Ebook: Alban Berg: The Man and the Work

In 1975 Mosco Carner (Mosco Cohen) published Alban Berg: The Man and The Work which immediately established itself as one of the most comprehensive biographies on the author of Wozzeck and the unfinished Lulu. In 1983 a second edition was published in which Carner focuses on that third Act finally brought to an end with the musicological analysis and cultural breadth that are typical of it, as his previous and still unsurpassed biography on Puccini testifies (a third edition, 1992, is still unpublished in Italy). Carner moves in search of a musically documented, but never mechanical, connection between man and artist: his primary aim is to balance the biographical-existential and the creative-expressive levels, two different levels of a single reality: that of an artist who entrusts his conception of life and art to music.

Even in the second part, where the compositions are addressed individually in terms of genesis and compositional practice, Carner always manages to maintain a direct line with the reader with that colloquial and learned style typical of the best Anglo-Saxon non-fiction. The reader thus finds a lively participation in the human and artistic events of one of the brightest figures in the history of twentieth-century music for whom Carner drew information directly from those who frequented him.