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(Vienna, February 9, 1885 - December 24, 1935)
Initially self-taught, forced to work for a living for a few years, only from 1904 was he able to devote himself intensely to the study of composition under the guidance of Schönberg, his friend and revered teacher.
Very close to the literary and pictorial environment of Vienna at the beginning of the century, he soon established himself as a composer, revealing himself, together with Webern, as the most exciting musician of the young Austrian generation trained at the Schönberg school.
After completing his military service, he could devote himself again to composition, settling in Vienna and starting to live an intense activity as a teacher. Despite the success he achieved in several of his works (in the first place at Wozzeck), he led a life that was anything but comfortable. After 1933, with the disappearance of executions in Nazi Germany, he experienced two years of absolute poverty before dying due to an infection generated by a poorly treated abscess.
Throughout his production, Berg felt the influence of the best German romanticism, in particular Brahms and Mahler. But already in his earliest compositions, the chromatic tension pushes him beyond the barriers of tonality, and he is barely twenty-five when he writes the first atonal pieces. His fidelity to the romantic tradition remains attested in him by his predilection for dense and passionate sounds, for the use of typically German symphonic forms (from the "March" of the 3 Pieces for orchestra op. 6 to the waltz of the Violin Concerto), for the lit cantability of his melodic lines (in which there is nothing of the Webernian shattering or of the Schönberghian exasperation), finally for the non-casual return of tonal reminiscences. The most "pushed" work in the direction of the renewal of language was undoubtedly the lyric suite for string quartet, a paradigmatic composition for the expressionism of the Vienna school and for the revolutionary conception of the technique of the string instrument. But Berg remains in the history of the music of our century above all for his two plays (of which the second was unfortunately left unfinished), Wozzeck and Lulu, which point to new paths of incredible richness to the composer of our time. Moreover, also in instrumental music, Berg has left immortal compositions: typical representative of Viennese expressionism. Berg gives breath and universal value to an entire era of modern civilization, s full of teachings and vital germs for the future.
Today, his production has entered the opera and symphonic repertoire worldwide: alongside Schönberg and Webern, he is destined to remain one of the most excellent musicians of our century.
The Kammerkonzert had been written and completed ten years earlier. On February 9, 1925, Berg announced its conclusion in Schoenberg with these words: «The composition of this concert which I dedicated to you on the occasion of your fiftieth birthday was only finished today, in my fortieth. Delivered late, please accept it with kindness, especially since it - conceived for you from the beginning - has also become a small monument to a twenty-year-old friendship. In a musical motto, premised in the first movement, the letters of your name, that of Anton Webern and mine, are fixed (as far as possible with musical writing) in three themes or motifs, which play an important part in the melodic development of this music. If with this we have already mentioned a trinity of events, likewise a trinity (since it is your birthday and the beautiful things I wish you are three) dominates the whole work ».
This famous letter contains a complete analysis of the Kammerkonzert. From the very first words, it can be deduced that a search for unity in multiplicity, similar to that of Webern, had animated Berg. In particular, the three movements are united in one. The instruments used are of triple order (keyboard, string, wind).
From the formal point of view, the three and its multiples always dominate: in. In the first movement, Theme joking with variations, the fundamental idea is repeated six times and is presented "as a tripartite theme of variation in thirty bars." The various forms of canon that Berg adopts there may recall Webern's "paths of the plow".."Berg's various canon forms The second movement is a tripartite Lied, while the third, Rondò rhythmic with Introduction (the introduction is a cadenza for piano and violin) is a contamination of the previous movements. The "trinity" manifests itself for Berg again in a rhythmic sense and in the harmonic field. Berg jokingly commented: "By making these compositional procedures publicly known, my fame as a mathematician will increase in the same ratio as my fame as a composer, squared with the distance, will decrease." But the last part of the letter claims precisely what lies beyond perfect symmetries: "If one knew how much friendship, how much love and what world of human and emotional relationships I have secretly woven around these three times, the supporters of program music (if there were still some) would have something to cheer about and the partisans and representatives of the "neoclassimism," the "new objectivism," the "linear" and the "physiologists," the "counterpoint" and the "formal" me, scandalized by this "romantic" tendency if I did not at the same time reveal to them that they too can find what they want if they are willing to seek. "
