Berg’s Piano Sonata: Romanticism’s Ecstatic Epilogue
Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata, Op. 1 begins with a yearning, upward-reaching line which dreamily recalls the opening of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Soon, we hear restless autumnal strains which seem to have drifted out of late Mahler. Composed in 1908, this is music which basks in the brilliantly hued twilight of Romanticism. Harmonically, the key of B minor maintains a tenuous hold in a chromatic and whole-tone sea, awash in shifting key centers and …