Epilogue

HOW SHOULD WE ASSESS ALBAN BERG’S PLACE IN MUSIC OF THE modern era? In the present day—far more than in the past—the question defies any broadly acceptable answer. Serious music from Berg’s time to our own has undergone such radical and continuing changes that any ideology supporting its critical evaluation seems temporary and arbitrary. The riots that greeted the Altenberg Songs at the Musikverein in 1913 or the Chamber Concerto in Paris in 1928 are unthinkable at performances in the present day. Equally unimaginable at present is the chartering of a train to bring audiences from New York to Philadelphia to hear a new opera, as happened for the American premiere of ...