Composer
Biography
Largely self-taught as a boy in Vienna, he became Schoenberg's pupil in 1904 and remained under that discipline for six years. The catalogue includes the Piano Sonata Op. 1, the String Quartet Op. 3, the Three Pieces for Orchestra Op. 6, the Lyric Suite. Wozzeck, completed after his war service and staged in Berlin in 1925, conceals a rigorous scheme of classical forms — passacaglia, suite, invention — inside a portrait of poverty and disintegration, and it became part of the international repertory. Lulu was left with its third act only partly orchestrated. The Violin Concerto, written in memory of the eighteen-year-old Manon Gropius and finished months before he died, folds a Carinthian folk tune and the chorale Es ist genug, harmonised by Bach, into its twelve-tone structure. He died in Vienna at the end of 1935, aged fifty. Three of the Seven Early Songs, from his years with Schoenberg, were the first of his music to be heard in public, and the Chamber Concerto for violin, piano and thirteen wind instruments stands beside the other numbered works. He served in the Austrian army from 1915 to 1918 and worked on Wozzeck, whose early sketches date from 1914 and main composition from 1917–1922. Three excerpts given in 1924 brought him public success. The death, on Christmas Eve, came from blood poisoning after an insect bite.