February 9, 2007

  • Alban Berg

    Alban Berg (1885-1935) comes from the Second Viennese School, placed there musicologically as a group that inherited music from Beethoven and Schubert.  The group included Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern.  Berg's music can be seen as closer, yet distant, cousin to Post-Romanticism.  Where the music say of Richard Strauss moves within a more immediately accessible harmonic language, Berg's music always stretches chromaticism in interesting ways.  I think his music is probably the most interesting to listen to because it helps provide a bridge to some of the more difficult atonal music that was to come.  Even Schoenberg's later music seems to return to the style of Expressionism explored in Berg's music.

    There are several works worth exploring in Berg's output.  The Violin Concerto is a fantastic place to start.  It includes an homage to Bach not just thematically but in the appearance of Baroque musical forms.  The piece is one of the more deeply moving works in the early atonal idiom.  But Berg's contribution could rest on his overwhelming opera, "Wozzeck."  I spent a month back in grad school examining every aspect of this work which at first seemed like overkill, but I discovered along the way one of the true masterpieces of Twentieth Century Opera.  The "Altenberg Lieder" are equally fascinating.  Berg's orchestral approach allows for you to hear individual lines within his harmonic structures.  It means that the music can reach you in ways you least expect.  Overpowering at times but always fascinating, Berg is one a composer worth hearing.  I've included a cheaper disc to begin with that also includes his masterful "Lyric Suite."  This is just a start to open to a musical world that was cut all too short by Berg's death in 1935.

             

     (Lyric Suite and Altenberg Lieder)