Alban Berg /

Like his fellow Schoenberg disciple Anton Webern, Viennese composer Alban Berg has long been in need of a full-scale, un-authorized biography; and, while this respectable, uninspired study does not fill the Berg gap as well as Hans Moldenhauer's Anton Webern (p. 107) remedied the Webern situation, it does put the essential material in readable form--and it does reflect the opening-up of Berg scholarship since the death of Berg's possessive widow in 1976, Alternating between life history and musical analysis (the latter seems to dominate), Monson takes the asthmatic, bohemian young Alban from self-taught songwriter to studies with paternally overwhelming Schoenberg; from marriage to ambivalent WW I service; from imitative disciple to the maverick who insisted, against odds and advice, on applying Schoenbergian techniques to opera, in the eclectic Wozzeck and the twelve-tone Lulu. Throughout, Monson is rather better at describing the music--its non-Schoenbergian links to the past, its theatricality--than in animating Berg's short life, though her detailed technical analyses are hampered by an inexpressive vocabulary and the bewildering absence of any musical examples. And Berg's place in the history of opera is misleadingly oversimplified: we're told, for instance, that Wozzeck was ""the first modern opera,"" but other contenders--like Pell‚as et M‚lisande--aren't even mentioned. (A similar tendency toward flat overstatement--""Webern and Berg were opposites""--turns up often). But Monson does well by the play-into-opera transformations and by recent revelations in Bergdana: a decade-long extra-marital affair (which scholar George Perle has linked to code notations in Berg's Lyric Suite) and the Lulu saga--how it was mislabeled a ""fragment,"" how its third act was suppressed by Berg's widow (did she equate Lulu with Berg's mistress?), how it has now been retrieved. (Monson would have gained much by postponing publication long enough to include input from this year of Lulu premieres.) Neither thoroughly satisfying on biographical or musicological terms, then, but this life-and-work is the only up-to-date general Berg resource around; and it will serve well enough till a broader and deeper study comes along. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.