Alban Berg

Alban Berg was born in Vienna in 1885 and was largely self-taught until he became a private pupil of Arnold Schoenberg in 1904, alongside Anton Webern. Schoenberg’s teaching shaped the rest of Berg’s working life, and the three composers became the central figures of what later became known as the Second Viennese School. Berg’s early concert works were tonal in character; the move into atonality and later into the twelve-tone method took place gradually across the 1910s and 1920s.

His operatic output is small but central to the twentieth-century repertoire. *Wozzeck*, drawn from Büchner’s play and composed in the years after the First World War, received its premiere in Berlin in 1925; *Lulu*, left incomplete at his death, was eventually performed and recorded in a three-act completion by Friedrich Cerha in the 1970s. Outside the operas, the Violin Concerto of 1935, written in memory of Manon Gropius, has remained the most widely performed of his works.

Berg died in Vienna in December 1935 of complications from an insect bite. Music Preserved’s archive includes recordings of the principal stage and concert works alongside studio sessions of the chamber music.