Alban Berg, Austrian Composer

Alban Berg, Austrian Composer

Alban Maria Johannes Berg (February 9, 1885 - December 24, 1935) was an Austrian composer. He had little formal music education before he became a student of Arnold Schoenberg (1904) and studied counterpoint, music theory, and harmony. By 1906, he was studying music full-time; by 1907, he began composition lessons. Berg was a part of Vienna's cultural elite during the heady fin de siècle period. His circle included the musicians Alexander von Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker, the painter Gustav Klimt, the writer Karl Kraus, the architect Adolf Loos, and the poet Peter Altenberg. From 1915-18, he served in the Austro-Hungarian Army. After WWI he settled in Vienna where he taught private pupils, and helped Schoenberg run his Society for Private Musical Performances, which sought to create the ideal environment for the exploration and appreciation of unfamiliar new music. As a composer he produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. He died on Christmas Eve 1935, from blood poisoning apparently caused by an insect-sting-induced carbuncle on his back. He was 50 years old. No photographer credited, undated.

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