Twelve-Toner

Alban Berg was a composer who rode to fame on only one work. His great, gloomy atonal opera, Wozzeck, is seldom performed, but it put his name in the musical history books.

Berg died at 50, in 1935. Besides Wozzeck, he left a nearly finished second opera, a brilliant violin concerto and a handful of other pieces. Last week, a Manhattan audience-heard the first U.S. performance in years of his Chamber

Concerto for Piano, Violin and Thirteen Wind Instruments--and liked it.

Composer Berg dedicated this work to his teacher, Arnold Schonberg. But he had not built it on Schonberg's "twelve-tone" technique.* Between two fast, brightly dissonant movements, Berg sandwiched a melodic slow movement that had listeners gasping: the themes build to a climax, then run backward to a close. 1914, even gave it a few licks while he was in the Austrian army. Its successful Berlin premiere in 1925 surprised Berg as much as anyone. He had expected to be booed; instead he got a dozen curtain calls. (The U.S. first saw Wozzeck in 1931; Manhattan audiences heard concert excerpts three times last season.)

Berg was fiercely proud of a Ford bought with the proceeds of Wozzeck. Once when a reporter wrote that he was "neglected and starving," Berg called up a friend: "It is necessary that tonight we starve better than usual; come and starve with us." They ate at one of Vienna's best restaurants. With his second opera, Lulu, unfinished, he died of blood poisoning.

* In which all twelve tones of the chromatic scale (the white & black keys in an octave on the piano) are arranged in a "row" in a highly formalized pattern. "Atonal" ( a term often loosely applied to Schoenberg, in spite of his protests) means music in which the traditional laws of consonant chords are not observed. To most untutored ears, both sound like hell.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.