Alban Berg

What do you want to say with this character, Wozzeck,

This is a play written in the 1830s by George Buchner, transformed into an opera in around 1915 or the end of the First World War by Alban Berg.

And what is it about? It's about violence and the desperation of poverty and the way in which I think the mixture between poverty making for depression and depression finding violence as its antidote.

The violence of desperation, in this case metered out by Wozzeck on his wife, is so still present in South Africa.

Yeah

... a very great American violinist who recently passed away, who had the courage to commission Alban Berg to write his Violin Concerto.

Berg did not, didn't wanna write it, but Krasner convinced him that he could write this great concerto and- Krasner premiered this piece with the Vienna Philharmonic in a very hostile antisemitic Vienna at that time.

Mm-hmm.

After studying law in Greece, he pursued music and musicology in Vienna and Hamburg, later becoming professor of musicology at the University of Hamburg.

His influential research covered Byzantine music, Gregorian chant, Mahler, Alban Berg, Ligeti, and the relationship between Eastern and Western musical traditions.

His publications, particularly in his studies of Mahler, remain important contributions to music scholarship.

LA Master Chorale announced the death of tenor Matthew Carlton Miles.

And I remember one day, I was probably six or something, he was playing this music, and I just remember listening to it going, what is that? Why does it have this effect on me? And I found out, of course, many years later that what I had heard was the coronation scene from Boris Godunov.

and which had really made a big impression on me much later when I was a teenager, I became completely obsessed with Wozzeck by Alban Berg, which is to this day is a work that I can quote most of that work because I was so obsessed with it.

And then of course, none of which really have a lot to do with Hercules versus vampires, other than the fact that It formed my vision of what opera could be.

Wozzeck is pretty scary and dark.

I, I happen to be reading a, this, it's a- Speaks to my dorkiness.

I happened to be reading a biography of Al- Alban Berg and got into these letters that he and Schoenberg had been wr- writing between the two of them, 'cause, you know-

Sure

...

Alban Berg was Schoenberg's, uh, one of his disciples, and they were writing letters.

The letters, um, they're, they spend most of their time bitching about the scene in Vienna at the time.

There are no gigs.

I mean, that was probably what was in my house was European classical.