Word: alban
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Since its foundation in 1842, the Salzburg Festival has always featured Native Son Wolfgang Mozart, although other Austrians and some outsiders, e.g., Beethoven and Wagner, often creep in. One Austrian whose name was never mentioned in the same breath with Salzburg was Atonalist Alban Berg. But this year Berg made...
...full chromatic scale in an octave). The result hurt people's ears. "Just dissonance," they said, or, more simply, "Just noise." Schoenberg stuck to his guns, demanded the "emancipation of dissonance." Discords can become new harmonies, he said. He found a few disciples. The best known: Alban Berg, composer of the twelve-tone opera Wozzeck (TIME, April 23). New music, Schoenberg insisted, "must be music which, though it is still music, differs in all essentials from previously composed music...
...universal verdict of the critics who have heard it, Alban Berg's atonal opera Wozzeck is the finest opera composed in the last 40 years.* Berg, an Austrian, finished Wozzeck in 1921, and it had immediate success in Europe. Oddly enough, in the U.S., it has had only one stage production (in 1931), and only a few doughty conductors have nibbled away at concert excerpts. One reason: its 15 scenes are costly to stage. More important, although Wozzeck is now more than 25 years old, most opera impresarios fear that, musically, it is still 25 years ahead...
...master, the captain, represents authority and unfeeling philistinism; the doctor, materialism and skepticism; the drum major, aggression and sexual cruelty; Wozzeck himself is the good-man-pure-fool of medieval literature. Another composer might have tried to dress such a story in conventional musical clothes, but not Alban Berg...
...York Philharmonic (Sun. 1 p.m., CBS). Alban Berg's Wozzeck (see Music...