Christopher Hailey – författare

Few figures have influenced 20th-century music as much as Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. Their letters, one of the most important sources of information about the background to their music, are here published for the first time. The editors have transcribed, translated and annotated more than 800 letters and from this vast body of material have selected 370 that reflect the lives and times of these two great composers. The letters reveal much about the relationship between Berg and Schoenberg: first as pupil and teacher, then as friends and finally, after the premier of Wozzeck, as colleagues and peers. They also shed light on the reasons for Schoenberg's move to Berlin in 1911, the intrigue behind the early demise of the Society for Private Musical Performance, and Schoenberg's feigned indifference to the success of Wozzeck. Schoenberg describes his first years in America and the correspondence ends with Berg's death in 1935. The letters are fully annotated and supplemented with appendices, facsimiles and many photographs.

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. The contributors are Antony Beaumont, Leon Botstein, Regina Busch, Nicholas Chadwick, Mark DeVoto, Douglas Jarman, Sherry Lee, and Margaret Notley. Bard Music Festival: Berg and His World Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson, New York August 13-15, 2010 and August 20-22, 2010