Alban Maria Johannes Berg (/bɛərɡ/ BAIRG,[1] German: [ˈalbaːn ˈbɛʁk]; 9 February 1885 – 24 December 1935) was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School.

[2] Although he left a relatively small oeuvre, he is remembered as one of the most important composers of the 20th century for his expressive style encompassing "entire worlds of emotion and structure".

... Berg wrote in a typically freewheeling manner to share his reading of Ibsen's A Doll's House with Watznauer on October 18, 1906,[6] here quoting from Ernst's Meersymphonie[7] in relating music to dreams, fantasies, feelings, and desires, especially those of a counterfactual and universal nature.

[a] Such themes predominate in Berg's often quasi-autobiographical and programmatic œuvre,[8] not only romantically[b] as in his Lyric Suite, but also socially as in Lulu,[12] politically as in Wozzeck,[c] and even mortally as in his Violin Concerto.

[19] With Marie Scheuchl, a maid in the family estate of Berghof in Carinthia and fifteen years his senior, he fathered a daughter, Albine, born 4 December 1902.

His circle included the musicians Alexander von Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker, the painter Gustav Klimt, the writer and satirist Karl Kraus, the architect Adolf Loos, and the poet Peter Altenberg.

Various suggestions have been made as to the reason for this interest: that he took it from the biorhythms theory of Wilhelm Fliess, in which a 23-day cycle is considered significant,[31] or because he first suffered an asthma attack on the 23rd of the month.

Berg made a start on his second opera, the three-act Lulu, in 1928 but interrupted the work in 1929 for the concert aria Der Wein which he completed that summer.

[33] Other well-known Berg compositions include the Lyric Suite (1926), which was later shown to employ elaborate cyphers to document a secret love affair; the post-Mahlerian Three Pieces for Orchestra (completed in 1915 but not performed until after Wozzeck); and the Chamber Concerto (Kammerkonzert, 1923–25) for violin, piano, and 13 wind instruments: this latter is written so conscientiously that Pierre Boulez has called it "Berg's strictest composition" and it, too, is permeated by cyphers and posthumously disclosed hidden programs.

[34] It was at this time he began exhibiting tone clusters in his works after meeting with American avant-garde composer Henry Cowell, with whom he would eventually form a lifelong friendship.

[35] Life for the musical world was becoming increasingly difficult in the 1930s both in Vienna and Germany due to the rising tide of antisemitism and the Nazi cultural ideology that denounced modernity.

[36] In 1932 Berg and his wife acquired an isolated lodge, the Waldhaus on the southern shore of the Wörthersee, near Schiefling am See in Carinthia, where he was able to work in seclusion, mainly on Lulu and the Violin Concerto.

[37] At the end of 1934, Berg became involved in the political intrigues around finding a replacement for Clemens Krauss as director of the Vienna State Opera.

Kleiber's production of the Lulu symphonic suite on 30 November 1934 in Berlin was also the occasion of his resignation in protest at the extent of conflation of culture with politics.

[36] Berg had interrupted the orchestration of Lulu because of an unexpected (and financially much-needed) commission from the Russian-American violinist Louis Krasner for a Violin Concerto (1935).

[38] Berg died aged 50 in Vienna, on Christmas Eve 1935, from blood poisoning apparently caused by a furuncle on his back, induced by an insect sting that occurred in November.

[40] An orchestration was therefore commissioned in secret from Friedrich Cerha and premièred in Paris (under Pierre Boulez) only in 1979, soon after Helene Berg's own death.