of Baudelaire, and the celebrated Concerto for violin and orchestra, “To the memory of an angel” (a commemoration of Manon, the daughter of Alma Mahler and the architect Walter Gropius, who died of poliomyelitis at the age of 18). The success of this concerto can be attributed to Berg’s partial return to tonality, or at least to composing music that was slightly more anchored in the repertory of the time, in particular through musical references to these works. This slight turn toward tradition also suffuses Lulu, which contains some tonal qualities. The opera follows the splendor and the misery of the life of an immoral courtesan whose trajectory may be seen as tracing out a logical feminine response to masculine opression (as described by Karl Kraus at a lecture Berg attended in 1905, also titled Pandora’s Box). Berg died before completing the opera, on 24 December 1935, of septicaemia caused by an infected insect sting (antibiotics were discovered just four years later). He left extensive notes, and the opera was finally completed by Friedrich Cerha, premiering nearly half a century later in 1979 at the Paris Opera, conducted by Pierre Boulez.