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Austrian composer (1885–1935) who produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. AMQS signed “Alban Berg,” on an off-white 6 x 9.25 album leaf, dated and identified in Berg’s hand, “30.3.30” and “Wozzeck II/1.” Berg pens two measures, numbered 112–113, in bass clef from Act II, Scene 1 of his landmark opera Wozzeck, notated in brown ink on a single stave and incorporating Wozzeck’s text, “Nichts als Arbeit unter der Sonne” [Nothing but work under the sun]. The reverse bears the signature of Austrian operatic baritone Hans Duhan, dated at Vienna, March 1931. In fine condition, with some light soiling.
Wozzeck, Berg’s searing three-act opera after Georg Büchner’s unfinished play Woyzeck, premiered at the Berlin Staatsoper on December 14, 1925, and quickly became one of the defining stage works of 20th-century modernism. The quoted passage comes from near the beginning of Act II, Scene 1, where Wozzeck’s weary line—“Nothing but work under the sun”—captures the opera’s bleak vision of poverty and psychological collapse. In Wozzeck, Berg fused rigorous formal design with intense dramatic immediacy, combining atonality, Sprechgesang, parlando, arioso, and flashes of late-Romantic lyricism into a score of extraordinary emotional force.
A scarce and highly desirable signed musical quotation from Berg’s greatest operatic achievement. Autograph material from Wozzeck is especially compelling, linking the composer directly to the work that established him, alongside Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, as one of the central figures of the Second Viennese School and one of the most powerful dramatic voices in modern opera.
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