Wozzeck

Template:Short description Template:Infobox opera Wozzeck () 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 destiny and nature, reflecting an understanding of humanity as shaped by universal forces.

A at its premiere, Wozzeck faced backlash but became a landmark of early 20th-century modernist opera. It helped establish the viability of large-scale atonal drama and exerted wide influence. It remains a cornerstone of the repertoire, celebrated for its narrative power and complex musical structure.

Background

Berg created the (literary opera) Wozzeck from 1914 to 1922, stalled by World War I.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 Berg's mentor Arnold Schoenberg advised, "let poetry lead you ... to music".Template:Sfn Schoenberg premiered some of Berg's aphoristic Altenberg Lieder (1911–1912), which caused the 1913 . He told Berg to write a suite of character pieces (the Three Pieces for Orchestra, 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 . 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. A Romantic in science like his patron Lorenz Oken, he treated taboo topics like sex, religion, and politics in literature and stressed characterization over narrative.Template:Sfn He had proto-MarxianTemplate: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

His work expresses a unity of opposites, or complements, from Hegel and Spinoza. 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]." 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).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 "" (free use of reason) and "" (free will) despite a medical history that included 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 KokoschkaTemplate:Efn and Emil Nolde, and poets Gottfried Benn, Rainer Maria Rilke,Template:Efn and Franz Werfel.Template:Sfn In expressionist German opera, Wozzeck followed Richard Strauss's Elektra and Schoenberg's Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand).Template:Sfn Schoenberg's Erwartung (Expectation) and Strauss's Salome had explored the grotesque in particular, 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 of the 1908 Vienna premiere of Paul Dukas's 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 (though he disliked Schreker's next opera, Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin).Template:Sfn At forums like the Café Museum, Berg met innovative, popular figures across styles, including the successful composer Erich Korngold and operetta composers 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 while keeping Büchner's jagged brutality and eerie realism.Template:Sfnm

Berg 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 the rights, so Berg retained his title. 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:SfnTemplate: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

1914–1922: History of composition process

1914–1916: Genesis amid war

On frugal (summer vacations), often 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 to compose Three Pieces for Orchestra. 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

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

Karl Kraus, 1913

Long fearing death from severe asthma, then a possibly allergy-related somatic symptom disorder, Berg was first deemed unfit by the Austro-Hungarian Army.Template:Sfnm His 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 "[M]y spirit would ... have broken", Berg 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 Pieces for Orchestra.Template:Sfn

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 monodramas such as Schoenberg's Erwartung and Glückliche Hand, and Strindberg's (Jacob Wrestles).Template:Sfnm Berg used musicodramatic ideas from Nacht (Nokturn), like snoring, in Wozzeck.Template:Sfn

As of February 1916, Berg was still sketching Wozzeck's outline, in four acts and 23 scenes.Template:Sfnm He wrote Helene of Austrian prisoners of war "imprisoned and starving in unheated stalls" under the AlliesTemplate: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

Their arms are crossed and tied behind ... then hoisted up on a tree so that the prisoner can only stand on his toes. When he can do that no more, he hangs until he faints from the pain. The barracks are atop a remote hill ... an hour up a path through a sea of dust and excrement. It is surrounded by pickets and barbed wire, and we can leave only on Sundays. The barracks outdo any description. Completely lice-ridden. [...] I'll have to tell you [more] in person.

Berg never saw combatTemplate:Sfn and served as a one-year volunteer () officer, including at the Imperial War Ministry—more likely via his brother Karl (Charly or Charley), also posted there, than Helene's possible nonmarital 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 while foraging mushrooms and hiking the mountains, lakes, and springs before reading himself to sleep at night. 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 a letter to Schoenberg that August.Template:Sfn Likely from his war service,Template:Sfn which in the same letter he called "slavery" that might go on "for years",Template:Sfn he saw more subjugation than poverty in Wozzeck. Asked what "inner point of contact" moved him to adapt the play in a 1930 interview, he said:

There was probably some natural relationship between me and this poem.Template:Efn ... Wozzeck is no simple "we-poor-people" play. What happened to Wozzeck can happen to any poor person, regardless of what type of clothing he wears. It can happen to anyone who is subjugated by others and cannot defend himself.

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 more fluid (motivic), Erwartung-inspired scenes. He gave the Captain and Doctor more (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 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 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 Three Pieces for Orchestra. Composer and pianist Erwin Schulhoff, a wounded veteran, played Berg's Piano Sonata in PragueTemplate:Sfn and hoped to premiere the orchestra pieces 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 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 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, and in this November 1919 letter, Berg sympathized while following Schoenberg in prioritizing Austro-German art music,Template:Sfn writing Schulhoff that a nation like GermanyTemplate:Efn might "deserve" its defeat for how it "treats its greatest".Template:SfnTemplate:Efn He blamed the war and its aftermath on capitalism, militarism, the press, and, uncharacteristically, Jews,Template:Sfn calling himself an "antimilitarist" like Kraus,Template:Sfn who polemically examined journalism and German–Jewish assimilation. Replying to Schulhoff, Berg 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, very near or perhaps including the Berghof, on Lake Ossiach outside VillachTemplate:Sfn

Berg gradually resisted his family's demands at the Berghof, writing Webern in March 1920 that he would need to earn income instead by editing, teaching, and writing, including for Template:Ill, the music journal of Universal Edition, though he might have even less time to compose.Template:Sfn That April, Johanna sold the landed property as he wished and as another family member had 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 unreliableTemplate: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 that 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).

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

File:Wozzeck (Alban Berg) - LABW - Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe 57-3 Nr. 5716.jpg

Townsfolk carousing with on-stage tavern musicians

The pit orchestra is large. The woodwind section has 4 flutes (all double piccolo), 4 oboes (4th doubles cor anglais), 4 clarinets in B♭ (1st doubles clarinet in A, 3rd and 4th double clarinet in E♭), 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 E♭, 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 has many wind instruments: flute (doubles piccolo), oboe and cor anglais, 2 clarinets (in E♭ 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.

Music

File:LinienkreiseSchema.png

In the music and its notation, Berg shapes Wozzeck's visions ("Lines and circles, strange figures, would that one could read them!") as cyclic figures spun from melodic lines.Template:Sfnm

As in much of his work, Berg navigates dialectics of convention and innovation, form and content, and structure and function in Wozzeck, often integrating and dissolving musical material cyclically.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn Small,Template:Sfnm fluid, sometimes purely rhythmic motifs recur in new contexts and undergo intricate transformations, helping to shape organic unity.Template:Sfnm He not only makes symbolic allusions to tonality, but also uses chord progressions freely amid an overall atonality typified by symmetrical interval cycles and sometimes densely layered rhythmic schemes.Template:Sfn Frequent tempo gradations and contrasts accrue formal and dramatic significance.Template:Sfn

Like earlier composers, Berg innovated on operatic tradition. Not wanting Wozzeck and his œuvre to seem Romantic or passé,Template:Sfnm he said he preferred strict musical form to "the Wagnerian recipe of 'through-composingTemplate:Single+double,Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn though the opera is Wagnerian in many respects (e.g., complexity, unmoored emotionality).Template:Sfnm His hybrid approach is an integrated number opera, where each act and scene has an old or abstract (absolute) musical form, yet often as a kind of program music or 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's text repeats phrases as motifs, like "" (a good person), "" (we poor folk), and "" (one after the other). He develops some ideas into short, recurring sections, whether from Bible quotes or, as in Wozzeck's visions, from Apocrypha. Berg does something similar throughout the music:Template:Sfn for example, variation techniques dominate act 3, focusing on some pitch (B, scene 2), rhythm (scene 3), hexachord (scene 4), tonality (final interlude), or duration (a perpetuum mobile of quavers, scene 5), while in act 1 they focus on a chord progression (scene 2) and a twelve-tone theme (scene 4).Template:Sfn He knew few, if any, would hear all these structures, but he used their patterns plus the play's linked scenes and repeated lines to shape musicodramatic repetition.Template:Sfn

Berg adopted Franzos's overall dramatic structure (exposition, development, catastrophe),Template:Sfn which Fritz Mahler summarizes: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 single note
Tavern	Scene 3	Invention on a rhythm
Wozzeck drowns	Scene 4	Invention on a hexachord
	Interlude	Invention on a tonality
Children playing	Scene 5	Invention on a regular quaver movement

A quasi-cadential gesture closes each act, where it would be "distinctly evident", Berg said, that "the circle of harmony comes full close", realized in an oscillation of blurred sonorities derived from two structural chords. The combined eight-pitch set of these chords, when transposed or inverted, can span the whole chromatic. Many scholars note that Berg seems to draw both harmony and melody from transformations of this set, often forming isomorphic figures built from whole-tone segments varied by semitone placement.Template:Sfnm

<score sound="1">

\new PianoStaff <<

 \new Staff = "treble" {
   \relative c' {
     \clef treble \omit Staff.TimeSignature
     \override Stem.transparent = ##t
     <ees ges b>1
     <f a des>1
   }
 }
 \new Staff = "bass" {
   \relative c {
     \clef bass \omit Staff.TimeSignature
     \override Stem.transparent = ##t
     <g d' a'>1
     <g d' b'>1
   }
 }

>>

</score>

Structural chords in WozzeckTemplate:Sfn

But in Wozzeck, unlike in the athematic (motivic) Clarinet Pieces (1913), Berg integrates harmony with thematic material to articulate larger structures and convey expression.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn For example, he repeatedly uses the low-register fifth G–D as a stabilizing pedal point that links Marie and the Drum Major and imparts brief tonal grounding to otherwise nontonal passages.Template:Sfnm The tritone B–F fatefully recurs at the curtain and throughout to signify Wozzeck's torment, especially tension with Marie and, to a lesser extent, the Captain.Template:Sfnm

At the same time, Berg uses such focal pitches and often register for frame of referenceTemplate:Sfn and added meaning.Template:Sfn For example, the single pitch B symbolizes the murderTemplate:Sfn and dominates that scene.Template:Sfn Soft at the end of act 2, when Wozzeck, beaten, whispers "" (one after the other),Template:Sfn B crescendos repeatedlyTemplate:Sfn and expands from unison B₃ into octaves:Template:Sfn Marie's last cry ("!", or "Help!") spans two, from B₅ to B₃.Template:Sfn (As B is here, so is F a pedal in Wozzeck's death scene.)Template:Sfn

Leitmotifs are assigned to the Captain, Doctor, and Drum Major, whose music recurs when Marie muses on him. Wozzeck has two: one as he hurriedly enters and exits, 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 "anguish" motif, sung by Wozzeck (act 1, scene 1), traces a minor chord with an added major seventh:

Berg regularly combines all of these elements musicodramatically. For example, when Wozzeck confronts Marie in act 2, scene 1, fragments of the Drum Major's motifs sound over a repeated G–A bass figure adapted from Wozzeck's misery motif, and Marie's replies recall the rowdy march scene over a G–D–A pedal.Template:Sfn

Altered idioms

Altered idioms and Expressionist music convey Wozzeck's (and others') emotions and thought processes, especially his madness and alienation. Folk song and popular dance idioms appear in the field and tavern scenes. Berg transforms a polka into a 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 (like "Ring a Ring o' Roses") in the epilogue.

Berg's notes and sketches for Wozzeck (and for the march from Three Pieces for Orchestra) 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 called "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".

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 The final interlude is perhaps from a 1909 piano piece for Helene or a planned 1912 symphony on Honoré de Balzac's 1834 novel Séraphîta.Template:Sfn

Musicodramatic synopsis

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

Berg asserted a reciprocal relationship between the music and the drama. In a 1930 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

There is no overture, only a brief symbolic introduction (mm. 1–3). The opening D-minor tone cluster crescendos softly in the strings, collapsing in glissandi to a more compact A♭-minor cluster, the verticalized leitmotif associated with Wozzeck's hurried entrances and exits.Template:Efn The whole chromatic is completed, with the eleventh pitch in the oboe and the twelfth in the bassoon.Template:Sfn

File:Wozzeck (Alban Berg) - LABW - Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe 57-3 Nr. 5717.jpg

The Captain lectures Wozzeck as wind blows outside.Template:Sfnm

Scene 1 (Suite) unfolds in episodes of obbligato part-writing. A wind quintet melodically suggests shifting, ambiguous harmonies as the curtain rises (m. 4) and the prelude begins:Template:Sfnm Wozzeck shaves the Captain, assenting in monotone to orders to go "slowly! One thing after the other!"Template:Sfnm In the stately pavane, the Captain ruminates on eternity in analogy to a mill wheel, painted with eight descending fourths (or the circle of fifths).Template:Sfnm He begins to rhythmically mock Wozzeck's assents in the manner of a verbal taunt to the viola cadenza.Template:Sfn

Wozzeck is a "good man" but has "no sense of morality", the Captain sings to the contrabassoon cadenza.Template:Sfnm As winds imitate a church pipe organ, he scorns Wozzeck's nonmarital son in falsetto.Template:Sfn Wozzeck quotes Mark 10:14 in double variations. In the air, he sings over expressive diminished seventh chords, which span the whole chromatic to underline his universal claim: morality is hard for "we poor folk", who, like the Captain, are only "flesh and blood".Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn If they reached Heaven, he cries, "we'd all have to manufacture thunder!" to accented triads that also span the whole chromatic.Template:Sfnm

Unnerved, the Captain again says Wozzeck is a "good man" who "think[s] too much!", dismissing him with another "go slowly", set to the prelude in reverse.Template:Sfnm In a brief interlude, this material is transformed, building to climax as the curtain rises again.Template:Sfn

Scene 2 (Rhapsody and Hunting Song)

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 \new Staff = "treble" {
   \relative c' {
     \clef treble \omit Staff.TimeSignature
     \override Stem.transparent = ##t
     <des ees aes>
     <c f b>
     <e b' dis>
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 \new Staff = "bass" {
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     <f a' \parenthesize c>
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>>

</score>

Rhapsody chords gravitate to C.Template:Sfn

In the rhapsody on three chords evoking tonic, dominant, and subdominant, Wozzeck and fellow soldier Andres gather firewood at sunset.Template:Sfn "This place is accursed!" says Wozzeck repeatedly,Template:Sfn fearing its toadstools (poisonous mushrooms)Template:Sfn and recounting a tale of someone who died three days and nights after finding a severed head there.Template:Sfn As a foil,Template:Sfn this alternates with strophes of Andres's rustic Template:Ill (hunting song) in Template:Time signature, sung on the first two chords as if in G major (increasingly off-key as he becomes uneasy).Template:Sfnm Wozzeck describes a hollow Earth, a firestorm, and a "crashing noise coming down, like trumpets".Template:Sfnm "Are you mad?", Andres asks. All is still, as if the world were dead, Wozzeck murmurs as drums are heard and bugles signal from town. Andres urges they leave before dark.Template:Sfn

The music segues as the scene changes: clarinets imitate distant bugles, the curtain falls,Template:Sfn and a funeral march begins as they retreat,Template:Sfn descending in a lament bass from C to F.Template:Sfn This march is transformed when a military band nears as the curtain rises.Template:Sfn

Scene 3 (March and Lullaby)

This rowdy band marches toward Marie's window,Template:Sfnm and she joins in song (an altered melody from Mahler's "Revelge").Template:Sfnm Across the street, her neighbor Margret notices her wandering eye for the soldiers and teases her about it. Marie slams the window shut, quieting the march. Her music of open fourths and fifths begins: she sings a self-soothing lullaby to her son. She waits for Wozzeck, entranced, to an ostinato (her "waiting" music), which ends on B–F as he knocks on her window. He arrives and shares his visions of the heavens to sunset music (mm. 435–6 reprises mm. 289–93 from scene 2).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.

The segue develops Marie's motif, the rhapsody chords, and a reminiscence motif from the rowdy military music into a twelve-tone figure.Template:Sfn

Scene 4 (Passacaglia)

This figure is the passacaglia theme, with 21 variations in three sections. It is a golden afternoon.Template:Sfn Wozzeck calls the Doctor "Herr Coffin Nail",Template:Sfn and the Doctor scolds him for breaking the paid experimental diet and urine-collection protocol (he cannot resist the urge to urinate). The Doctor is so angry that, to medically reassure himself, he takes his own pulse to music at ♩= 60. Midway, Wozzeck mentions Marie and shares his field visions with the doctor, including the toadstool constellations mirrored in music. In the last section, the Doctor, set to his motif and a waltz melody, is excited to publish a case report. His diagnosis of Wozzeck's mental illness ("") is set to the horn music from the Captain's ruminations on time, expanding in an ironic comment on the three's obsessions, with the verticalized quartal eternity motif marking the Doctor's exclamation about his own theories. Then he suddenly calms and demands to medically examine Wozzeck.Template:Sfn

As a brief interlude, the passacaglia theme fragments and yields to music from the rowdy march.Template:Sfn

Scene 5 (Rondo)

It is evening outside Marie's house.Template:Sfn She admires the Drum Major from her doorway. The military music continues. He makes advances. She briefly struggles to resist him physically, then yields to his seduction and lets him in as the curtain falls with two oscillating chords.Template:Sfn

Act 2

Scene 1 (Sonata-Allegro)

The curtain rises with two oscillating chords. In her room the next morning, Marie wears the Drum Major's gift of earrings to admire herself in a bit of broken mirror, set to a motif as the exposition's first subject. In the transition, her son stirs awake on her lap. She grimly transforms the lullaby as the second subject, singing of "gypsies" taking children who will not sleep. He hides his face in the coda. In the repeat, Marie returns to the mirror until he stirs again, and she uses shadowgraphy to threaten him with the Sandman. This time in the coda, Wozzeck enters unseen,Template:Sfn startling Marie, who tries to hide her earrings in the development. He doubts she found a matching pair, as she claims.Template:Sfn A plain C-major triad marks his affectionate gift of money,Template:Sfn and he leaves. In the recapitulation, she is wracked with guilt as she reconsiders the Drum Major and his gift.Template:Sfn

File:Wozzeck (Alban Berg) - LABW - Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe 57-3 Nr. 5719.jpg

Wozzeck gives Marie money.

The curtain falls with a C-major glissando in the recapitulation, which, without voices, serves as this interlude.Template:Sfn

Scene 2 (Fantasia and Fugue on Three Themes)

The curtain rises on a new day with a C-major scale on harp. On the street, the Captain tries to speak with the Doctor, who says he "must hurry" to the expanding obsession motif. "A good man takes his time", says the Captain as the opening oboe theme returns.Template:Sfn Breathlessly chasing, the Captain receives a medical assessment by turns mocking ("bloated, fat") and dire (risk of "apoplexia cerebria", or stroke) to the waltz. In the triple fugue, their leitmotifs (Captain, then Doctor) join a version of Wozzeck's coda music as it dawns on him that they are hinting at the love triangle.Template:Sfn

A slow chamber-orchestra interlude hints at the next scene's music.Template:Sfn

Scene 3 (Largo)

It is overcast. Wozzeck arrives to confront Marie at her door to music scored like Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1. She halfheartedly denies it amid rowdy military music. Enraged, he nearly strikes her. "Don't touch me", she cries to music echoing her struggle with the Drum Major. "Better a knife in my heart", she moralizes to a chromatic wedge symbolizing the knife, "than dare to lay a hand on me". Struck by the suggestion, Wozzeck flees.Template:Sfn

File:Wozzeck (Alban Berg) - LABW - Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe 57-3 Nr. 5718.jpg

Wozzeck gazes at Marie and makes a fist.

The prior interlude's undulating music reverses into the next scene's slow .Template:Sfn

Scene 4 (Scherzo with two trios)

Two novices sing drunken solos for patrons at a (Viennese garden tavern). Rowdy seduction music recurs in her waltz with the Drum Major as Wozzeck watches. A hunter's chorus sung by soldiers, then another song from Andres, and finally a drunken sermon interrupt. The band resumes, but an Idiot walks into Wozzeck, slurring, "Everyone is happy, but it stinks of blood". Wozzeck dissociates.Template:Sfn

Erratic dance music accelerates past the curtain fall, halting as a men's chorus is heard in a faint vocalise of the rhapsody chords.Template:Sfn

Scene 5 (Introduction and rondo)

This strange chorus, the curtain slowly reveals, is soldiers snoring in a guardhouse barracks. Wozzeck tosses and turns, haunted by thoughts of Marie and the Drum Major dancing. He seems to hear the tavern songs outside, set to music from the hollow Earth. After seeing the knife in a vision, he prays, set to the field scene music. But the drunken Drum Major comes boasting and fights him to music from Marie's struggle. Wozzeck falls as oscillating music fades to a final low B on harp.Template:Sfn

Act 3

Scene 1 (Invention on a theme)

Wracked with guilt, Marie reads the Bible by candlelight, including the pericope of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery. Her son clings to her, so she tells him a fairy tale before turning to a passage on Mary Magdalene.Template:Sfn

This theme develops and fades to a chilling harp and celesta arpeggio reintroducing the fateful pitch B.Template:Sfn

Scene 2 (Invention on a single note (B))

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

File:Wozzeck (Alban Berg) - LABW - Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe 57-3 Nr. 5712.jpg

Wozzeck gazes at Marie's body.

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)

In a mad scene, 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.

D minor has been prepared at length: the altered chord closing the rhythmic invention (m. 219) yielded the hexachord (m. 220), transposed down (m. 302) before shifting into tonality.Template:Sfn

Interlude (Invention on a tonality)

The final interlude, a catharsis, opens forcefully in D minor with whole tones (m. 320). It modulates to F major, followed by a section amassing Wozzeck's motifs. At the climax (m. 364), a fully chromatic dominant sonority, built from three superimposed 3-cycles, crescendos into the "anguish" motifTemplate:Sfn as the harmony resolves into tonal closure back in D minor (m. 370).Template:Sfn

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   \relative c' {
     \clef treble \omit Staff.TimeSignature
     \override Stem.transparent = ##t
     <f a d e>1^\markup { \teeny "m. 219" }
     <cis e gis ees' f>1^\markup { \teeny "m. 220" }
     <ees f>1^\markup { \teeny "m. 302" }
     <d e>1^\markup { \teeny "m. 320" }
     <d e>1^\markup { \teeny "m. 370" }
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 \new Staff = "bass" {
   \relative c' {
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     1
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     <a d f a>1
     <d, a' f' a>1
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>> </score>

Scene 5 (Invention on an eighth-note moto perpetuo, quasi toccata)

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

Reception

Wozzeck is among the most renowned 20th-century modernist operas, holding a position like that of Tristan und Isolde in the 19th century.Template:Sfn John Deathridge called it "one of the undisputed masterpieces of modern opera".Template:Sfn Audiences have long responded to its emotional force and elements of post-romanticism,Template:Sfn and it has captivated musicians as a work that rewards musical analysis.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn Its dissonant, psychological idiom recalls Schoenberg's Erwartung,Template:Sfn and its tormented, outcast antiheroTemplate: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:SfnTemplate:Efn Its hybrid form has been compared to that of Paul Hindemith's Cardillac, Ferruccio Busoni's Doktor Faust,Template:Sfn and Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos.Template:Sfn

Berg's critical engagement with militarism and war receded as Wozzeck became a repertoire standard apart from its original context, not unlike Maurice Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin.Template:Sfn Publicly, he mostly focused on the music but backed Alexander Landau's 1926 socialist analysis (arguing that Wozzeck's suffering is collective and calls for action, not blame).Template:Sfn However, the opera's social topicality may have always been somewhat contextual, allowing it function critically in a manner immanent to its reception.Template:Sfn Berg also backed Template:Ill's 1929 reading of Wozzeck as JobTemplate:Sfn and, influenced by Kraus, Strindberg, and Otto Weininger, studied his dramatic figures as archetypes (as in Lulu), even considering an unrealized operatic trilogy: Wozzeck, the servant; Vincent (van Gogh), the friend (of Gauguin); and Wolfgang (Amadeus Mozart), the master.Template:Sfn

Performance history

Wozzeck, through Berg's promotional and musicodramatic strategies, made him famous.Template:Sfnm After its 1925 premiere, which took place within a year of Cardillac, Kurt Weill's Protagonist, and Ernst Krenek's Zwingburg and Der Sprung über den Schatten,Template:Sfn it was produced 27 times, especially in Germany and Austria, until January 1933. Then Nazi Germany suppressed "degenerate music".

1921–1925: Promotion, publication, and premiere

Schoenberg saw Wozzeck's (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

That 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 operaTemplate:Single+doubleTemplate:Sfn (Wozzeck was not a "conventional 'music dramaTemplate:Single+double, Klein wrote in Anbruch, but had a "new kind of structure" with "all the forms of absolute music" and a "formal musical development".Template:SfnTemplate:Efn) Then, in exchange for Wozzeck, Universal Edition published Three Pieces for Orchestra.Template:Sfn Webern debuted two ( and ) at Heinrich Jalowetz's and Template:Ill's "Austrian Music Week" that summer in Berlin, drawing more press.Template:Sfnm

Also that summer, when Gustav Havemann's Quartet played Berg's String Quartet at the 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 FragmentsTemplate:Efn for Voice and Orchestra from the Opera "Wozzeck". In late 1923, Berg had pianist Ernst Bachrich play Wozzeck excerpts for conductor Erich Kleiber, who was visiting Vienna. Kleiber agreed to stage it at the Berlin State Opera. Universal Edition deemed this the best premiere offer. Scherchen premiered the Fragments, intended for Berlin, to acclaim at Frankfurt's 1924 festival,Template:Sfn inspiring Adorno to study composition with Berg.

File:Wozzeck poster 1925 (1).jpg

Premiere placard

Berg helped with staging and rehearsals in Berlin.Template:Sfn There were at least 137,Template:Sfn and Berlin State Opera manager Max von Schillings quit over a funding clash.Template:Sfn Wozzeck was regarded as the first full-scale atonal opera.Template:Sfn Many music writers, including Vienna's Paul Stefan and Prague's Template:Ill, and composers, including Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Adorno, and Stefan Wolpe, attended the dress rehearsal.Template:Sfn The 14 December 1925 premiere was a succès de scandale with some disruptions.

Wozzeck achieved sustained expressive coherence despite a post-tonal musical languageTemplate:Sfn and was covered internationally and at length.Template:Sfn In January 1927, Oslo's Berlin-based Dagbladet critic (and Francophile composer) Pauline Hall hailed it as "a new stage in German musical development, ... for the first time since Wagner". It showed independence from Schoenberg and was equal to Debussy's Pelléas, she added.

Gurlitt's Wozzeck

The Vienna premiere of Büchner's play also inspired Manfred Gurlitt.Template:Sfn Premiered four months after Berg's opera and also published by Universal Edition, Gurlitt's opera Wozzeck discomfited Berg.Template:Sfn They worked without any knowledge of each other. Examining Gurlitt's piano–vocal score, Berg found it "not bad or unoriginal" but a weak "broth ... even for [poor folks]".Template:Sfn 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 It has remained in the shadow of Berg's.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

1926: Vojcek

Writer Template:Ill translated Berg's Wozzeck,Template:Sfn and in 1926 conductor Otakar Ostrčil led its Czech-language premiere as Vojcek at Prague's National Theatre,Template:Sfn staged by dramatist Template:Ill.Template:Sfn In the "Chat with Alban Berg" published in the German-language Prager Presse on the day of the first performance (12 November), music and theater critic Oskar Baum wrote that criticism of the Schoenberg circle's work as abstract or "'dogmatic' ... evaporates [upon] contact with the music". Berg, reportedly in "high spirits" at the dress rehearsal, was quoted at length:Template:Sfn

[T]he translation ... comes so close to the original; it is more the ... spirited presentation ... as though the work in this language has found a more natural ... expression. In ... the soul of the folk, the essential sameness of the human soul in all its national varieties becomes most apparent. [T]he living archetype that Büchner's play evokes ... was most likely a Slavic type. More important ... is the ... musical conduct of this performance, ... which I ... admir[e].

During the third performance,Template:Sfn as Berg wrote Adorno, some "Czech Nationalists (virtually Nazis)" and "clerical lobbies" staged "purely political!" disruptions: "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.Template:SfnmTemplate:Efn The city government quickly banned it.Template:Sfn Ostrčil connected the affair to "a reactionary movement that has been asserted in our life".Template:Sfn

In a 1927 interview, Berg attributed the protests to "political issues ... supposedly connected to my artistic outlook".Template:Sfn In an interview printed in 1928, composer Leoš Janáček said that "wrong was seriously done to Berg", calling him a "dramatist of astonishing consequence, of deep truth". In the 1930 interview with Jancke, Berg remembered the deceased Janáček among those who backed him, saying that Prague's top circles and critics fought the ban. Czech nationalists, he recalled, had opposed him as an AustrianTemplate:Efn and for his work's supposed defeatism.Template:Sfn

1927: Leningrad

In 1927, the Association for Contemporary Music, spearheaded 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.Template:Sfn

1929–1930: Arrangement and lectures for regional cities

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 Berg first gave his "Lecture on Wozzeck" before this premiere, then in 11 more cities:Template:Sfn in the 1930 interview with Jancke, he said that after ten stagings here and eight in Essen, about ten other theaters planned it, including Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hagen, Lübeck, Stuttgart, Weimar, and Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, as the ADMV festival opera). When interviewed, Berg was in Aachen for Wozzeck rehearsals, following a performance of his Lyric Suite (alongside Schoenberg's music) there. Composer Béla Bartók, Jancke noted, had said Wozzeck showed contemporary art music's potential in regional 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.Template:Sfn Webern said he was "shaken to his depths", though he criticized the production as "insufficient". Some called it "art for art's sake" and "unsocial".Template:Sfn Neue Freie Presse critic Julius Korngold wrote a polemical review:Template:Sfn

If there is ... "atonal" music, it is ... a music that cannot be ... deduced given its fanatic attachment to chromaticism—in both vertical [harmonic] and horizontal [melodic] dimensions. ... [W]e have here "negative composing" ... with its conscious dethronement of the evolving tonal system and rejection of tonal relationships and a tonal center.

In reply, Berg framed atonality as tradition-based harmonic innovation in a revised "Lecture on Wozzeck" ("The 'Atonal OperaTemplate:Single+double) he delivered at the (cultural association) and in a scripted Radio Wien talk "What Is Atonal?" with critic Julius Bistron.Template:Sfn Following Schoenberg, he argued that music predating the common practice period entailed post-tonal possibilities, rejecting the label "atonal" as denoting loss rather than innovation. He saw his and Schoenberg's music as historically grounded in a long line of chromaticism, from Max Reger and Johannes Brahms to Franz Schubert and Mozart, preserving continuity with old forms, motivic development, loosely triadic elements, and the centrality of melody.

1930–1931: Philadelphia and New York

File:Emil Stumpp Erich Kleiber Staatsoper 1930.jpg

Conductor Erich Kleiber repeatedly championed Berg's music, including in the United States, and was lauded.Template:Sfnm

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 had met Berg in 1928 via pianist Josefa Rosanska (Josephine Rosensweet, Rudolf Kolisch's soon-to-be wife) when they went to Berg's home to hear 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

You may hear the military band approaching, the crackling and cutting of the wood for the captain's fire, feel the approach of darkness and find reflected in the instruments the sulphurous sky of the field scene, and the setting of the sun. Or you will feel the blinding, insane thought of murder in Wozzeck's brain, and may be conscious, with weird distinctness and psychology of effect, of bubbles rising into the pool into which Wozzeck's body has sunk. All ... synthesized and reflected as in a transparent mirror [...]. ... [T]his score ... is beautiful.

Gilman agreed:Template:Sfn

The layman, if he can accustom himself ... will find ... bitter and piercing loveliness, ... intensity, a compassionate wisdom [and] suffusing tenderness ... reveal[ing] Berg [as a] poet ... a pitiful humanitarian, even (let us whisper it!) a shameless romanticist—a social and spiritual rebel, no less than an aesthetic one.

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

[Berg] is Wozzeck himself, and we ... know Wozzeck's terrors of the strange things ... his premonitions which he cannot explain, of the evil that dogs him, his hallucinations, his murderous revolt. This is the psychological and emotional quality of the music.

1932–1934: British broadcasts

In 1932, Henry Wood led the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a studio performance of the Wozzeck Fragments broadcast by Schoenberg pupil Edward Clark. In 1934, Adrian Boult conducted Wozzeck in a Queen's Hall concert performance also broadcast by Clark.

Effect on Berg

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

Berg and Brussels conductor Maurice Corneil de Thoran examine Wozzeck's score in 1932.

Unlike Schoenberg or Webern, Berg was able to live on royalty payments for his music,Template:Sfn mostly from Wozzeck performances in Central Europe.Template:Sfn 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

1934–1950: Decline and suppression

Performances of Wozzeck declined and were suppressed under fascism, and inflation further harmed Berg's finances. Webern's engagement to conduct the Fragments in Florence was canceled in 1934.Template:Sfnm Soon after immigrating to the United States that year, Schoenberg helped Berg obtain funds to complete Lulu by persuading the Library of Congress to buy the holograph score of Wozzeck.Template:Sfn As a tribute following Berg's 1935 death, Webern intended to conduct the Fragments in Barcelona, where he was overwhelmed by the 1936 world premiere of Berg's Violin Concerto.Template:Sfn Conductor Tullio Serafin led the 1942 Italian premiere before leaving the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, and Naples' Teatro di San Carlo staged it in 1949–50.Template:Sfn

1952–2008: Revivals and further premieres

In 1952, the Royal Opera House gave Wozzeck its first British staging. The Vienna State Opera first revived it in the 1955–56 season, their first after World War II, led by Karl Böhm.Template:Sfn The Berlin State Opera reinstated Wozzeck,Template:Sfn and it gradually appeared across Germany: at the Staatstheater Augsburg,Template:Sfn the Staatstheater Braunschweig,Template:Sfn the Theater Dortmund (managed by Template:Ill),Template:Sfn the Theater Gießen,Template:Sfn the Staatsoper Hannover,Template:Sfn the Staatstheater Mainz (with László Anderkó as Wozzeck),Template:Sfn the Staatstheater Nürnberg,Template:Sfn the Theater Regensburg,Template:Sfn the Mainfranken Theater Würzburg,Template:Sfn and at Munich's Prinzregententheater led by Ferenc Fricsay.Template:Sfn The Finnish National Opera and Ballet staged it after its 1956 reorganization.Template:Sfn

In 1962, Paris's Théâtre des Champs-Élysées gave Wozzeck its first French staging.Template:Sfn The De Nederlandse Operastichting mounted it in its first season (1965–66), stage directed by Maurice Huisman.Template:Sfn In his debut that year, Herbert Graf stage directed Wozzeck's local premiere at the Grand Théâtre de Genève.Template:Sfn In Italy, Gian Carlo Menotti hired Template:Ill to stage it at Spoleto's Festival dei Due Mondi,Template:Sfn and Parma's Template:Ill staged it in 1965,Template:Sfn followed by the Teatro Comunale di Bologna in 1969Template:Sfn and Genoa's Teatro Carlo Felice in 1970 (after fascist suppression there).Template:Sfn The Nederlandse Reisopera added it to their repertoire in the 1970s,Template:Sfn as did Opera Australia after the Sydney Opera House opened.Template:Sfn

In the 1980s, Gerard Mortier stage directed both revivals at Brussels' La Monnaie,Template:Sfn and Parma's Teatro Regio mounted it in 1989.Template:Sfn In the 1990s, Paris's Théâtre du Châtelet,Template:Sfn the Opéra national de Montpellier,Template:Sfn the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino,Template:Sfn and Trieste's Teatro Lirico Giuseppe VerdiTemplate:Sfn presented Wozzeck, and Pierre Audi mounted it twice through the Dutch National Opera.Template:Sfn Menotti revived it at Spoleto's Teatro Caio Melisso in 1994,Template:Sfn Bologna revived it to poor attendance in 1995,Template:Sfn and Theater Saarbrücken produced it for Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg's 1995–96 season.Template:Sfn Wozzeck was restaged in Russia only in 2008Template:Sfn after decades of Stalinism and turbulent Germany–Russia relations.Template:Sfn

Influence

Krenek

File:Alma Mahler.jpg

Alma Mahler hosted the Bergs and Ernst Krenek at .Template:Sfnm

Berg and Krenek were acquainted at the of Alma Mahler,Template:Sfn who was 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

Shostakovich

The second scene of Shostakovich's opera The Nose (1927) likely parodies Wozzeck. Shaken to find a nose he fears he severed, Shostakovich's barber galops through friendly townsfolk by a river, set to melodic motifs recalling Berg's tavern polka, during which Wozzeck feigns friendliness with townsfolk after murdering Marie. The barber tosses the nose into the water, as Wozzeck does his knife into a pond. Rising and falling lines evoke its sinking, as they depict Wozzeck's drowning. A policeman sees. He interrogates in hysterical falsetto, with a high climax, laughter, and final deflation, as the Captain does in Wozzeck's first scene. The barber replies in a clipped, spoken manner, echoing Wozzeck's monotonous assents.

Others

Wozzeck was among Gershwin's influences and perhaps his model in writing the opera Porgy and Bess, which he reportedly "wanted to write like ... an American Wozzeck". It also influenced Luigi Dallapiccola,Template:Sfn who used the same tetrachord as Wozzeck's "wir arme Leut" motif in the climactic betrayal scene of the opera Il prigioniero (1944–1948).Template:Sfn The one-act opera C'est la guerre (1960–1961) by Template:Ill shows Wozzeck's influence in its taut Expressionism and ironic use of popular tunes.Template:Sfn

In later German opera, Wozzeck influenced the style of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten and Wolfgang Rihm's Jakob Lenz.Template:Sfn

In concert music, Luciano Berio quotes the rising orchestral chords Berg uses in the word painting of Wozzeck's drowning alongside other musical depictions of water in Sinfonia (1968–1969). Luigi Nono's concert fragments from his opera Al gran sole carico d'amore may follow the model of Berg's Wozzeck Fragments (and Lulu Symphony).

Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, in creating the 1979 musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, drew on Berg's portrayal of an antihero and tightly structured integration of music and drama.

Other arrangements

Besides Stein's arrangement,Template:Sfn John Rea's arrangement is for 22 singers and 21 instrumental parts.

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 Bayley	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.

See also

• The Hungarian-Austrian writer Andreas Latzko's 1917 novella (Homecoming) from Template:Ill (People in War) depicts a humiliated veteran, unable to marry and driven to murder.

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

• Adorno, Theodor W. and Alban Berg. 2005. Correspondence 1925–1935, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Template:ISBN. (Trans. of Briefwechsel 1925–1935. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997.)
• Alegant, Brian. 2010. The Twelve-tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola. Vol. 76, Eastman Studies in Music, sen. ed. Ralph P. Locke. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Template:ISBN (hbk).
• Barnouw, Dagmar. 1999. "Wiener Moderne and the Tensions of Modernism". Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second Viennese School, ed. Bryan R. Simms, 73–128. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. Template:ISBN.
• Beaumont, Antony. 2010. "Berg and the Orchestra". Alban Berg and His World, ed. Christopher Hailey, 133–162. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Template:ISBN (hbk). Template:ISBN (pbk).
• Busch, Regina. 2010. "A Descriptive Overview of Berg's Night/Nocturne". Alban Berg and His World, intro. Regina Busch, ed., trans, and cmt. Christopher Hailey, 91–132. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Template:ISBN (hbk). Template:ISBN (pbk).
• Deathridge, John. 2005. "Wagner and beyond". The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera, ed. Mervyn Cooke, 14–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Template:ISBN (hbk). Template:ISBN (pbk).
• Fisher, Burton D. 2000. Macbeth. Opera Journeys Mini Guide Series. Miami: Opera Journeys Publishing. Template:ISBN (pbk).
• Franklin, Peter. 2024. Britten Experienced: Modernism, Musicology, and Sentiment. London and New York: Routledge. Template:ISBN (hbk). Template:ISBN (ebk). Template:ISBN (pbk). .
• Template:Ill. 2020. Kokoschka: The Untimely Modernist, trans. Debra S. Marmor and Herbert A. Danner. London: Haus Publishing. Template:ISBN (ebk).
• Griffel, Margaret Ross. 2018. "A Brief History of Operas in German". Vol. 1, Operas in German: A Dictionary, ed. Margaret Ross Griffel, xv–xxvi. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Template:ISBN (ebk). Template:ISBN (hbk).
• Hailey, Christopher. 2010. "Berg's Worlds". Alban Berg and His World, ed. Christopher Hailey, 3–32. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Template:ISBN (hbk). Template:ISBN (pbk).
• Headlam, David J. 1996. The Music of Alban Berg. Composers of the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. Template:ISBN (hbk).
• Ho, Allan B. and Dmitry Feofanov. 2011, rev 2014. The Shostakovich Wars.
• Jarman, Douglas. 1989. Alban Berg: Wozzeck. Cambridge Opera Handbook Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Template:ISBN (hbk).
• Jarman, Douglas (ed.). 1989. The Berg Companion. New York: Macmillan. Template:ISBN (pbk).
• Jarman, Douglas. 2010. "'Remembrance of things that are to come': Some Reflections on Berg's Palindromes". Alban Berg and His World, ed. Christopher Hailey, 195–222. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Template:ISBN (hbk). Template:ISBN (pbk).
• John, Nicholas (ed.). 1990. Wozzeck – Alban Berg. English National Opera Guide Series, Vol. 42. London and New York: John Calder and Riverrun. Template:ISBN (pbk).
• Perle, George. 1980. The Operas of Alban Berg, Vol. I: Wozzeck. Berkeley: University of California Press. Template:ISBN.
• Shreffler, Anne C. 1999. "Anton Webern". Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second Viennese School, ed. Bryan R. Simms, 251–314. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. Template:ISBN (hbk).
• Schroeder, David. 1999. "Alban Berg". Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second Viennese School, ed. Bryan R. Simms, 185–250. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. Template:ISBN.
• Simms, Bryan R. 1999. "Introduction". Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second Viennese School, ed. Bryan R. Simms, xi–xiv. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. Template:ISBN.
• Simms, Bryan R. 1999. "Arnold Schoenberg". Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second Viennese School, ed. Bryan R. Simms, 129–184. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. Template:ISBN (hbk).
• Simms, Bryan R. and Charlotte Erwin. 2021. Berg. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Template:ISBN (hbk).
• Stewart, John Lincoln. 1991. Ernst Krenek: The Man and His Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Template:ISBN (hbk).
• Walsh, Stephen. 2001. "Alban Berg" and "Emil Petrovics". In The New Penguin Opera Guide, ed. Amanda Holden. New York: Penguin Putnam. Template:ISBN.

Further reading

• Bailey Puffett, Kathryn. 1997. "Berg's aphoristic pieces". The Cambridge Companion to Berg, ed. Anthony Pople, 83–110. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Template:ISBN.
• Bonds, Mark Edward (June 2020). Template:"'WozzeckTemplate:'s Worst Hours': Alban Berg's Presentation Copy of Wozzeck to Eduard Steuermann". Notes, 76(4), 527–534. JSTOR 27079692
• Deák, István. 1992. Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Template:ISBN.
• Judson, Pieter M. 1996. Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Template:ISBN.
• Mulej, Oskar. 2024. Liberalism after the Habsburg Monarchy, 1918–1935: National Liberal Heirs in the Czech Lands, Austria, and Slovenia. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan. Template:ISBN.
• "No Wives for Soldiers: Marriage Forbidden Under Proposed Austrian Law." The New York Times, 22 January, 1920.

External links

• Template:Sister-inline
• Wozzeck: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project
• Template:Trim Template:Replace on YouTube
• Photos of the Berg family, including at the Berghof
• Portrait of the opera in the online opera guide opera-inside.com