ABSTRACT
alban berg is now recognized as a classic figure in the history of music. His entire oeuvre is performed repeatedly around the world, recorded regularly, studied in more than 1,500 books and articles, and enjoyed and pondered by the serious musical public everywhere. His music has been influential to, indeed indispensable to, other major composers. Operas including Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten and Wolfgang Rihm’s Jakob Lenz could probably not have been written without Wozzeck, the brilliant virtuosity of Pierre Boulez’s Éclat would be hard to imagine without the Chamber Concerto, the pathos-laden music of George Rochberg without the Orchestra Pieces, the quotation collages of Luciano Berio and Mauricio Kagel without the Violin Concerto, or the provocative eclecticism of Alfred Schnittke without Lulu and Der Wein.
