The first ever complete presentation of Berg’s extensive song output on CD, including a world premiere recording: a must-hear for all song devotees and students of the Second Viennese School. As first a Romantic and then a modernist, as a sensualist fascinated by form, Alban Berg produced one of the richest bodies of music in the 20th century. He began composing as a teenager, guided by little more than his piano tuition. By the time he began lessons with Arnold Schoenberg in 1904, he had composed 35 songs – more than a third of his total eventual output. Writing to his publisher Emil Hertzka in 1910, Schoenberg observed: ‘Alban Berg is an extraordinarily gifted composer, but the state he was in when he came to me was such that his imagination apparently could not work on anything but lieder. Even the piano accompaniments to them were songlike.’ ‘An extraordinarily gifted composer’: no small praise from the notoriously hard-to-please Schoenberg. In fact Berg’s early Lieder undertake their own stylistic journey, from an initial (understandable) debt to Schubert and Schumann, to a more chromatic language which points in the direction of Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf. Once under Schoenberg’s influence, however, Berg adopted a new approach in his compositions of songs, adding to the consistency of the piano part and handling his thematic material with more counterpoint and rhythmic variation. Here the influence is that of Brahms, a model composer for Schoenberg and his school
