Piano Music - Alban Berg

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📖 "Berg's personality is fascinating in more ways than one, but what I find most striking is the combination of immediate expressiveness with outstanding structural powers."
Pierre Boulez,
In Orientations (1986)

📖 “That is the rebus of Berg’s music. One could hardly characterize it more simply and accurately than by saying that it resembled himself.”
Theodor W. Adorno

📖 "In analyzing Berg’s intellectual ambience, one has the start from the “Viennese Modernism,” the literature, art and music of the turn of the century in Vienna – a culture that was basically a melting-pot of the most diverse influences. There were numerous coincident trends: Naturalism, Beyond Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Fin de Siècle, Expressionism. It would be hard to reduce these many directions to a single common denominator: clearly there were different factions and fractions."
Constantin Floros Alban Berg. Music as Autubiography

📖 "Berg’s empirical existence was subject to the primacy of production; he honed himself as its instrument, and the sum total of his worldly wisdom boiled down to creating conditions that would permit him to wrest the oeuvre from his physical weaknesses and psychological resistances."
Theodor W. Adorno

📖 “If Mahler once said about the landscape around Lake Attersee that he composed it all up, Berg, in so many respects Mahler’s heir, could have said the same of his inward nature.”
Theodor Adorno

📖 “He always felt drawn to the mysteries of the world of numbers. One of his ancestors must have been an alchemist who knew the secret formulas and dark mysteries of Black
Magic. Curious coincidences, enigmatic relations of numbers in time and space were ever present to his restless mind. They have entered into the incredibly complicated and yet simple
and logical figures and proportions of his scores.”
Hans W. Heinsheimer about Berg

Alban Berg

1885 - 1935
Alban Berg was an Austrian composer of the "Second Viennese School".

📖 "The best music always results from ecstasies of logic."
(In New York Times)

📖 "Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection."

📖 "I can tell you, dearest friend, that if it became known how much friendship, love and a world of human and spiritual references I have smuggled into these three movements, the adherents of programme music - should there be any left - would go mad with joy."

📖 "Nature is so god-filled. Daily I swear to myself that I will spend the end of my days in the country, after my life’s beginning had sadly condemned me to the city.”

📖 “Oh! All that is beautiful – Nature and Art – is ever new, each day is new, and only the philistine always sees the same thing.”

📖 “If what I write is not what I have experienced, my life will someday perhaps be directed by my compositions, which would then be sheer prophecies.”
Berg to Schönberg, April 10, 1914

📖 “I tell you this whole clamoring for tonality springs not so much from the need to be able to relate to a key note, as rather from the need for familiar consonances, let’s be honest, for the triad – and I maintain that, so long as it contains a sufficient number of such triads, a music will not give offense, no matter how much it might otherwise violate the sacred laws of tonality.” Berg, “What is atonal?” (1930)

Quotes by Alban Berg

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Music by Alban Berg

👉 Or Download free sheet music - Alban Berg on IMSLP.

Books about Alban Berg

Some Recordings of Alban Berg's Piano Music

Maria Yudina (recorded in 1964)

Glenn Gould

Murray Perahia (recorded in 1987)

Maurizio Pollini (recorded in 1993)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard

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