Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs (Sieben frühe Lieder) is a cycle for high voice and orchestra that Berg assembled and orchestrated in 1928 from songs he had originally composed between 1905 and 1908, while studying with Arnold Schoenberg. The set is made up of seven individual songs: Nacht, Schilflied, Die Nachtigall, Traumgekrönt, Im Zimmer, Liebesode, and Sommertage, each setting a German-language poem by a different writer.

Although the songs come from Berg’s early years, the cycle is not just an anthology. Berg revised the material, reordered it, and used the orchestral setting to give the whole sequence a strong internal balance, with the outer songs acting as a framing pair. The result is a concise but highly expressive work that still reflects the late-Romantic world of Berg’s youth while also pointing toward the tighter control and sharper individuality of his later style.