Constantin Floros

"The central point of this book is the realization that the creative work of Alban Berg, which in recent years has moved to the forefront of scholarly interest, is largely rooted in autobiography, so that therefore one can gain access to the music by studying the inner biography of its creator. Accordingly, the first of the three parts of this volume outlines a character portrait of this great composer. Part two considers the conditions relevant to a deeper understanding of Berg and of the Second Viennese School generally. In part three, then, Berg's key works will be analyzed and semantically deciphered in terms of his inner biography. The study is based not only on the sources in print but also on the rich unpublished material. Alban Berg was incapable of composing without a program. He needed an extra-musical stimulus. With him, personal experience was the indispensable condition of the creative process: the autobiographic reference was all-important for composing."

"In the fall of 1976, 14 letters by Alban Berg, renowned composer of the Second Viennese School, were discovered in the posthumous papers of Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, wife of a Prague industrialist and sister of Franz Werfel, the well-known Austro-Czech writer. In the 1920s Berg gained international notoriety with his opera Wozzeck and the Lyric Suite, which was largely inspired by his relationship with Fuchs." "The secret letters were delivered to Hanna surreptitiously by Theodor Adorno and Alma Mahler Werfel. They were brought to New York by Hanna on her flight from Nazi persecution, and were eventually found in her estate after her death. First discovered by George Perle, then deciphered and transcribed in German by Constantin Floros, they appear here in English for the first time."--Jacket.

Modern music notation developed out of the so-called square notation and this out of the Latin neumes. The question of where these neumes came from has long been the subject of scholarly debate. As the author demonstrated in his three-volume Universale Neumenkunde published in German in 1970, there is a very close relationship between the Paleo-Byzantine notation and the Latin neumes. Although the study aroused a great deal of dispute, more recent studies have revealed that the relevance of the Neumenkunde remains essentially unchallenged after 40 years. Those path-breaking research results on the relationship of the Greek and Latin notational systems are now available for the first time in a completely revised and augmented English translation.

"Alma Mahler-Werfel was one of the most fascinating ... of twentieth-century women. Her book Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters (1940) includes 159 of Mahler's letters, yet only 37 of these were published in their original, unedited form." "This new edition restores the original texts, and includes a further 188 letters as well as other, hitherto unpublished documents. The letters are supplemented by commentaries..."-- BOOK JACKET.