The image of Alban Berg as a member of the Second Viennese School and a devoted student of Arnold Schoenberg, even in his mature years, pervades our understanding of the composer. This image is derived, as Joseph Auner has demonstrated, from a historical narrative that turned the notion of a Second Viennese School of composers into a concept—a concept in which important critics such as René Leibowitz went so far as rendering Schoenberg as the sole leading genius, leaving Berg and Webern as mere derivatives whose existence as composers would have been “inconceivable” without Schoenberg's teaching. Obviously, we have no way of knowing what kind of composer Berg would have been without Schoenberg's mentoring, although he had considered studying composition with Hans Pfitzner before he started taking lessons with Schoenberg. Leibowitz's argument may be justified nonetheless by Berg's own accounts of the teacher-student relationship, attesting that long after his apprenticeship—which started in 1904 and extended to 1911—he identified himself with Schoenberg and followed every major turning point in Schoenberg's musical language, from the emancipation of dissonance to the development of serial methods in the 1920s. To define Berg as a mere follower of Schoenberg, however, runs the risk of misrepresenting the eclectic character of his music as well as the relational aspects of his identity as a composer.