Alban Berg

Alban Berg, a member of the “Second Viennese School” of composers, combined romanticism with modernist idioms in a very personal way. The romantic component was more pronounced than some of his modernist colleagues would have liked: they considered his work in such ways a throwback. Musicologist Douglas Jarman wrote in 1991 that the romantic element, especially the “emotional intensity and apparent spontaneity” of Berg’s music, helped make him the most popular of the members of the Second Viennese School, but that it is also responsible for his works' never having received the “detailed analytical attention” that critics and scholars have showered upon those of his colleagues, Schoenberg and Webern. Berg is the composer, among much else, of the opera Lulu (for which he also created the libretto.) Strictly speaking, he is the composer of most of Lulu. He died in 1935 before completing this score. The form in which we now know the Third Act is due in part to the work of Friedrich Cerha.