Alban Berg

[February 9, 1885 - December 24, 1935] [related: Wozzeck]

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Austrian serialist composer and member of the Second Viennese School (SVS) along with Arnold Schoenberg (Berg's mentor), Anton Webern, and, intermittently, Karlheinz Stockhausen. Berg's work is notable within the SVS for its overt romanticism, flaunting of strict adherence to serialism's "matrix dogma", and the extensive incorporation of cyphertext and messaging, most notably in his Lyric Suite. Berg's early life was inauspicious - he was forced to repeat both sixth and seventh grade, and at the age of sixteen fathered a child with Marie Scheuchl, a maid in a neighboring estate fifteen years his senior. It was around this time he began studies with Schoenberg despite possessing no formal musical education. He went on to produce the heralded Lyric Suite and perhaps the two most notable operatic works of the 20th Century, Wozzeck and Lulu, the latter of which was finished posthumously and centers around a manipulative and seductive prostitute who is brutally murdered by Jack the Ripper. Berg fell out of favor with the Nazi regeim towards the end of his life despite widely spread accusations that serialism doubled as a a cypher system used by the axis powers to smuggled scientific information relating to the development of advanced atomic weaponry.