Alban Berg’s Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op.5 are the composer’s only true miniatures. Many musicologists and biographers date these pieces from the spring of 1913, but according to Berg’s wife, they were completed in June—an important distinction, since the latter was the month of Berg’s fateful meeting with his former teacher Arnold Schoenberg. Musicologists have documented Berg’s trip to Berlin in 1913, which included a traumatic encounter with Schoenberg. It is presumed that Schoenberg roundly criticized his slavish disciple, attempting to discourage him from composing songs and small-scale works, and encouraging him toward extended instrumental composition. Musicologist Brian Archibald has remarked that Schoenberg likely delivered some “strong criticism of Berg’s recent work, and possibly even of his personality.” Schoenberg‘s harsh rebuke of Berg may indeed have been triggered by Berg’s Op.5 miniatures. Archibald notes the irony in Schoenberg‘s attack on Berg in light of the fact that Berg’s Four Pieces were strongly influenced by Schoenberg‘s own set of miniatures, the Six Little Piano Pieces, Op.19 (1911).

 

The Four Pieces were not performed until 1919, when they received their premier, despite Schoenberg‘s earlier admonishments, at a meeting of Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna.

—Alexander Carpenter