First songs and instrumental music

Berg's dozen or so ‘official’ compositions, from the Piano Sonata Op. 1 through to the Violin Concerto he composed more than a quarter of a century later, are many times outnumbered by the songs he wrote between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three. Only eight of these were published during Berg's lifetime – the 1907 setting of Theodor Storm's ‘Schliesse mir die Augen beide’ and the selection of Seven Early Songs that Berg revised and orchestrated in 1928 – though one more was made available by Willi Reich shortly after the composer's death. The publication of two volumes of Jugendlieder in 1985 changed the picture entirely: it meant that roughly two-thirds of the approximately eighty-five early songs were available in published form; within a short while the same could be said of a significant proportion of the piano music Berg wrote in his early twenties. Between them, and almost exclusively, these two genres - solo song and piano music – carried him from his first teenage efforts as a composer through to atonality in the manner of Schoenberg.

One of the most striking features of this development is the disparity of Berg's achievement in the two genres. In a famous and characteristic letter written in 1910, Schoenberg described the situation without mercy: