One of the pioneers of atonal music: Who is Alban Berg?

(1885-1935) He was born on February 9, 1885, in Vienna. He was from a middle-class Viennese family that adored music. By the age of fifteen, he had composed many songs and duets; about seventy of them were found among the composer's manuscripts after his death. These compositions were composed in a classical way. But in his later compositions, his music showed significant changes compared to his first performances. The main reason for this change was Berg's encounter with Schönberg, the radical composer of 20th-century music when he was only nineteen years old. Berg met Schönberg in 1904, and a long-term teacher-student relationship developed into friendship over time. During his military service between 1915 and 1918, he began to compose his famous opera Wozzeck and completed the opera in 1921. The work was staged in 1925 and was a great success. He finished his second opera, Lulu, in 1934, with a few shortcomings. He composed his violin concerto in 1935 but died of blood poisoning on December 24 that same year. Along with Schönberg and Webern, he was one of the first implementers of the twelve-tone technique, one of the most important inventions in the history of music.

The most important event in his life as a composer was his encounter with Schoenberg. Schönberg and his students were at that time developing the twelve-tone technique, which included very important changes in the technique of composing music. The composer, who started to work with them, should enter a new transformation process in the musical sense. It is noteworthy that no traces of inexperience were found in the works he composed after this period. Later in his writings, he explained this quality of his works by being a student of Schoenberg. He dedicated one of his most important works, the End Orchestra Piece, Kammerkonzert, and his last opera, Lulu, to Schoenberg.

Berg had watched the playwright Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck in 1914 and liked it very much. Since Büchner also wanted his work to be composed as an opera, the composer set to work and completed the opera in 1921. Berg, who was not a famous composer at the time, could not perform his opera in its entirety, only to have three parts performed. These episodes were staged in Frankfurt in 1924 and were a great success. The entire opera was staged in 1925 by the Berlin State Opera under the direction of Erich Kleiber. The opera, which became famous all of a sudden, was performed 166 times in 29 different cities until 1926. Wozzeck is dedicated to Alma Mahler, the widow of Gustav Mahler and one of Berg's closest friends. Although it was composed with an "atonal" technique, classical opera architecture (lay-knot-result) was followed as a musical structure. After Wozzeck, Berg returned to chamber music and composed the famous Kammerkonzert for piano, violin, and thirteen wind instruments. He also began searching for a libretto for a new opera and found Frank Wedekind's Lulu in 1928. In 1934, the vocal parts of Lulu were composed, but the orchestration of the opera was not finished as the artist's health deteriorated during this time. Yet he combined five separate pieces from the opera into one suite. The suite was first interpreted in Berlin in 1934; It was also performed in Vienna soon after.

The importance of Alban Berg as a composer is that he can combine contemporary composing techniques in his original music very successfully, benefiting from the music before him. Although he was criticized by some critics as a "ruleless, complex and atonal" composer during his period, he contributed to the development of music by developing a new understanding of form and rule with his works. On the other hand, although he applies a composing technique that can be considered difficult for the audience, he can be watched more easily than similar composers due to his skillful use of dramatic outputs and contrasts. He became one of the important representatives of the style he adopted with his works which are perfect in terms of form and technique and competent in orchestration.