Sospeso performs songs by Alban Berg at the Sospeso Cabaret at studioseven on April 16, 2005.

Along with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg and fellow pupil Anton Webern in the years before and immediately after World War I, he moved away from tonality to write free atonal and then 12-note music. At once a modernist and a Romantic, a formalist and a sensualist, he produced one of the richest bodies of music in the 20th century, and in opera, especially, he had few equals.

Though Berg was always the most popular of the three Viennese composers with concert and opera audiences, his posthumous critical standing fluctuated considerably. Until the 1960s, when Perle published his first articles on Lulu, there had been little detailed study of Berg's music, and it was generally accepted that he was the least strict, the least systematic and the most conservative and backward-looking of the composers of the Second Viennese School. Whether his supposed lack of system and of modernist conviction was seen as an asset or a failing depended on the writer's attitude to what was happening in contemporary music. To Boulez and other young composers who spearheaded the period of total serialism in the Europe of the 1950s, and for whom Webern was the most important of the three Viennese composers, Berg's attachment to tradition was a sign of an unacceptable willingness to compromise. ‘Dodecaphony’, wrote Boulez of the Violin Concerto, ‘has more pressing duties than to tame a Bach chorale’.

But such views of Berg were based on mistaken premisses. His ‘free’ music has been revealed as at least as systematic as – and, in some ways, more systematic than – that of his colleagues and contemporaries, involving methods of organizing pitch, metre, rhythm and proportion that seem strikingly relevant to what has happened in music since his death. That such innovative and apparently ‘abstract’ organizational procedures take place within, and indeed give rise to, an intensely expressive music invoking the emotional world of Tristan, Mahler and the late Romantics is one of the many paradoxes that underlie Berg's music. The bringing together of elements that would normally be regarded as mutually exclusive – tonality with atonality, subjective autobiographical elements with objective compositional constraints, quotation and reference to popular style with rigorous and integrated handling of all musical parameters – is a constant feature of Berg's music. It is perhaps the rich resulting ambiguity that makes Berg so important an influence on more recent composers, whether modernist or postmodernist. As the 20th century closed, the ‘backward-looking’ Berg suddenly came as Perle remarked, to look like its most forward-looking composer.

From Douglas Jarman's article in the New Grove. Image: Portrait of Alban Berg, by Arnold Schoenberg.