Piano sonata (Berg)

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Alban Berg's Piano sonata is his only solo work given an opus number (Op. 1). He wrote it during the years 1907 and 1908, but it was not published until 1911.

This sonata consists of a single movement centered in the key of B minor, but Berg makes frequent use of chromaticism, whole-tone scales, and wandering key centers, giving the tonality a very unstable feel. The piece is in the typical sonata form, with an Exposition, Development and Recapitulation, but the composition also relies heavily on Arnold Schoenberg's idea of developing variation, a method to ensure the unity of a piece of music by deriving all aspects of a composition from a single idea.