"Perle's contribution in both domains, the analytical and the biographical, have their original and primary impetus in his studies of the Lyric Suite, a work that has preoccupied him since 1937. This Pendragon edition brings the wealth of his earlier writings on the Lyric Suite together for the first time and includes, in addition, new material on the quartet's history, new analytical observations, and a comparative study of the sketches and drafts that allows the reader to convert the currently published score into an authoritatively corrected edition."--BOOK JACKET.

In this volume leading scholars discuss Berg's life and cultural environment, style and technique, and unfinished second opera Lulu.

Pro Mundo - Pro Domo: The Writings of Alban Berg contains new English translations of the complete writings of the Viennese composer Alban Berg (1885-1935) and extensive commentaries tracing the history of each essay and its connection to musical culture of the early twentieth century. Berg is now recognized as a classic composer of the modern period, best known for his operas Wozzeck and Lulu. Berg, Anton Webern, and their teacher Arnold Schoenberg constitute the "Second Viennese School," which played a major role in the transformation of serious music as it entered the modern period. Berg was an avid and skillful writer. His essays include analytic studies of compositions by Schoenberg, polemics on music and musicians of his day, and lectures and miscellaneous writings on a variety of topics. Throughout his considerable and diverse corpus of writings, Berg alternates between two perspectives: Pro Mundo - Pro Domo, meaning roughly "speaking for all - speaking for myself," commenting at one moment on the general state of culture and the world, and the next moment on his own works. In his early years he also tried his hand at fictional writing, using works by Ibsen and Strindberg as models. This new English edition contains 47 essays, many of which are little known and have not been previously available in English.

This book explores the crossroads between autobiographical narratives and musical composition in Alban Berg's Lulu, unveiling aspects of encoded social customs, gender identity, and personal experiences within musical structures. Exploring the crossroads between autobiographical narrative and musical composition, this book examines Berg's transformation of Frank Wedekind's Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora -- the plays used in the formationof the libretto for Lulu -- according to notions of gender identity, social customs, and the aesthetics of modernity in the Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s. While Berg modernized several aspects of the plays and incorporatedserial techniques of composition from Arnold Schoenberg, he never let go of the idealistic Wagnerian perspectives of his youth. In fact, he went as far as reconfiguring aspects of Richard Wagner's life as an ideal identity to beplayed out in the compositional process. In composing the opera, Berg also reflected on the most important cultural figures in fin-de-siècle Vienna that affected his worldview, including Karl Kraus, Emil Lucka, Otto Weininger, andothers. Combining analysis of Berg's correspondence, numerous sketches for Lulu, and the finished work with interpretive models drawn from cultural studies and philosophy, this book elucidates the ways in which Berg grappled at the end of his life with his self-image as an "incorrigible romantic," and explains aspects of his musical language that have been considered strange or anomalous in Berg scholarship. Silvio J. dos Santos isassistant professor of musicology at the University of Florida.

"This book contains a new study of the life and works of the composer Alban Berg (1885-1935). The major events in his life are recounted, based on a reassessment of archival documents, correspondence, and the recollections of those who knew him. His relationship with other modernists in music, art, and literature-including Arnold Schoenberg, Karl Kraus, and Alma Mahler-Werfel-is traced. The role played in Berg's personal and artistic life by his wife, Helene, is emphasized, and her management of his legacy-often controversial-for the forty years following his death is explored. The book contains a close study of each of Berg's major musical works, including his operas Wozzeck and Lulu"--

This book examines the relationship of three very different men who are usually seen as the most important composers of the so-called Second Viennese School – Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern – in the years 1906 to 1921 through a close reading of their correspondence with each other. To date only one of these correspondences, that of Schönberg and Berg, has been published, so the other two sets of letters are not yet widely known. The largely differing personalities of these three men come out clearly in their letters to each other: Schönberg, the master who demands a great many things from his two pupils (long after they have ceased to be that); Berg, from whom he demands the most; and Webern, his most pious devotee. The book covers the period linking the first correspondence between master and pupils in 1906 and the dissolution of the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen in 1921, the period when these men were most closely bound together.

Preeminent music theorist and leader in the study of music and disability Joseph Straus presents a truly groundbreaking take on musical modernism--demonstrating in an expansive and vivid multimedia presentation that modernist music is inextricably entwined with attitudes toward disability. In Broken Beauty, Straus argues that the most characteristic features of musical modernism--fractured forms, immobilized harmonies, conflicting textural layers, radical simplification of means in some cases, and radical complexity and hermeticism in others--can be understood as musical depictions of disability conditions, including deformity/disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, idiocy, and autism. Against the traditional medical model of disability, which sees it as a bodily defect requiring diagnosis and normalization or cure, this new sociocultural model of disability sees it as cultural artifact, something that is created by and creates culture. Straus places this revised model of disability against a wide range of canonical, high-art concert music from the first decades of the century through the 1950s. Broken Beauty illustrates how disability is right at the core of musical modernism; it is one of the things that musical modernism is fundamentally about.