The editors have transcribed, translated and annotated more than 800 letters and from this vast body of material have selected 370 that reflect the lives and times of these two great composers. The letters reveal much about the relationship between Berg and Schoenberg: first as pupil and teacher, then as friends and finally, after the premier of Wozzeck, as colleagues and peers. They also shed light on the reasons for Schoenberg's move to Berlin in 1911, the intrigue behind the early demise of the Society for Private Musical Performance, and Schoenberg's feigned indifference to the success of Wozzeck. Schoenberg describes his first years in America and the correspondence ends with Berg's death in 1935. The letters are fully annotated and supplemented with appendices, facsimiles and many photographs.

Letters from Berg to his wife, written between 1907 and 1935. Illustrated with photos.

In the fall of 1976, 14 letters by Alban Berg, renowned composer of the Second Viennese School, were discovered in the posthumous papers of Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, wife of a Prague industrialist and sister of Franz Werfel, the well-known Austro-Czech writer. In the 1920s Berg gained international notoriety with his opera Wozzeck and the Lyric Suite, which was largely inspired by his relationship with Fuchs. The secret letters were delivered to Hanna surreptitiously by Theodor Adorno and Alma Mahler Werfel. They were brought to New York by Hanna on her flight from Nazi persecution, and were eventually found in her estate after her death. First discovered by George Perle, then deciphered and transcribed in German by Constantin Floros, they appear here in English for the first time.

Adorno was twenty-one years old when he traveled to Vienna in March1925 to study musical composition with Alban Berg. Twenty years later, Adorno wrote: "how much of my writing will remain is beyond my knowledge or my control, but there is one claim I wish to stake:that I understand the language of birds," It was no less than the desire to learn to speak this language that drew him to Berg. Adorno already knew what he wanted to drew to compose before he went to Berg, and the aim of his stay in Vienna and the following years was to learn to put this knowledge of musical composition into practice. His correspondence with Berg is partly defined by his engagement with the compositional problems posed for the musical avant-garde by Schoenberg's discovery of the twelve-tone technique, for which Adorno was to become an advocate. This correspondence documents how he wrote numerous essays on Berg, Webern and Schoenberg during this time, and tried in vain to establish a platform for the Second Viennese School against "moderated modernity" in the journal Anbruch. It also shows how much Adorno continually admonished by Berg to focus only on his musical composition, strove to reconcile his academic duties and his literary and journalistic work with the constant which to do nothing more than compose.