Alban Berg Opus numbers

[Serial_Apologist]

I find myself in some confusion.

Earlier this evening, New Generation Artists included performances of early songs by Berg: the first, titled "Wo die Goldregen Steht" is listed in Radio Times as being Op 2 No 2; two of the subsequent three Berg songs are listed as Op 5 Nos 1 and 2 and Op 6 No 3. I am puzzled: All my literature has a completely different song as the second of Op 2, "Nacht"; Op 3 is the String Quartet of 1910 and Op 6 the Three Orchestral Pieces of 1914. All of the songs performed during the programme were in a style I would hitherto have regarded as predative of the period of the Piano Sonata Op 1, though none were from the "Sieben Fruhe Lieder". No dates of composition were announced for any of the pieces played (including Janacek's lovely piano pieces "On an Overgrown Path") - something I am finding more and more to be the case these days in Radio 3 broadcasts.

Can somebody more up-to-date than myself please inform me if someone has "re-opused" Berg's oeuvre?

Thanks in anticipation.

S-A

[Roehre]

S-A,

Berg's output has not been re-opussed.

The 7 (or 8) opus numbers which were allocated by Berg for the published works (i.e. the sonata, songs, string quartet, altenberg lieder, clarinet pieces, 3 pieces f orchestra, Wozzeck [plus the Chamber concerto, but Berg withdrew the number 8 before its publication]) are the "offically" used and recognized ones.

However, Berg allocated some 15 odd opus numbers (many of them groups of works) to works before the official opus 1, all composed before 1908.

Among those works are the 7 Early Songs (1907), published and later even orchestrated and published again by Berg, but also another some 40-odd songs and a couple of piano pieces, including some 8 sonatas (many unfinished) and 2 variation sets. Nearly all of these were given opus numbers, written on the autograph scores.

Since the 1985 commemmoration of his birth and death some of these works were recorded (IIRC DFD/Reimann on EMI the first artists to do so), and -as there are some songs with titles used more than once by Berg- given the original pre-opus-1-from-1908 opus numbers to make clear these are others than the well-known ones.

The numbers you see listed are those "older" opus-numbers.

The last decade or so some of these pre-early-songs-songs were broadcast on R3.
Never have these old-numbers been mentioned, and hardly their year of composition.
Informing the public seems not to be a job for R3 anymore, I'm afraid.

[Serial_Apologist]

Many thanks indeed, Roehr: useful to know these things which "they" don't tell us!