I can tell you, dearest friend, that if it became known how much friendship, love and a world of human and spiritual references I have smuggled into these three movements, the adherents of programme music - should there be any left - would go mad with joy.

Among Schoenberg's teaching was the idea that the unity of a musical composition depends upon all its aspects being derived from a single basic idea; this idea was later known as developing variation. An orchestration was therefore commissioned in secret from Friedrich Cerha and premièred in Paris (under Pierre Boulez) only in 1979 soon after Helene Berg's own death. Alban Maria Johannes Berg (February 9 1885 – December 24 1935) was an Austrian composer.

He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Alban Maria Johannes Berg (February 9 1885 – December 24 1935) was an Austrian composer.