The Cambridge Companion to Berg

by Edited by Anthony Pople

• ISBN13: 9780521563741
• ISBN10: 0521563747
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-04-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The world of Alban Berg is full of paradoxes, secrets and allusions, but he was able to handle emotional and moral issues at a distance and with profound sympathy. His unhurried, almost aristocratic attitude to life and his extreme self-criticism in professional matters resulted in an extraordinarily small musical output, but it includes towering masterpieces such as the operas Wozzeck and Lulu, and his last work, the Violin Concerto. All of Berg's substantial works are discussed in this Companion which brings together a team of experts who write from a variety of historical and critical perspectives, outlining the place of the music in the cultural history of its time and recontextualising it against the broader twentieth-century interplay of fashions, aesthetics and ideas.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	viii	(1)
Chronology	ix	(4)
Select list of works	xiii	(1)
Contributors	xiv
Introduction	1	(2)
Anthony Pople
Part 1: Culture and environment	3	(48)
1 Defining home: Berg's life on the periphery	5	(19)
Christopher Hailey
2 Battles of the mind: Berg and the cultural politics of 'Vienna 1900'	24	(14)
Andrew Barker
3 Berg and Adorno	38	(13)
Raymond Geuss
Part 2: From song to opera	51	(114)
4 Early works: tonality and beyond	53	(30)
Anthony Pople
5 Berg's aphoristic pieces	83	(28)
Kathryn Bailey
6 Berg, Mahler and the Three Orchestral Pieces Op. 6	111	(34)
Derrick Puffett
7 The musical language of Wozzeck	145	(20)
Anthony Pople
Part 3: After Wozzeck	165	(80)
8 Secret programmes	167	(13)
Douglas Jarman
9 Compositional process in Wozzeck and Lulu: a glimpse of Berg's atonal method	180	(9)
Patricia Hall
10 Compositional technique 1923-6: the Chamber Concerto and the Lyric Suite	189	(15)
Neil Boynton
11 In the orbit of Lulu: the late works	204	(23)
Anthony Pople
12 Lulu's feminine performance	227	(18)
Judy Lochhead
Part 4: Postscript	245	(14)
13 Berg and the twentieth century	247	(12)
Arnold Whittall
Notes	259	(40)
Select bibliography	299	(1)
Index	300