Alban Berg

His first ‘graduation piece’ from Schoenberg's class, it sets a young man's passion on the strict construction he had learned from his teacher.

• The short motif of just a few notes heard at the opening is the material of the entire piece. Follow the places where it returns in altered shapes, and the single movement of some 10 minutes is heard as one whole.
• The key is B minor, but chords that slide by semitones keep blurring the center. Only when the final B minor chord arrives do you feel your feet touch the ground.
• Berg had originally planned several movements, but when the next one would not come, Schoenberg is said to have had him end with one, on the grounds that once he had said all he had to say, the piece was finished.
• Performers differ on whether to repeat the exposition, where the themes are first presented. In performances that observe the repeat, the design of sonata form comes through more clearly.

His first orchestral work, set to short poems from the backs of postcards, it sparked the 1913 ‘scandal concert’ and left Berg deeply wounded.

• At the opening of song 1, many instruments repeat short figures, each at its own speed, layering into a shimmering haze of sound. Wait for the moment the soprano quietly rises out of that haze.
• In song 3, “Über die Grenzen des All,” a chord containing all twelve notes builds up and scatters. This was some 10 years before the 12-tone technique arrived.
• The last, song 5, “Hier ist Friede,” is a passacaglia (a form that keeps repeating a short melody and builds variations on top of it). Hold on to that recurring melody as you listen, and the structure comes into view.
• The premiere caused an uproar, yet heard today the music mostly flows in a whisper, very softly (pianissimo). It is worth listening while wondering what so provoked the audience of 1913.

Dedicated to Schoenberg on his fortieth birthday in answer to his rebuke that Berg wrote only short pieces, it lies deep in Mahler's shadow.

• Piece 1, “Präludium,” begins in a murmur of unpitched percussion (tam-tam·cymbals·bass drum), lets a melody rise, then vanishes back into the same noise. Beginning and end interlock like mirror images.
• In piece 2, “Reigen,” fragments of the Viennese waltz and the country dance (Ländler) flash past, distorted. It recalls the dance movements of Mahler's symphonies.
• In piece 3, “Marsch,” the huge orchestra surges as if collapsing, and near the end a hammer strikes. The passage is widely read as a nod to the hammer in Mahler's Symphony No. 6.
• Because the piece was begun just before the war, many hear the violence of the march as a premonition of it. Berg himself, however, never said so.

Steeped in the humiliation and helplessness he felt during military service, this portrait of the downtrodden soldier Wozzeck made Berg's name with its 1925 Berlin premiere.

• Each of the 15 scenes is built on an old instrumental form. Act 2 as a whole is like a symphony in five movements, and Act 3 consists of six inventions (short studies), each delving into a single material, such as ‘one note’ or ‘one rhythm.’
• In Act 3, scene 2, the murder by the pond, a single B (H in German) sounds from beginning to end. When the scene ends comes the moment the whole orchestra swells twice on that one B (crescendo), counted among the most chilling passages in the opera.
• The D minor interlude after Wozzeck drowns is the most clearly tonal music in the work. Berg described it as the place where the composer steps out from the stage to appeal directly to the audience.
• In the final scene, Marie's child, unaware of having lost a mother, rides a hobbyhorse and plays, calling ‘Hopp, hopp.’ The music halts in midair, as if it had not ended.
• Throughout, Sprechstimme, a vocal style between song and speech (half-speaking while roughly following the pitches), is used. Each singer weighs ‘speech’ and ‘song’ differently, so comparing recordings is rewarding.

Outwardly an instrumental quartet, it is a secret confession that encodes in note names and numbers his love for Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, whom he met in Prague.

• The six movements alternate: the fast ones grow ever faster, the slow ones ever slower and darker. The path from movement 1, ‘Allegretto gioviale’, to the closing ‘Largo desolato’ is itself a story.
• In movement 3 the strings, fitted with mutes (devices that dampen the sound), rush past in a rapid whisper, then suddenly burst out loudly in the central ‘Trio estatico’.
• Movement 4 quotes a melody from the Lyric Symphony of Zemlinsky, a colleague of Berg's teacher, set to the words ‘You are mine’.
• In the final movement, the opening motif of the prelude to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde slips quietly past. It is a borrowing of the very symbol of unattainable love.
• Hidden in this movement's melody was Baudelaire's poem De profundis clamavi. Since this came to light in the 1970s, the movement has also been performed in a version in which a soprano sings the words.

Written in the forest house amid Nazi ostracism and hardship, it was his last opera, which he never finished after setting it aside for the concerto.

• From a single basic row (the twelve notes laid out in a fixed order), Berg derived a different row for each character. Even so, the harmonies often sound as sweet as late Romanticism, shattering the notion that 12-tone music is rigid.
• The ‘film music’ interlude at the center of Act 2 depicts Lulu's arrest, imprisonment and escape. At the exact midpoint the music turns back on itself, retracing the first half from the end (a palindrome), so that downfall and recovery mirror each other.
• Lulu's Lied in Act 2 showcases the virtuosity of a coloratura soprano, flashing among the high notes. The heart of the character lies in its words: she has never tried to seem anything other than what others have taken her for.
• In the final scene, after Lulu's scream rings out, Countess Geschwitz dies calling ‘Lulu, my angel’. The weight of the ending shifts depending on whether you hear the two acts Berg completed with the suite appended, or the three-act version completed by Cerha.

Dedicated to Manon Gropius, who died at eighteen, it became the last work Berg completed.

• The solo violin begins quietly with broken chords (arpeggios) that seem to touch, one after another, the four strings left unstopped by the fingers (open strings). Though it is a 12-tone row, it is built to contain major·minor triads, so it does not sound strange.
• Late in movement 1 a Carinthian folk song appears, widely heard as a portrait of the lively young Manon.
• After a scream-like climax, movement 2 brings in Bach's chorale Es ist genug. The solo violin presents the melody, and the clarinets answer like an organ in Bach's own harmonization.
• The last four notes of the row rise by successive whole steps, matching exactly the opening of the chorale melody. The 12-tone technique and Bach were, in effect, designed as one from the start.
• The work ends with the solo violin fading away on a very high note. Sustaining that last high note clearly and without wavering reveals the player's mastery.