Berg was born in Vienna, the third of four children of
Johanna and Conrad Berg. His family lived comfortably until the death of his
father in 1900.
He was more interested
in literature than music as a child and did not begin to compose
until he was fifteen, when he started to teach himself music. In late February
or early March 1902 he fathered a child with Marie Scheuchl, a servant girl in
the Berg family household. His daughter, Albine, was born on December 4,
1902.
Berg had little formal
music education before he became a student of Arnold Schoenberg in October 1904. With Schoenberg he
studied counterpoint, music theory, and harmony. By 1906, he was studying music
full-time; by 1907, he began composition lessons. His student compositions
included five drafts for piano
sonatas. He also wrote songs, including his Seven Early Songs (Sieben Frьhe Lieder), three of
which were Berg's first publicly performed work in a concert that featured the
music of Schoenberg's pupils in Vienna that year. The early sonata sketches
eventually culminated in Berg's Piano Sonata (Op. 1) (1907–1908); it is one of the
most formidable "first" works ever written.
Berg studied with
Schoenberg for six years until 1911. Berg admired him as a composer and mentor,
and they remained close lifelong friends. Berg may have seen the older composer
as a father figure, as Berg's father had died when he was only 15.
Among Schoenberg's
teaching was the idea that the unity of a musical composition depends upon all
its aspects being derived from a single basic idea; this idea was later known
asdeveloping variation. Berg passed this on to his students, one of
whom, Theodor Adorno, stated: "The
main principle he conveyed was that of variation: everything was supposed to
develop out of something else and yet be intrinsically different". The Piano Sonata is an example—the
whole composition is derived from the work's opening quartal gesture and its opening phrase.
Berg was a part of
Vienna's cultural elite during the heady fin de siиcle period. His circle included the
musicians Alexander von
Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker, the painter Gustav Klimt, the writer and
satirist Karl Kraus, the
architect Adolf Loos, and the
poet Peter Altenberg. In 1906,
Berg met the singer Helene
Nahowski, daughter of a wealthy family (said by some to be in fact the
illegitimate daughter of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria from his liaison with Anna
Nahowski); despite the outward
hostility of her family, the two were married on May 3, 1911.
In 1913, two of
Berg's Five Songs on Picture
Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg (1912) were premiиred in Vienna, conducted by Schoenberg. Settings of aphoristic
utterances, the songs are accompanied by a very large orchestra. The performance
caused a riot, and had to be halted; the work was not performed in full until
1952 (and its full score remained unpublished until 1966).
From 1915 to 1918, Berg
served in the Austrian Army and during a period of leave in
1917 he began work on his first opera, Wozzeck. After the end of World War I, he settled again in Vienna
where he taught private pupils. He also helped Schoenberg run his Society for Private Musical
Performances, which sought to create the ideal environment for the exploration
and appreciation of unfamiliar new music by means of open rehearsals, repeat
performances, and the exclusion of professional critics.
Three excerpts from Wozzeck were performed in 1924, and this
brought Berg his first public success. The opera, which Berg completed in 1922,
was not performed in its entirety until December 14, 1925, when Erich Kleiber directed a performance in Berlin. Today Wozzeck is seen as one of Berg's most important
works. Berg completed only the first two acts of his later opera, the critically
acclaimed Lulu, before he
died.
Berg's best-known piece
is his elegiac Violin Concerto.
Like much of his mature work, it employs a personal adaptation of
Schoenberg's twelve tone
technique that enables the
composer to combine frank atonality with passages that use more traditional
tonal harmonies; additionally, Berg incorporates quotations from historical
tonal music, including a Bach chorale and aCarinthian folk song. The Violin Concerto was
dedicated to Manon, the deceased daughter of architect Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler.
Other well known Berg
compositions include the Lyric
Suite (seemingly a significant
influence on the String Quartet No. 3 of Bйla Bartуk), Three Pieces for Orchestra and theChamber Concerto for violin, piano and 13 wind instruments.
Berg died in Vienna, on
Christmas Eve 1935, apparently from blood poisoning caused by an insect bite. He was 50
years old.
Douglas Jarman writes in
the New Grove: "As the 20th
century closed, the 'backward-looking' Berg suddenly came as Perle remarked, to look like its most
forward-looking composer."