Five Orchestral Songs on Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg, op. 4

Berg wrote the five Altenberg-Lieder in 1911–12 on aphoristic texts that Peter Altenberg had written on picture postcards. Two of them were included in the concert Schoenberg conducted in Vienna on 31 March 1913; the audience broke into open fighting, the police were called and the evening was abandoned before the last item — the episode is remembered as the Skandalkonzert. Berg withdrew the songs and never heard them complete. They waited until 1952, when Jascha Horenstein conducted the first full performance in Rome, seventeen years after the composer's death.