Enormous and Beautiful Alban Berg Musical Quotation

BERG, ALBAN. (1885-1935). Austrian composer who, with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg and colleague Anton Webern, founded the Second Viennese School, which is characterized by atonal music and a twelve-tone notational system. AMusQS. (“Alban Berg”). 1p. Oblong 4to. (8” x 11½”). N.p., (1934). Inscribed in German to “the dear honorable Doctor Bach on his 60th birthday… a greeting from days past” (Austrian journalist and music critic DAVID JOSEF BACH; 1874-1947). Five bars from Berg’s song “Regen” with the accompanying opening lyrics “Geht ein grauer Mann Durch den stillen Wald, Singt ein graues Lied” (“A grey man goes through the still woods singing a grey song”).



Berg began studying with Arnold Schoenberg in 1904, composing songs and piano works in 1907. His String Quartet, Opus 3 premiered in 1911, the same year his education with Schoenberg ended. Berg became part of Vienna’s artistic elite, even though the 1913 Vienna premiere of portions of his Five Songs on Picture Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg caused a riot. After serving in World War I, he collaborated with Schoenberg to explore and promote new music. Berg’s opera Wozzeck premiered in 1925 and brought him recognition before it was later condemned as “degenerate art” by the Nazis. In 1926, Berg completed his Lyric Suite, the first major composition in which he employed the twelve-tone system. This six-movement work for string quartet, which contains many coded references to his mistress, is a highly regarded work, which “for all its subjective and tragic character, remains one of the most brilliant and effective virtuoso display pieces in its genre,” (The New Grove Dictionary). Our quotation is from Berg’s song “Regen,” a musical setting of Johannes Schlaf’s poem, a youthful song composed between 1904 and 1908, published posthumously in 1985 in a collection of Jugendlieder.



Bach was a childhood friend of Schoenberg whom the latter credited with influencing both his character and interest in music and literature. In 1904, Bach became the music critic for Vienna’s Arbeiter-Zeitung, in which capacity (and later as editor) he championed the works of Schoenberg, Mahler, Berg, and their contemporaries. Highly influential as an arbiter of Viennese culture, Bach, an outspoken socialist, founded the Arbeiter-Symphonie-Konzerte (Workers’ Symphony Concerts), the Vienna Singverein (Vienna Choral Society), and was among the earliest members of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Association. For his efforts, the Nazis claimed Bach was a part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine traditional culture which, along with the Nazi persecution of Jews, prompted his immigration to England in 1939.



Neatly penned in black ink on a large sheet of music paper. Sold more than 30 years ago at Sotheby’s, London for approximately $3300. [musicandart]