Alban Berg Quotes

M.: Do you think Mahler thought he was doing something avant-garde? O.: I don’t think so. M.: Schoenberg and Alban Berg were certainly conscious of being avant-garde, though. O.: Oh, very much so. They had their “method”. Mahler had no such thing. M.: So he flirted with chaos, not as a methodology, but naturally and instinctively. Is that what you are saying? O.: Yes. Isn’t that exactly where his genius lies?

For in the quiet of his letter, on the tranquil blue paper, he can express his truest feelings. The tongue and the spoken word have become so soiled by their everyday use, they cannot speak out loud the beauty which the pen can quietly write.

The violent response to hearing new music by Schoenberg (his Chamber Symphony No. 1) and his students, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, led to the concert’s being terminated before its scheduled final work by Mahler, as objects were being hurled and furniture destroyed.

Adorno echoed the words and works of Karl Marx in his music. Whereas Marx focused on the economic aspect, Adorno placed his emphasis on the role played by culture in maintaining the politically apathetic status quo. Music of the 12-atonal métier would be even more powerful than Marx’s economic assault on western capitalism. Adorno was of course a serious student and polished writer and performer of classical music. He was, perhaps, the most important music “new ground” philosopher, an intellectual giant in modernism in music. While attending the University of Frankfurt in Germany, he became friends with Alban Berg and studied composition under him from 1924. There Adorno learned the “dialectics” of George Hegel and applied it to his compositions. Adorno became Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfort.

But the maestro’s biggest project during the second half of the season was the first North American production of Paul Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue, on 29 March 1911. Ariane, a forward-looking, brilliantly orchestrated work, had had its premiere in Paris four years earlier, and had since been performed in Vienna, conducted by Alexander Zemlinsky and admired by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, among others. Toscanini,