Piano Sonata in B Minor

Before Schoenberg had become the composer who changed the course of 20th-century music, he was already sowing the seeds of change as the teacher of Alban Berg. Schoenberg taught Berg from 1904 until 1911, and the fruits of their collaboration can be heard in Berg’s highly expressive Sonata (published in 1910). Strikingly, whereas sonatas had traditionally contained three or four contrasting movements, Berg wrote just the one. He had intended this to be the first of three—including a slow movement and a finale—but on finishing the movement he found he had nothing more to add. At Schoenberg’s advice, it became Berg’s standalone Op. 1. It is full of building tensions and climaxes; its evolving melodic lines are both lyrically yearning and daringly edgy. Listen to its dense chords, with their colourful, whole-tone shades of Debussy. The Sonata’s chromatic harmonies obscure the sense of tonal gravity, as they move away from, and later return into, the darkness of the work’s B-minor home key. This is the language of late German Romanticism, passed on from composers such as Wagner and Richard Strauss to Schoenberg to Berg, and a taste of the groundbreaking Viennese music that was to come.