Alban Berg and His World is a collection of essays and source material that repositions Berg as the pivotal figure of Viennese musical modernism. His allegiance to the austere rigor of Arnold Schoenberg's musical revolution was balanced by a lifelong devotion to the warm sensuousness of Viennese musical tradition and a love of lyric utterance, the emotional intensity of opera, and the expressive nuance of late-Romantic tonal practice. The essays in this collection explore the specific qualities of Berg's brand of musical modernism, and present newly translated letters and documents that illuminate his relationship to the politics and culture of his era. Of particular significance are the first translations of Berg's newly discovered stage work Night (Nocturne), Hermann Watznauer's intimate account of Berg's early years, and the famous memorial issue of the music periodical 23. Contributors consider Berg's fascination with palindromes and mirror images and their relationship to notions of time and identity; the Viennese roots of his distinctive orchestral style; his links to such Viennese contemporaries as Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold; and his attempts to maneuver through the perilous shoals of gender, race, and fascist politics.

This volume presents essays written by leading American and British scholars that discuss Berg's life and cultural environment, his style and technique, and his unfinished second opera Lulu.

The world of Alban Berg is full of paradoxes, secrets and allusions, but he was able to handle emotional and moral issues at a distance and with profound sympathy. All of Berg's substantial works are discussed in this Companion which brings together a team of experts who write from a variety of historical and critical perspectives, outlining the place of the music in the cultural history of its time and recontextualizing it against the broader twentieth-century interplay of fashions, aesthetics and ideas.

Berg's Wozzeck traces the composer's slow but determined progress. Using compositional sketches, diaries, notebooks and other archival material, author Patricia Hall reveals the challenges Berg faced - from his induction as a soldier in World War I, to the hyperinflation of the twenties. In addition to the precise chronology of the opera, the sketches show how Berg derived large-scale form from the Buchner text, and how his compositional style evolved during the nine years in which he composed the opera. A comprehensive visual database on the book's companion website of the extant sketches from seven archives in the United States, Germany and Austria allows the reader to examine, for the first time, Berg's sketches in high resolution color scans.

Dave Headlam offers a comprehensive analysis of Berg's music in this book. He examines each of the composer's works - including the Piano Sonata, Opus I, the operas Wozzeck and Lulu, and the Violin Concerto - and defines the main components of his musical language. Charting Berg's development as he progressed from late-romantic tonality to atonality and finally to his own distinctive dodecaphonic language, Headlam demonstrates the compositional continuity that underlies all of Berg's music.

Rather than offering a biography of Berg, Jarman provides more comprehensive analysis of the composer's works.

In "Taken By the Devil", author Margaret Notley uncovers the unusual and uniquely generative role of censorship throughout the lifecycle of Berg's great opera. Placing the opera and its source material in a wider cultural context, Notley provides close readings of the opera's libretto and score to reveal the precise techniques employed by the composer in negotiating the censors. She goes on to explore the ways Berg chose to augment rather than flatten the discrepancies between various performances of the earlier plays and the opera itself, adding further dimensions of interpretation to the work.

Two-volume, groundbreaking set that dissects the compositional processes in Berg's two operas, Wozzeck and Lulu.

In Alban Berg's annotated score to his second string quartet, the Lyric Suite, he asserts that every note was written as a small monument to a great love. As composer and Kinkeldy Award-winner George Perle discovered, and described in his 1977 article The Secret Program of Berg's Lyric Suite, the person to whom Berg dedicated this work was not his wife, Helene (nor was it Alexander Zemlinsky, the official dedicatee), but Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, a family friend. This revelation had a revolutionary impact on universally accepted views of Berg's life and character. The Pendragon edition brings Perle's wealth of writings together for the first time, and includes new material on the quartet's history and theory, its textual notes, the annotated score, and text and context within the piece.