Word: albans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
Berg: Lyric Suite (the Juilliard String Quartet; Columbia, 2 sides LP). Austrian Atonalist Alban Berg, who died in 1935; is rapidly coming into his own. His opera Wozzeck is enjoying a spate of concert performances (Columbia and Artist Records have recorded excerpts), and it will be a featured work at this year's Salzburg Festival. The Lyric Suite, composed six years later (1926), comes far more strangely to the ear, is not recommended for those not already pleased to make Berg's acquaintance. Performance and recording: excellent...