Berg's Altenberg Lieder, Op. 4 (1912), effectively mark the end of his career as a composer of songs. Near the beginning of his career, Berg wrote dozens of lieder, most of which remained unpublished during his lifetime. His earliest successes under the tutelage of Arnold Schoenberg also included a number of songs, most notably the four of Op. 2. The Altenberg Lieder, though composed after Berg's formal studies with Schoenberg had ended, nonetheless bear the mark of the elder composer's powerful influence. Though Schoenberg discouraged Berg from writing songs, he is probably at least partly responsible for the nature and character of the Altenberg Lieder, since they were written as Berg was also occupied with the orchestration of Schoenberg's massive song cycle Gurrelieder (1901-1911). The orchestral richness of Gurrelieder is certainly evident in Berg's songs, but so is the influence of Gustav Mahler, whose Das Lied von der Erde (1908-1909) had made such a lasting impression on Berg when he first heard the work in 1911.

The Altenberg Lieder are sensitively and masterfully executed and reveal the composer's adroitness at orchestration and the inherently lyrical expressivity of his musical language. Berg no doubt could have continued composing songs with great success but was devastated by Schoenberg's initial response to the Altenberg Lieder and by the scandal that attended their first performance. After hearing some of the songs, Schoenberg wrote to Berg, "they bother me." At their first public performance on a program that included the Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6 (1909), of fellow Schoenberg disciple Anton Webern, as well as Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (1901-1904), the audience rioted.

The Altenberg Lieder are drawn from the whimsical, somewhat eccentric poetry of Peter Altenberg, a "coffeehouse" poet and friend of Berg and his wife. According to musicologist Mark DeVoto, Altenberg often sent "epigrammatic...scurrilous poems in blank verse" on postcards to his friends, five of which Berg chose for the present cycle; Berg's full title for the work, in fact, is Five Orchestral Songs on Picture-Postcard Texts of Peter Altenberg. Each of the songs is symmetrically conceived; that is, each begins and ends with similar, if not identical, harmonic or motivic gestures. The songs make considerable use of canon, passacaglia, and variation form. Berg also employs an expanded tonal language that includes the use of whole-tone scales, total chromaticism, and, as DeVoto notes, a proto-12-tone system of pitch organization that prefigures Schoenberg's method by more than a decade. After composing the Altenberg Lieder, Berg turned primarily to instrumental music, and later, to opera. It was, in fact, Berg's operas and works like the Lyric Suite for string quartet (1925-1926) and the Violin Concerto (1935) that would assure him a place in musical history. Still, Berg might have achieved similar success as a composer of songs had the Altenberg Lieder been greeted with less derision from both Viennese concertgoers and his influential teacher.

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