Wozzeck

Template:Short description Template:Other uses Template:Infobox opera Wozzeck (Template:IPA) is the first opera by Austrian composer Alban Berg, created between 1914 and 1922 and premiered on 14 December 1925 at the Berlin State Opera. Based on Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck (1836), it depicts a soldier's tragic slide into madness and murder amid militarism and oppression.

Berg's expressionist musical language and innovative approach to musical form heightened the opera's psychological realism. He used atonality and leitmotifs to show individuals' emotional and existential plight under forces of authority. Drawing on tonal and rhythmic idioms from folk and dance music, he linked psychological and social dimensions and exposed social alienation. He also invoked latent themes and topics of fate and nature, reflecting an understanding of humanity as shaped by universal forces.

A Template:Lang at its premiere, Wozzeck faced backlash but became a landmark of early 20th-century modernist opera. It remains a cornerstone of the repertoire, celebrated for its narrative power and complex musical structure.

Background

Template:Multiple image

Berg created the Template:Lang (literary opera) Wozzeck from 1914 to 1922, stalled by World War I.<ref name="Watkins 2003">Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Sfnm He had first pursued a literary career, writing lyrical and dramatic juvenilia, including after Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts.Template:Sfn But in 1904, he diaried that music was "a higher form of revelation".Template:Sfn Arnold Schoenberg, his mentor, advised, "let poetry lead you ... to music".Template:Sfn Schoenberg premiered some of Berg's aphoristic Altenberg Lieder (1911–1912), which caused the 1913 Template:Lang. He told Berg to write a suite of character pieces (the Three Orchestra Pieces, 1913–1915) before trying a planned vocal symphony after Gustav Mahler, but affirmed Berg's operatic interest in the chamber plays of August Strindberg.Template:Sfn

Then Berg twice attended the May 1914 Vienna premiere of Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck (1836) at the Template:Lang. He recalled seeing Albert Steinrück as Wozzeck among visitors from the Munich Residenz Theatre and said he "immediately" decided to make it an opera.Template:Sfnm Berg wrote his own libretto, which is indebted partly to writer Karl Emil Franzos. Franzos's version, titled Wozzeck by a misreading of poorly legible papers shared by Büchner's brother, physician Ludwig Büchner, first appeared in a Neue Freie Presse serial (1875) and in his "critical, complete" Büchner edition (1879).Template:Sfnm

Büchner, Woyzeck, and Berg

Büchner and Woyzeck

Trained in biology and medicine,Template:Sfn Georg Büchner taught comparative anatomy at the University of Zurich.<ref name="Reddick 1990">Template:Cite book</ref> A Romantic in science like his patron Lorenz Oken,<ref name="Dedner 2017">Template:Cite book</ref> he treated taboo topics like sex, religion, and politics in literature<ref name="Reddick 1994">Template:Cite book</ref> and stressed characterization over narrative.Template:Sfn<ref name="Guthrie 1995">Template:Cite book</ref> He had proto-Marxian Template:Sfn or similarly radical politics and studied the French Revolution for his first play, Danton's Death (1835), which left him feeling "crushed" by forces he sought to describe in an 1834 letter to his fiancée Minna Jaeglé: "I find in human nature a terrible sameness [...]. Individuals are but froth on the waves, ... a ridiculous struggle against an iron law [...]."Template:Sfnm<ref name="Büchner 1993">Template:Cite book</ref>

His work expresses a unity of opposites, or complements, from Hegel and Spinoza.<ref name="Thompson 2017">Template:Cite book</ref> Philosopher György Lukács called him a literary realist after the hero of Büchner's Lenz fragment (1835), who calls for artists to "submerge themselves in the life of the ... humblest person and ... reproduce it with all its faint agitations, hints of experience, the subtle ... play of his features [expressions]."<ref name="Lukács 1993">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Lukács 1937">Template:Cite web</ref> German literature scholar John Reddick argued his style expressed paradoxes in mosaics, as in a "shattered whole": "All my being is in this single moment", says Leonce at the climax of Leonce und Lena (1836).<ref name="Reddick 1993">Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Sfn

File:Johann Christian Woyzeck.jpg

Woyzeck (1780–1824) of Leipzig

In Woyzeck, Büchner mixed the grotesque with tragicomedy.Template:Sfn He used case reports of romantic femicide, mainly physician Johann Christian August Clarus's on Johann Christian Woyzeck, a barber and military veteran,Template:Sfn published in a medical journal to which Büchner's brother contributed.Template:Sfnm At the competency evaluation, Clarus reported that his patient had "Template:Lang" (free use of reason) and "Template:Lang" (free will) despite a medical history notable for recurrent episodes of psychosis, leading to Woyzeck's 1821 conviction and 1824 beheading.Template:Sfnm Büchner died of typhus in 1837, leaving an untitled, fragmentary script with shifting character names,Template:Sfn perhaps as an Template:Ill.Template:Sfn

Toward Berg's Wozzeck

Berg came from the same expressionist milieu, rooted in Symbolism with its exaltation of outcast artists,Template:Efn as novelist Franz Kafka, painters Oskar Kokoschka Template:Efn and Emil Nolde, and poets Gottfried Benn, Rainier Maria Rilke,Template:Efn and Franz Werfel.Template:Sfn In expressionist German opera, Wozzeck followed Richard Strauss's Elektra and Schoenberg's more radical Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand.Template:Sfn Erwartung and Strauss's Salome had recently explored the grotesque, and Berg saw operatic potential in Büchner's mad murderer and dark social criticism.Template:Sfn

Berg grew up playing a broad opera repertoire piano four hands with his sister Smaragda, and his taste was wider than Schoenberg's or Webern's.Template:Sfnm A frequent opera-goer, he attended multiple rehearsals for the 1908 Vienna premiere of Paul Dukas' Ariane et Barbe-bleue, and studied the score and its "thousands of splendid passages".Template:Sfn He may have learned from Schreker's Der ferne Klang, having prepared its piano-vocal score in 1911Template:Sfn (but disliked Schreker's next opera Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin).Template:Sfn At forums like the Café Museum, he met innovative figures across styles, including popular composers Erich Korngold, Franz Lehár, and Oscar Straus, through Viennese coffee house culture.Template:Sfn He knew Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande as a model of modernist Literaturoper, a direction he had explored in drafting a libretto (without music) from Franz Grillparzer's play Template:Ill. As in Pelléas, Berg linked Wozzeck's scenes with short interludes,Template:Sfn yet he kept Büchner's jagged brutality and eerie realism.Template:Sfnm

He worked mainly from writer Template:Ill's Wozzeck–Lenz: Zwei Fragmente (Wozzeck and Lenz: Two Fragments; 1909, reprinted 1913; Template:Ill), which mostly just resequenced Franzos's 26 scenes.Template:Sfnm Theater director Template:Ill, whose scene cuts Berg mostly followed, had used it in 1914.Template:Sfn That year, scholar Template:Ill tied the play to Clarus's Woyzeck.Template:Sfn In 1919, scholar Georg Witkowski issued a critical edition claiming Franzos's omissions, edits, and additions ruined Büchner's play.Template:Sfn Berg mostly chose Franzos's freer, livelier text, which polarized grotesque and tragic aspects, over Witkowski's. Franzos's publisher lost rights, so Berg left his title. Franzos's dramatic form shaped Berg's operatic acts (exposition, development, catastrophe). Berg's staging and lighting synced time and action as Franzos's sequential flow suggested ("The drama ... must go forward ... breathlessly", Berg replied to writer Hanns Heinz Ewers's 1925 offer to collaborate).Template:Sfn As became habit, Berg added bits of his life: scripted coughs echo his asthma, and the Doctor's salamanders line mocks Paul Kammerer, the scientist–musician once loved by his wife, Template:Ill.Template:Sfn Template:Efn Berg's epilogue was not Franzos's or Landau's final scene,Template:Sfn but it was more Franzos's invention than Büchner's.Template:Sfn

1914–22: History of composition process

1914–1916: Genesis amid war

Template:Multiple imageOn frugal Template:Lang (summer vacations), first at his wife's family's farm and villa in Trahütten, Berg precomposed Wozzeck from as early as 1914, conceptualizing and sketching perhaps two scenes while continuing Three Orchestra Pieces. He hesitated when Schoenberg said the play was unsuitable.Template:Sfn Then war erupted, and his patriotism was cooled by Karl Kraus's attack on "the cash register of world history".Template:Sfn Long fearing death from severe asthma, then a possibly allergy-related somatic symptom disorder, he was first deemed unfit.Template:Sfnm Pupil Theodor W. Adorno saw the substance dependence and hypochondriasis of a tortured artist in his self-medication and physician visits, including to Sigmund Freud.Template:Sfn "[H]ad I been declared fit ... my spirit would ... have broken", he wrote Schoenberg, rejecting "a past time and a beloved place" as evoked by a bell to bait "curious Russian heads" from trenches to shoot.Template:Sfn In mid-1915, Berg was conscripted anyway and bought the play while finishing Three Orchestra Pieces.Template:Sfn

File:Karl Kraus, 1913 (SOA Praha) cr.jpg

Karl Kraus, 1913

That winter, he began another opera with the working title Nacht (Nokturn) (Night/Nocturne; 1915–1917, unfinished).Template:Efn In it, a semi-autobiographical "He" falls asleep discussing philosophy with the subconscious "Other". Then a dream sequence by turns nostalgic, erotic, and nightmarish ends with a filmTemplate:Efn showing a dark mountain forest thinning upon the snow line to sky and snow fields at dawn. This echoes other monodramas like Schoenberg's Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand), and Strindberg's Template:Lang (Jacob Wrestles).Template:Sfnm Berg used musicodramatic ideas from Nacht (Nokturn), like snoring, in Wozzeck.Template:Sfn

He was still sketching Wozzeck's outline, in 4 acts and 23 scenes as of February 1916.Template:Sfnm He wrote Helene of Austrian prisoners of war "imprisoned and starving in unheated stalls" under the Allies Template:Sfn and was himself first assigned 30-hour guard-duty shifts in Vienna.Template:Sfn He wrote that April of seeing fellow soldiers, including deserters, confined and strappadoed at a military base in Bisamberg, where he was then on office duty:Template:Sfn Template:Blockquote He never saw combatTemplate:Sfn and served as a one-year volunteer (Template:Lang) officer, including at the Imperial War Ministry—more likely via his brother Karl (Charly or Charley), also posted there, than Helene's illegitimate father Franz Joseph I of Austria.Template:Sfn In August, he wrote Helene: "For months I haven't done any work on Wozzeck. Everything suffocated, buried!"Template:Sfn

1917–1918: Resolve and state collapse

In early 1917, Berg wrote playwright Template:Ill that his two opera ideas were "equally old".Template:Sfn That summer, he worked on Wozzeck while on several weeks' leave at Trahütten, as was his habit, composing at the piano from early morning. In the afternoon, he sketched outside, foraging mushrooms and hiking the mountains, lakes, and springs before reading himself to sleep. Helene identified this "love of nature" in his music, including Wozzeck.Template:Sfnm He marked 1917 as the symbolic year he committed to Wozzeck in one of then few letters to Schoenberg that August.Template:Sfn He saw more subjugation than poverty in Wozzeck, likely from his war service,Template:Sfn which in the same letter he called "slavery" that might go on "for years".Template:Sfn Asked what "inner point of contact" moved him to adapt the play in a 1930 interview, he said:<ref name="Berg 2014">Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Blockquote

File:Jännerstreik 1918 in Wiener Neustadt.png

Austro-Hungarian strike of January 1918

In summer 1918, on six weeks' regiment leave at Trahütten, Berg revised the libretto as he finished two scenes (likely the second scenes of acts 1 and 2).Template:Sfnm That June, he wrote Schoenberg that he had been "degraded to the point of self-loathing" during the war (in 1924, he drafted a letter to Kraus confiding he had experienced suicidal ideation).Template:Sfn "There's a bit of me in [Wozzeck]", he wrote Helene that August, "since I have been spending these war years just as dependent on people I hate ... in chains, sick, captive, resigned, humiliated."Template:Sfn Days later, he wrote his friend and colleague Anton Webern, "the fate of this poor man [Wozzeck], exploited and tormented by all the world ... touches me", praising the drama's "unheard-of intensity of mood".Template:Sfn He planned to use traditional song forms and variations, and to alternate thematic and Erwartung-inspired scenes. He gave the Captain and Doctor more Template:Lang (half-singing, half-speaking) roles, as in melodrama, later shifted to conventional singing ones.Template:Sfn

File:Egon Schiele - Kauerndes Menschenpaar (Die Familie) - 4277 - Österreichische Galerie Belvedere.jpg

In The Family (1918), Egon Schiele envisions a family. That year, he died of Spanish flu. He had designed the poster for a 1912 Living Austrian Composers concert featuring Berg's music.Template:Sfn

That year, Schoenberg hired him at the Society for Private Musical Performances to help with administration, rehearsals, music arrangements, and writing.Template:Sfn The Bergs caught Spanish flu that fall, and the pandemic worsened labor shortages and hunger,Template:Efn both of which were prevalent amid the war and its aftermath.Template:Sfn His family's farm and country estate at Lake Ossiach, the Berghof,Template:Sfn faced nearby food riots (in Villach)Template:Sfn and business failure.Template:Sfn Writer Stefan Zweig recalled "starving and freezing millions crowd[ing Vienna]", where "revolution or ... catastrophe" seemed possible amid unfolding state collapse, including the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and nearby German revolution of 1918–1919.Template:Sfn That November, Berg's military service ended with several armistices and Austro-Hungarian defeat. "I am again a person!", he told Buschbeck.Template:Sfn

1919–1922: Progress through war's aftermath

In July 1919, Berg set the final, symmetrical order of Wozzeck's scenes, finishing act 1 in four weeks before pausing in August to copy parts for the Three Orchestra Pieces. Composer and pianist Erwin Schulhoff, a wounded veteran, played Berg's Piano Sonata in PragueTemplate:Sfn and hoped to premiere them there and in Dresden, through the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.Template:Sfnm In concert advertisements he sent to Berg for these "Progress Concerts", he tied the revolutions of 1917–1923 to a spiritual "revolution in art".Template:Sfn

That fall, Berg and Helene were being drawn into what she called the "Berghof Catastrophe": having enabled his composing with an appanage, his mother Johanna (née Braun) sought their help (and received only his) co-managing the Berghof, with its guest house and tavern. Wartime mismanagement was culminating in bitter disagreement and lasting feuds among the Bergs and their families gathered there partly for food.Template:Sfn The government had instituted production quotas and resorted to the confiscation for food rationing.Template:Sfn "[D]espite ... freezing and having nothing to live on", Berg emphasized that he was "happy", recalling war "years of suffering and humiliation at a low rank, not composing a single note" to Schulhoff in November 1919.Template:Sfn

Schulhoff had also circulated an artists' petition espousing internationalism for signatures, and in this November 1919 letter, Berg sympathized but followed Schoenberg in prioritizing Austro-German art music,Template:Sfn writing Schulhoff that a nation like Germany Template:Efn might "deserve" its defeat for how it "treats its greatest".<ref name="Ljubibratić 2024">Template:Cite journal</ref>Template:Sfn Template:Efn Continuing, he blamed the war and its aftermath on capitalism, militarism, the press, and, uncharacteristically, Jews.Template:Sfn He called himself an "antimilitarist" and asked who among the Entente, "outside Russia", had the same "ring of idealism" to their names as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, recently murdered Spartacist uprising leaders.Template:Sfn

File:Burg Landskron 4.jpg

A view of the village of St. Andrä on Lake Ossiach near Villach

Berg gradually resisted his family's demands at the Berghof, writing Webern in March 1920 that he would need to earn income by editing, teaching, and writing, including for Template:Ill, the music journal of Universal Edition, in which case he might have even less time, however, to compose.Template:Sfn That April, Johanna sold the landed property as he wished and another family member advised.Template:Sfn In July, he planned three scenes (likely 1, 3, and 5) of act 2 in the shape of four- or five-movement symphony, finishing them by August.Template:Sfn

In 1921, nearing the Austrian hyperinflation, the Society closed,Template:Sfn and Johanna kept planning her family's future.Template:Sfn She had disparaged Helene's passive income (from financial assets in Austrian kronen) as miserly and unreliable,Template:Sfn and worried that Berg might "live in penury" by "componiererei" (fooling around composing).Template:Sfn With dollars from her late son Herman's Florida estate, she funded New York trusts managed by Template:Ill, a firm long tied to the family,Template:Sfn thereby re-enabling Berg's composing career. He finished act 2 in Vienna with Helene at Bad Hofgastein, then act 3 in Trahütten by October.Template:Sfn While polishing and orchestrating Wozzeck, Berg recalled that Schoenberg had "tried to take away all my pleasure in [the opera]".Template:Sfn In June 1922, he wrote Schoenberg it was done.Template:Sfn

Composition

Scoring

Wozzeck is scored for voices, choirs (men's, women's, and children's), and large orchestra, including onstage musicians four times: a military band (act 1, scene 3), a chamber orchestra (act 2, scene 3), a tavern band (act 2, scene 4), and an out-of-tune, upright tavern piano (act 3, scene 3).<ref name=UE />

Roles

Template:Sronly
Role	Voice type	Premiere cast, 14 December 1925 Conductor: Erich Kleiber
Wozzeck	baritone	Leo Schützendorf
Marie, his common-law wife	soprano	Sigrid Johanson
Marie's son	treble	Ruth Iris Witting
Captain	buffo tenor	Waldemar Henke
Doctor	buffo bass	Martin Abendroth
Drum Major	heldentenor	Fritz Soot
Andres, Wozzeck's friend	lyric tenor	Gerhard Witting
Margret, Marie's neighbor	contralto	Jessika Koettrik
First Apprentice	deep bass	Ernst Osterkamp
Second Apprentice	high baritone	Alfred Borchardt
Madman	high tenor	Marcel Noé
A Soldier	baritone	Leonhard Kern
Soldiers, apprentices, women, children

Instrumentation

The pit orchestra is large. The woodwind section has 4 flutes (all double piccolo), 4 oboes (4th doubles cor anglais), 4 clarinets in BTemplate:Music (1st doubles clarinet in A, 3rd and 4th double [[E-flat clarinet|clarinet in ETemplate:Music]]), bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, and contrabassoon. The brass section has 4 horns in F, 4 trumpets in F, 4 trombones (1 alto, 2 tenor, 1 bass), and tuba. The percussion section has 4 timpani, 2 bass drums (1 with rute), several cymbals (1 suspended, 1 attached to bass drum), snare drum, 2 tam-tams (1 small), triangle, and xylophone. There is a celesta, a harp, and a standard string section.

The military band has three sections. Woodwinds include piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets in ETemplate:Music, and 2 bassoons. Brass includes 2 horns in F, 2 trumpets in F, 3 trombones, and tuba. Percussion includes bass drum with cymbals, snare drum, and triangle. Berg marks when these musicians may be taken from the pit in a footnote near the end of act 1, scene 2.

The chamber orchestra matches Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1. It is mostly wind instruments: flute (doubles piccolo), oboe and cor anglais, 2 clarinets (in ETemplate:Music and A) and bass clarinet, and bassoon and contrabassoon, plus 2 horns. It also has a string quintet plus double bass.

The tavern band has a clarinet in C, a bombardon in F (or muted tuba as substitute), an accordion, a guitar, and 2 fiddles.

Form

Like earlier composers, Berg innovated on the operatic tradition. Not wanting Wozzeck to seem simply post-Wagnerian,Template:Sfn Template:Efn he said he preferred strict musical form to "the Wagnerian recipe of 'through-composing'",Template:Sfnm though the opera remains Wagnerian in many respects.Template:Sfnm Template:Efn His hybrid approach is a kind of integrated number opera, where each act and scene instead has an old or abstract musical form, often as a kind of word painting, like the serious passacaglia for the Doctor's exam, or the prelude and triple fugue as the Doctor and Captain hint at Marie's infidelity.Template:Sfn

Büchner repeats short phrases as motifs in the text, like "Template:Lang" (a good person), "Template:Lang" (we poor folk), and "Template:Lang" (one after the other). He develops some ideas into short, recurring sections, whether from Bible quotes or, like Wozzeck's visions, from Apocrypha. Berg follows this in the music. Variation techniques dominate act 3, monomaniacally focusing on a pitch (BTemplate:Music, scene 2), rhythm (scene 3), hexachord (scene 4), key (D minor, interlude), or duration (a perpetuum mobile of quavers, scene 5). He knew few, if any, would hear all these structures but used their patterns and the play's linked scenes and repeated lines to structure musicodramatic repetition.Template:Sfn

Fritz Mahler summarizes the opera's form:Template:Sfn

Drama		Music
Expositions	Act 1	Five character pieces
Wozzeck and the Captain	Scene 1	Suite
Wozzeck and Andres	Scene 2	Rhapsody
Wozzeck and Marie	Scene 3	Military march and Lullaby
Wozzeck and the Doctor	Scene 4	Passacaglia
Marie and the Drum Major	Scene 5	Andante affettuoso (quasi Rondo)
Dramatic development	Act 2	Symphony in five movements
Marie and her son, then Wozzeck	Scene 1	Sonata movement
The Captain and the Doctor, then Wozzeck	Scene 2	Fantasia and fugue
Marie and Wozzeck	Scene 3	Largo
Garden of a tavern	Scene 4	Scherzo
Guard room in the barracks	Scene 5	Rondo con introduzione
Catastrophe and epilogue	Act 3	Six inventions
Marie and her son	Scene 1	Invention on a theme
Wozzeck kills Marie	Scene 2	Invention on a note (BTemplate:Music)
Tavern	Scene 3	Invention on a rhythm
Wozzeck drowns	Scene 4	Invention on a hexachord
	Interlude	Invention on a key (D minor)
Children playing	Scene 5	Invention on a regular quaver movement

Themes

Musical

Leitmotifs are given to characters like the Captain, Doctor, and Drum Major, whose music recurs when Marie muses on him. Wozzeck has two: one as he runs, and one languidly expressing his misery and helplessness. Marie's motifs convey sensuality, as when she accepts a pair of earrings from the Drum Major.

The central "anguish" motif, sung by Wozzeck (act 1, scene 1), traces a minor chord with an added major seventh:

Template:Block indent

As in his next opera, Lulu, an isolated C-major major triad signifies affection and money. In his Wozzeck Lecture, Berg joked, "How could the objectivity [[[:Template:Lang]]] of money ... be better represented?"Template:Sfn

The smallest leitmotif is the single pitch B, symbolizing the murder. Soft at the end of act 2, when Wozzeck, beaten, whispers "Template:Lang" (one after the other), it intensifies during the murder, expanding from unison B₃ into crescendoing octaves. Marie's last cry for help spans two octaves, B₅ down to B₃.

A pair of chords closes each act, oscillating into a blur.

Narrative

The plot depicts the militarism, callousness, social exploitation, and casual sadism of a small town.Template:Cn Transitions between day and night reflect cyclical wartime themes of life and death, as in Schoenberg's Template:Lang "Template:Lang" (referring to forlorn hope) or the popular soldiers' Template:Lang "Template:Lang".Template:Sfn Template:Efn

Idioms

Expressionism

Expressionist music evokes Wozzeck's and other characters' emotions and thought processes, especially his madness and alienation. Though largely atonal, it generally has some function in its voice leading and extended tonicizations, and there are tonal passages. Pitch and harmony structure the drama, with recurring pitch sets for continuity: the dyad B–F, a tritone, signifies Wozzeck and Marie's struggle and interpersonal tension, while the dyad BTemplate:Music–DTemplate:Music, a minor third, reflects Marie's bond with her son.

Berg adapted tonal juvenilia for Wozzeck. In Marie's Bible scene, he reworked a sonata fragment in F minor that has been called Schumannesque in its melancholy.Template:Sfn After Wozzeck's mad scene, Template:Lang ("Where is the knife?"; act 3, scene 4) comes an Template:Lang interlude adapted from a Mahlerian student piece in D minor; its climax is a loud, dominant-functioning aggregate sonority crescendoing into a statement of the "anguish" leitmotif (act 3, scene 5, mm. 364–365).Template:Sfnm

Other idioms

Folk song and popular dance idioms appear in the field and tavern scenes. Berg transforms a polka into a Template:Lang in the later tavern episode (act 3, scene 3). Its opening rhythm is a retrograde of a tango, alluding to Kraus's play Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1915–1922; The Last Days of Mankind), drafts of which appeared in Template:Ill by 1916.Template:Sfn Marie's orphan plays among children singing Template:Lang (like "Ring a Ring o' Roses") in the epilogue.

Berg's notes and sketches for Wozzeck (and for the march from Three Orchestra Pieces) mingled with fragments of military papers. Drafts include Austrian army bugle calls rendered atonal in the final score (act 1, scene 2). His war experience of sleeping in barracks informed his word painting of snoring soldiers (act 2, scene 5), which he described as "polyphonic breathing, gasping, and groaning ... the most peculiar chorus I've ever heard ... like some primeval music that wells up from the abysses of the soul".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Musicodramatic synopsis

Berg asserted a reciprocal relationship between the music and the drama. In an interview, Oskar Jancke asked whether "the text ... facilitates the understanding of your music", which he said "the public ... grappl[ing] with ... finds unfamiliar". Berg replied: "Yes, but also the reverse. The music also aids in understanding the poem. Basically I have done nothing more than to produce it on a higher level." The music, he added, "neutralize[s] the fragmentary character".Template:Sfn

Act 1

Scene 1 (Suite)

Wozzeck shaves the Captain, who orders him to go slow and lectures him on morality. Wozzeck dutifully replies, "Template:Lang" ("Yes sir, Captain"). The Captain scorns his illegitimate son. Wozzeck says it is hard to be good when you are poor, quoting Mark 10:14, Template:Lang ("Let the children come to me"). The Captain asks what he means. Growing agitated, Wozzeck cries that if the poor reached Heaven, "we'd all have to manufacture thunder!" to crackling, tumultuous music. Unnerved, the Captain concedes Wozzeck is "a decent man, only you think too much!"

Scene 2 (Rhapsody and Hunting Song)

Wozzeck and his fellow soldier Andres gather firewood at sunset. Andres sings a hunting song, while Wozzeck is terrified by visions. Calming down, he ominously murmurs that all is still, as if the world were dead. They must return before dark, Andres reminds him. As they do, a funeral march begins. It transforms as night falls and the scene segues.Template:Sfn

Scene 3 (March and Lullaby)

Morning brings a rowdy military band marching toward Marie's window.Template:Sfnm She has a wandering eye for the soldiers. Her neighbor Margret notices and teases her about it. Marie slams the window shut and sings a self-soothing lullaby to her son. Wozzeck arrives and shares not only his visions, but also his affection and money (C-major triad).Template:Sfn As he leaves in a hurry, Marie reminds him to look at their boy. She laments their poverty. He runs to the doctor.

Scene 4 (Passacaglia)

The harried but rational Doctor, whom Wozzeck hails as "Herr Coffin Nail",Template:Sfn scolds Wozzeck for disobeying medical orders (Wozzeck is part of a paid experiment requiring adherence to a restricted diet and urine collection). The Doctor is so angry that, to medically reassure himself, he takes his own pulse. Then Wozzeck's mental illness becomes apparent, and the Doctor is thrilled at the prospect of publishing a case report.

Scene 5 (Rondo)

Marie admires the Drum Major from her doorway. He makes advances. She briefly resists, then yields.

Act 2

Scene 1 (Sonata-Allegro)

Marie admires the Drum Major's gift (earrings) and puts her son to bed. Wozzeck arrives and asks about the earrings. Doubting that she found a matching pair, as she claims, he gives her money and leaves her wracked with guilt.

Scene 2 (Fantasia and Fugue on Three Themes)

Echoing the opening, the Captain urges the Doctor to slow down. The Doctor mocks him with dire diagnoses of his ailments. As Wozzeck passes, they hint at Marie's infidelity.

Scene 3 (Largo)

Wozzeck confronts Marie about her infidelity. She does not deny it. Enraged, he nearly strikes her. She stops him: "Better a knife in my belly than your hands on me". He repeats her words, thinking aloud.

Scene 4 (Scherzo)

Marie and the Drum Major dance in the tavern. Wozzeck watches. Soldiers sing a hunter's chorus. Andres notices him alone and asks why. A drunken Apprentice preaches. An Idiot stumbles toward him, crying, Template:Lang ("Joyful, ... but it reeks ... I smell blood!")

Scene 5 (Rondo)

At night in the barracks, soldiers snore. Unable to stop thinking about Marie, Wozzeck talks to Andres and prays. The Drum Major enters and humiliates Wozzeck with a beating. Roused, some watch. Wozzeck dissociates.

Act 3

Scene 1 (Invention on a Theme)

At night in her room, Marie reads the Bible and cries for mercy.

Scene 2 (Invention on a Single Note (B))

At a forest pond, Wozzeck stabs Marie as she tries to run, declaring that if he can't have her, no one can. A blood-red moon rises.

Scene 3 (Invention on a Rhythm)

Wozzeck and Margret dance in the tavern among others as he celebrates doom and the Devil's arrival.Template:Sfn He pulls her onto his lap, insults her, and demands she sing. Others see blood on him, raising alarm. He runs.

Scene 4 (Invention on a Hexachord)

Wozzeck frantically searches the pond for his knife. Paranoid and psychotic, he speaks to Marie, imagining the blood-red moon exposing him to the world. He drowns (possibly by suicide) in the red, moonlit water, which he sees as blood. The Captain and Doctor, walking slowly nearby, are disturbed by the sound of it and return to town.

Interlude (Invention on a Key (D minor))

This interlude provides some catharsis.Template:Sfnm

Scene 5 (Invention on an Eighth-Note moto perpetuo, quasi toccata)

The next morning, children play and sing in the sunny street outside Marie's door. News of her death spreads. They run to see her corpse. Marie's son appears unaffected by this, even when it is shouted at him. After some delay, he follows, oblivious.

Reception

Wozzeck is among the most renowned 20th-century modernist operas. John Deathridge called it "one of the undisputed masterpieces of modern opera".Template:Sfn Its dissonant, psychological idiom recalls Schoenberg's Erwartung,Template:Sfn and its tormented, outcast antihero Template:Sfn has prompted comparisons to operas with similar male title roles, such as Giuseppe Verdi's Macbeth and Nabucco, Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, and Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes.Template:Sfn Wozzeck has also been described as more "highbrow" than Grimes, sometimes polemically.Template:Sfn

Berg's critical engagement with militarism and war in Wozzeck faded from view as the work became a repertoire standard apart from its original context, not unlike Maurice Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin.Template:Sfn Publicly, Berg mostly focused on his music in Wozzeck but backed Alexander Landau's 1926 socialist view (Wozzeck's suffering is not his, but ours: we must act, not blame) and Template:Ill's 1929 view, from the Book of Job (Wozzeck as Job).Template:Sfn

Wozzeck, Paul Hindemith's Cardillac, Kurt Weill's Protagonist, and Ernst Krenek's Zwingburg and Der Sprung über den Schatten all premiered within a year of each other.Template:Sfn Berg's mixed-form opera has been compared to Cardillac, Ferruccio Busoni's Doktor Faust,Template:Sfn and Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos.Template:Sfn

Gurlitt's Wozzeck

Wozzeck's Vienna premiere also inspired Manfred Gurlitt.Template:Sfn Premiered four months after Berg's opera<ref name="Gurlitt"/> and also published by Universal Edition, Gurlitt's Wozzeck discomfited Berg.Template:Sfn They worked without any knowledge of each other,<ref name="Gurlitt">Template:Cite web</ref> and Gurlitt's work has remained in the shadow of Berg's.<ref name="Gurlitt"/> Examining Gurlitt's piano–vocal score, Berg found it "not bad or unoriginal" but a weak "broth ... even for Template:Lang [poor folks]". Gurlitt's leaner musical textures and polystylism align with Hindemith and Weill, with frequent, socially oriented use of the chorus. His opera may be closer to Büchner's original conception.Template:Sfn

Performance history

Wozzeck and Berg's strategy made him famous.Template:Sfnm

1921–23: Promotion, funding, and publication

Schoenberg saw Wozzeck's Template:Lang (short score) in 1921 and urged Universal Edition's Emil Hertzka to publish the imminent piano–vocal score by Berg's pupils (mostly Fritz Heinrich Klein but also Gottfried Kassowitz): "This is an opera! Genuine theater music! Everything is flawlessly done, as though Berg had never composed anything but theater music!"Template:Sfn

With funds from dedicatee Alma Mahler and a loan from May Keller, with whom his sister Smaragda then had a lesbian relationship,Template:Efn Berg paid Universal Edition to print private piano–vocal score copies in 1922. He sold few but sent many to critics, conductors, and theaters in early 1923.Template:Sfn In April, Die Musik published the lullaby with Template:Ill's rapt review: "It is in the form of the piece that the composer opens up new paths", "perhaps" to a "truly 'musical opera'".Template:Sfn

In exchange for Wozzeck, Universal Edition published Three Orchestra Pieces,Template:Sfn two of which (Template:Lang and Template:Lang) Webern debuted at Heinrich Jalowetz's and Template:Ill's "Austrian Music Week" in Berlin, drawing more press.Template:Sfnm<ref name="Moldenhauer and Moldenahuer 1978">Template:Cite book</ref>

1923–24: Scherchen premieres requested suite

When Gustav Havemann's Quartet played Berg's String Quartet at the 1923 Salzburg International Society for Contemporary Music festival, Hermann Scherchen asked for a Wozzeck suite. Berg gave him the march, lullaby, and Bible scene as Three Fragments for Voice and Orchestra from the Opera "Wozzeck". Intended for Berlin, Scherchen premiered them at Frankfurt's 1924 Template:Lang festival to acclaim.Template:Sfn

1925: Kleiber premieres Wozzeck

In late 1923, Berg had pianist Ernst Bachrich play Wozzeck excerpts for Berlin State Opera conductor Erich Kleiber in Vienna. Kleiber agreed to stage it. Universal Edition deemed this the best premiere offer.Template:Sfn Berg helped with staging and rehearsals. Many were held, and intendant Max von Schillings quit over a funding clash. The dress rehearsal drew music writers Paul Stefan from Vienna and Template:Ill from Prague, and composers including Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Adorno, and Stefan Wolpe.Template:Sfn

The 14 December 1925 premiere was a succès de scandale with some disruptions.<ref name="Walsh">Template:Harvnb</ref> Wozzeck achieved sustained expressive coherence despite its post-tonal musical language.Template:Sfn From Germany to London and New York, the press covered it at length.Template:Sfn

It was staged throughout Germany and Austria until Nazi Germany forbade "degenerate music".<ref name="Walsh"/>

1926: Protests at Czech Vojcek

In 1926, Otakar Ostrčil translated and led the Czech-language premiere of Wozzeck (Vojcek)Template:Sfn at Prague's National Theatre. Some "Czech Nationalists (virtually Nazis)" and "clerical lobbies" staged "purely political!" disruptions, Berg wrote Adorno: "To them I am the Berlin Jew Alban (Aaron?) Berg. Ostrčil bribed by the Russian Bolsheviks, the whole thing arranged by the 'Elders of Zion' etc."Template:Sfn

Antonín Šilhan wrote as much in Národní listy, and Template:Ill tied the opera's degeneracy to Jewish Bolshevism in Template:Ill, while Zdeněk Nejedlý mocked them, praising Wozzeck in Rudé právo. The Bohemian State Committee quickly banned it.<ref name="Locke 2008">Template:Cite journal</ref>Template:Sfnm Template:Efn

1927: Leningrad triumph and silence

In 1927, the Association for Contemporary Music, led by Nikolai Roslavets, staged Wozzeck at Leningrad's Mariinsky Theatre with Boris Asafyev's assistance,Template:Sfn Template:Ill conducting. Berg rode trains for about three days to attend the first performances and wrote journalist Soma Morgenstern that he was "celebrated [as] never ... before".Template:Sfn Here Wozzeck was, he continued, "a sensation ... in purely artistic, not political, terms".Template:Sfn He wired Helene "huge, tumultuous success", but reviews were mixed.Template:Sfn Dmitri Shostakovich attended all eight or nine performances.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>Template:Sfn

Amid Stalinism and worsening relations with Germany,Template:Sfn Wozzeck was not restaged in Russia until 2008.Template:Sfn

1929: Small-town arrangement and lectures

Oldenburgisches Staatstheater conductor Johannes Schüler proved that Wozzeck could succeed in a small-town theater with few rehearsals.Template:Sfn Berg and Erwin Stein cut sections from four to three musicians, yielding an orchestra of about 60.Template:Sfn<ref>"Alban Berg – Wozzeck – reduced version (Stein)", Universal Edition. Retrieved 12 November 2013.</ref> Berg first gave his "Lecture on Wozzeck" before this premiere, then in 11 more cities.Template:Sfn

1930: Viennese premiere and polemic

For Wozzeck's 1930 Austrian premiere, led by Vienna's Clemens Krauss, Berg gave tickets to friends, family, and his illegitimate daughter, Albine Wittula. While on better terms with Kleiber, Berg was pleased with Krauss's performance and touched by his opera's hometown success. Neue Freie Presse critic Julius Korngold wrote a polemical review:Template:Sfn Template:Blockquote In reply, Berg framed atonality as tradition-based harmonic innovation in a revised "Lecture on Wozzeck" ("The 'Atonal Opera'") he delivered at the Template:Lang (cultural association) and in a scripted Radio Wien talk "What Is Atonal?" with critic Julius Bistron.Template:Sfn

1931: Philadelphia and New York

Kleiber gave the Wozzeck Fragments their 1930 U.S. premiere at the New York Philharmonic, priming opera-goers. "Like Debussy in his Pelléas, Berg sought ... to probe the depths of consciousness", wrote Lawrence Gilman in the New York Herald Tribune.Template:Sfn

In 1931, the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company, working with the Curtis Institute of Music and Philadelphia Orchestra, staged the U.S. premiere of Wozzeck at Philadelphia's Metropolitan Opera House under Leopold Stokowski. Composer George Gershwin rode a special Wozzeck train from New York (he met Berg in 1928 via pianist Josefa Rosanska, called Josephine Rosensweet, Rudolf Kolisch's soon-to-be wife, and heard the Kolisch Quartet play Berg's Lyric Suite).Template:Sfn Calling the audience "brilliant", The New York Times's conservative critic Olin Downes wrote of an "astonishing" success and hailed Berg's word painting:Template:Sfn Template:Blockquote

Gilman agreed:Template:Sfn Template:Blockquote

Later that year, Stokowski's Philadelphia team staged Wozzeck's second U.S. premiere at New York's Metropolitan Opera, prompting another Downes review:Template:Sfn Template:Blockquote

1932–52: British broadcasts and premiere

In 1932, Henry Wood led the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a studio performance of the Wozzeck Fragments broadcast by Schoenberg pupil Edward Clark.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 1934, Adrian Boult conducted Wozzeck in a Queen's Hall concert performance also broadcast by Clark.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 1952, it was staged at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.<ref name="Walsh" />

Effect on Berg

File:Alban Berg en Maurice Corneil de Thoran (1932).jpg

Berg examines the score of Wozzeck with Brussels conductor Maurice Corneil de Thoran in 1932.

Wozzeck brought Berg financial comfort, mostly via royalties from performances in Central Europe,Template:Cn nearly until his 1935 death. He traveled not only to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Russia, and England, but also to Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, France, and Italy for performances of and talks about the opera.Template:Sfn

Busy attending to his success and enjoying independence, he declined vacations with Schoenberg and Schreker's offers of a Berlin Musikhochschule appointment.Template:Sfn He benefited from new relationships with Kleiber, Karl Böhm, and Gian Francesco Malipiero, and was appointed to the ADMV jury.Template:Sfn

Influence

Krenek

Berg and Krenek were acquainted at the Template:Lang of Alma Mahler,Template:Sfn a close friend of the BergsTemplate:Sfn and the wife or lover of Gustav Mahler, Kokoschka, and Werfel. Krenek studied Wozzeck's piano–vocal score and wrote Berg with praise and questions about vocal writing while working with Kokoschka on Orpheus und Eurydike in 1923.Template:Sfn Berg replied with examples from Wagner, Mozart, and Bach, stressing music adapted to singers' limits and his varied use of voice ("the supreme instrument") for dramatic effect.Template:Sfn

Krenek denied modeling Orpheus on Wozzeck, but Berg likely influenced him. Hans Hartleb saw parallels in the operas' violence and music of "fatalism, melancholy, and sensuality" for Eurydike and MarieTemplate:Sfn (whose role, he wrote, such music elevated).Template:Sfn

Berio

In Sinfonia (1968–69), Luciano Berio quotes the rising orchestral chords Berg uses in the word painting of Wozzeck's drowning.Template:Cn

Other arrangements

Besides Stein's arrangement,Template:Sfn John Rea's arrangement is for 22 singers and 21 instrumental parts.<ref name=UE>Template:Cite web</ref>

Recordings

Year	Wozzeck	Marie	Doktor	Hauptmann	Andres	Margret	Tambourmajor	Chorus and Orchestra	Conductor	Label / Notes
1949	Heinrich Nillius	Suzanne Danco	Otakar Kraus	Parry Jones	Frank Vroons	Mary Jarred	Walter Widdop	BBC Chorus and Symphony Orchestra	Adrian Boult	SOMM Ariadne (radio broadcast, Royal Albert Hall, issued 2023)
1951	Mack Harrell	Eileen Farrell	Ralph Herbert	Joseph Mordino (Soldat, Idiot)	David Lloyd	Edwina Eustis	Frederick Jagel	New York Philharmonic	Dimitri Mitropoulos	Columbia (FCX 157–158)
1955	Tito Gobbi	Dorothy Dow	Italo Tajo	Hugues Cuénod	Petre Munteanu	Maria Teresa Mandalari	Mirto Picchi	RAI Chorus and Symphony Orchestra of Rome	Nino Sanzogno	RAI / Myto (sung in Italian)
1965	Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau	Evelyn Lear	Karl-Christian Kohn	Gerhard Stolze	Fritz Wunderlich	Alice Oelke	Helmut Melchert	Chorus and Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin	Karl Böhm	Deutsche Grammophon – 1966 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording
1966	Walter Berry	Isabel Strauss	Karl Dönch	Albert Weikenmeier	Richard van Vrooman	Ingeborg Lasser	Fritz Uhl	Chorus and Orchestra of the Paris Opera	Pierre Boulez	Columbia – 1968 Grammy Award for Best Opera RecordingTemplate:Efn
1970	Toni Blankenheim	Sena Jurinac	Hans Sotin	Gerhard Unger	Peter Haage	Elisabeth Steiner	Richard Cassilly	Chorus of the Hamburg State Opera; Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra	Bruno Maderna	Arthaus Musik (directed by Rolf Liebermann)
1979	Eberhard Waechter	Anja Silja	Alexander Malta	Heinz Zednik	Horst Laubenthal	Gertrude Jahn	Hermann Winkler	Wiener Staatsopernchor; Vienna Philharmonic	Christoph von Dohnányi	Decca
1987	Franz Grundheber	Hildegard Behrens	Aage Haugland	Heinz Zednik	Philip Langridge	Anna Gonda	Template:Ill	Wiener Staatsopernchor; Vienna Philharmonic	Claudio Abbado	Deutsche Grammophon
1994	Franz Grundheber	Waltraud Meier	Günter von Kannen	Graham Clark	Endrik Wottrich	Dalia Schaechter	Mark Baker	Chorus and Children's Choir of the Deutsche Oper Berlin; Staatskapelle Berlin	Daniel Barenboim	Teldec
2003	Andrew Shore	Josephine Barstow	Clive Bailey	Stuart Kale	Peter Bronder	Jean Rigby	Alan Woodrow	Philharmonia Orchestra	Paul Daniel	Chandos (Chan 3094; sung in English)
2006	Franz Hawlata	Angela Denoke	Johann Tilli	Hubert Delamboye	Robert McPherson	Vivian Tierney	Reiner Goldberg	Vivaldi Chorus; IPSI; Petits Cantors de Catalunya; Orchestra & Chorus of the Gran Teatre del Liceu	Sebastian Weigle	Opus Arte (directed by Calixto Bieito)
2017	Roman Trekel	Anne Schwanewilms	Nathan Berg	Marc Molomot	Robert McPherson	Katherine Ciesinski	Gordon Gietz	Houston Grand Opera Children's Chorus; Shepherd School of Music; Houston Symphony	Hans Graf	Naxos

Film adaptation

The Hamburg State Opera's 1970 production was filmed at a deserted castle for director Template:Ill's 1972 TV film Wozzeck, broadcast on Norddeutscher Rundfunk.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

References

External links

Template:Alban Berg Template:Woyzeck Template:Second Viennese School Template:OlivierAward OperaProduction

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