2 - Towards the Violin Concerto
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
After the completion of the Lyric Suite on 26 September 1926, Berg composed only three more works: the concert aria Der Wein, the opera Lulu and the Violin Concerto. Clearly, the two shorter works are literally dwarfed by the opera, which is of three hours' duration – about as long as all his other works put together, Wozzeck excepted. But the aria and the concerto lie within the orbit of Lulu in a way more directly relevant to their musical characteristics, in that the former was not begun until work on the opera was well under way, while the latter was completed with work on the opera still unfinished: both were, in effect, interruptions of the larger project. The early chronology of the Lulu years also included the preparation of an orchestral version of the Seven Early Songs (1905–8) and a revision of the Three Orchestral Pieces (1914–15), thus bringing Berg into direct working contact with his pre-war music at a time when he was forging a sound-world and a musical language for his masterpiece and its satellites. Commentators from Stravinsky to George Perle have identified the Three Orchestral Pieces as in many ways representing the beginning of Berg's maturity: from this point on, a number of recurrent or developing technical features are clearly in evidence from one work to the next.
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- Berg: Violin Concerto , pp. 9 - 24Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991