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1885 - 1935 |
LULU  ELENA SCIANNAMEA LA TRAGEDIA DI LULU DA WEDEKIND A BERG  |
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| The Piano Sonata op. 1, composed in 1908, was Berg's apprentice piece under the tutelage of Arnold Schoenberg. It was written in the midst of a troubling time for the composer: Helene Nahowski's parents opposed the intention of Berg to marry her, on grounds of his unstable health. Theodor Adorno was a student of Berg's who went on to be a philosopher and musical theorist. In his book about Berg, Master of the Smallest Link, he wrote that the Piano Sonata is an excellent introduction to Berg's music. This is due to its shortness - about 11 minutes - and its accessibility. Additionally, it is the unpolished "raw data" of Berg's musical imagination, and thus gives the listener insight into its creator's mind. The single movement is in simple sonata form: Exposition, Development, and Recapitulation. The piece is, however, greatly indebted to more recent developments in music. Berg used Schoenberg's idea of deriving all themes in the piece from one theme. In the Sonata all themes are intended to logically follow from the first melody heard in the piece._  |
The Vier Lieder, Op. 2, are written for piano and soprano. The texts are taken from poems by Hebbel and Mombert. The songs are extremely important in Berg's oeuvre; in them, several of the essentials of Berg's mature style are revealed and tonality is superceded by what Schoenberg called "pan-tonality." I will discuss three of the songs seperately. The first song, with text by Friedrich Hebbel, is the first instance in Berg's music of what was to become a favourite technique of his: retrograde. The song has the ABA form, meaning that very similar sections are seperated by a unique section. The inherent symmetry of this design is greatly enhanced by "an encompassing series of pitch events that progresses to the midpoint (coinciding with the climax) and then continues in reversed order to the end" (Gable and Morgan: 134). The song is also Bergian in that it is multivalent, "incorporating features attributable to several possible formal models: ternary [ABA], tension-release, continuous variation, and retrograde" (ibid., 136). |
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LINKS ON ALBAN BERG
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FRANK WEDEKIND |
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ADORNO ON MAHLER, STRAUSS AND BERG ALBAN BERG STIFTUNG |
