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Thursday 4 February
Alban Berg (1885–1935)
Three Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6 (1913–15)
1 Präludium: Langsam
2 Reigen: Anfangs etwas zögernd – Leicht beschwingt
3 Marsch: Mässiges Marschtempo
Alban Berg did not get off to a promising start. A terrible
student: he had to repeat two separate years of high school
before he could finally graduate. Then, too, a fling with the
family’s kitchen maid led to his becoming a father at the age
of 17. Though passionate about music, he was clearly not cut
out for academic success, and sensibly accepted a position
as an unpaid intern in the civil service.
The decisive step in his eventual career arrived in the
autumn of 1904, when he and Anton Webern signed up for
composition lessons with Arnold Schoenberg, who had
taken out a newspaper advertisement in the hope of
attracting pupils. Schoenberg, who was a little more than
10 years older than Berg and not yet famous, stopped
offering formal classes after a year, frustrated that most of
his pupils showed no aptitude for composition. However,
the talented students – including both Webern and Berg –
stuck with him. Schoenberg seems not to have insisted that
his students adopt his own compositional methods; in
the event, both Webern and Berg developed strikingly
individual voices. Some years later, Webern would write
of Schoenberg’s tutelage:
‘People think Schoenberg teaches his own style and forces
the pupil to adopt it. That is quite untrue – Schoenberg
teaches no style of any kind, he preaches the use neither of
old artistic resources nor of new ones … Schoenberg
demands, above all, that what the pupil writes for his lessons
should not consist of any old notes written down to fill out an
academic form, but should be something achieved as the
result of his need for self-expression. So he must, in fact,
create – even in the musical examples written during the most
primitive initial stages. Whatever Schoenberg explains with
reference to his pupil’s work arises organically from the work
itself; he never has recourse to extraneous theoretical
maxims.’
Berg’s formal studies with Schoenberg continued through
1911. Writing to his publisher in 1911, Schoenberg remarked:
‘Alban Berg is an extraordinarily gifted composer, but the
state he was in when he came to me was such that his
imagination apparently could not work on anything but
Lieder … He was absolutely incapable of writing an
instrumental movement or inventing an instrumental theme.’
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