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 of 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 Frühe 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–
8); it is one of the most formidable "first" works ever written (Lauder, 1986).
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 on all its aspects being derived from a single basic idea; this idea was later known as
developing 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 siècle 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; 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 premièred 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 a
Carinthian folk song. The Violin Concerto was dedicated to Manon, the deceased daughter of architect
Walter Gropius and
Alma Schindler.
Other well known Berg compositions include the
Lyric Suite (seemingly a significant influence on the String Quartet No. 3 of
Béla Bartók), Three Pieces for Orchestra and the
Chamber 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."
