Listening to change, listening to Alban Berg's Close o' close my eyes at parting

Was listening to Alban Berg's Close o' close my eyes at parting, a 1 minute song written in two versions.
The first was written in 1900, followed by a redo in 1925. My grandmother was 12 for the first version but she was a proud mother for the second.
My mother was 12 when the second version was written.
I see a certain numerical symbolism in this, but this musical miracle in two settings also made me think how much can happen in a relatively short time.
My father was 7 for the second serving of this song, my grandfather was an accomplished young pianist  for the first but a WWI invalid for the redo of  Close o' close my eyes at parting. 

But the music! Listen to these two short pieces, with the words and a score perhaps in front of you.The first version, Massig bewegt, Moderate, calm, is a neoclassic song, with a twist. It's metered in 5/4, not exactly your usual 1900 fare. The song has no key signature, nor does it really care, all it does is to step up and down with predictable yet unnerving interval symmetry. it almost feels as if something was brewing, so that even this mild sonnet contains seeds of war, the DNA of the XX century. Enter the 1925 Close o' close my eyes at parting. 3/4 not 5/4, again no key signature; the up and down of the voice (and piano's singing) resembles the earlier version but there is a corruption of symmetry, a deterioration of rhythm, an aggression on tonality. It's the end of the world!But, no wait, at the end of the piece a "g" from the very end of the register tells us that this is not the end, just the beginning of something similar to a pagan hell.

Why did Berg go from one extreme (mellow melody) to the depths of Wozzeck, Jack the ripper in Lulu? Was it Berg alone or all of us? Did we ever recover from the dead winter of '900's wars and Stalingrad, Treblinka, Auschwitz? Did we just pretend, when the Beatles came on board, with Elvis before them, and the Stones, were we cured? Does anyone even care anymore? Does anyone ever sing Close o' close my eyes at parting? in its 1900 version?

I have been reading a newspaper every morning before leaving home for over 50 years. I can hardly imagine doing without one. Oh, wait, I am doing without one! The Plain Dealer became Plain and there are no real news to read.  Just sports, national, international, local, high school, retirement home tournaments, kindergarten challenges, and bedroom arguments. Who won? What happened? Let's dissect a meaningless game and devote 20 pages to it, since the TV news only spend 80% of available bandwidth to broadcast pretty much the same stories you find in the Plain.

The Plain

In fact, I  noticed that the online version of the paper has small TV screen-like windows where two individuals, a lady and her male partner in crime tell you what you already heard on TV the day before. The reality is simple, we don't have a football team, just the side effects of it. In random order these are: a concussed quarterback, a tax to pay for the stadium, an additional disbursement to pay for improvements of various types (a TV screen, you bet, the biggest in town, so you can watch TV at the stadium instead of from home).
How does this belong to culture in NEO? It does, for this is the culture of NEO for a lot of people. It does, since the Browns produce a humorous Monday, the notoriously hardest day of the week.
There is nothing wrong with sports or with a newspaper devoting tons of space to sporting news. In a country where I previously lived there is a daily full-length paper that only deals with sports. Let's call this paper The Dealer, it deals in sports and it does so with grace, the paper edition being in hard-to-miss pink!

The Dealer