Wikipedia

Wozzeck

For other uses, see Wozzeck (disambiguation).
Wozzeck
Opera by Alban Berg
Poster from the 1974 Oldenburgisches Staatstheater production
LibrettistBerg
LanguageGerman
Based onWoyzeck
by Georg Büchner
Premiere
14 December 1925 (1925-12-14)
Berlin State Opera

Wozzeck (German pronunciation: [ˈvɔtsɛk]) 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 succès de scandale 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

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  • (left) Georg Büchner, illustration in an 1879 French edition of his complete works
  • (right) Plaque marking Wozzeck's composition at the present-day Alban Berg Villa in Trahütten

Berg created the Literaturoper (literary opera) Wozzeck from 1914 to 1922, stalled by World War I.[1][2] He had first pursued a literary career, writing lyrical and dramatic juvenilia, including after Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts.[3] But in 1904, he diaried that music was "a higher form of revelation".[4] Berg's mentor Arnold Schoenberg advised, "let poetry lead you ... to music".[5] Schoenberg premiered some of Berg's aphoristic Altenberg Lieder (1911–1912), which caused the 1913 Skandalkonzert. 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.[6]

Then Berg twice attended the May 1914 Vienna premiere of Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck (1836) at the Residenzbühne [de]. He recalled seeing Albert Steinrück as Wozzeck among visitors from the Munich Residenz Theatre and said he "immediately" decided to make it an opera.[7] 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).[8]

Büchner, Woyzeck, and Berg

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Büchner and Woyzeck

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Trained in biology and medicine,[9] Georg Büchner taught comparative anatomy at the University of Zurich.[10] A Romantic in science like his patron Lorenz Oken,[11] he treated taboo topics like sex, religion, and politics in literature[12] and stressed characterization over narrative.[9][13] He had proto-Marxian[14] 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 [...]."[15][16]

His work expresses a unity of opposites, or complements, from Hegel and Spinoza.[17] 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]."[18][19] 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).[20][21]

Woyzeck (1780–1824) of Leipzig

In Woyzeck, Büchner mixed the grotesque with tragicomedy.[22] He used case reports of romantic femicide, mainly physician Johann Christian August Clarus's on Johann Christian Woyzeck, a barber and military veteran,[23] published in a medical journal to which Büchner's brother contributed.[24] At the competency evaluation, Clarus reported that his patient had "freier Vernunftgebrauch" (free use of reason) and "Willensfreiheit" (free will) despite a medical history that included recurrent episodes of psychosis, leading to Woyzeck's 1821 conviction and 1824 beheading.[25] Büchner died of typhus in 1837, leaving an untitled, fragmentary script with shifting character names,[23] perhaps as an open drama [de].[26]

Toward Berg's Wozzeck

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Berg came from the same expressionist milieu, rooted in Symbolism with its exaltation of outcast artists,[a] as novelist Franz Kafka, painters Oskar Kokoschka[b] and Emil Nolde, and poets Gottfried Benn, Rainer Maria Rilke,[c] and Franz Werfel.[38] In expressionist German opera, Wozzeck followed Richard Strauss's Elektra and Schoenberg's Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand).[39] In particular, Schoenberg's Erwartung and Strauss's Salome had explored the grotesque, and Berg saw operatic potential in Büchner's mad murderer and dark social criticism.[40]

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.[41] 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".[42] He may have learned from Schreker's Der ferne Klang, having prepared its piano-vocal score in 1911[43] (though he disliked Schreker's next opera, Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin).[44] At forums like the Café Museum, Berg met innovative figures across styles, including popular composers Erich Korngold, Franz Lehár, and Oscar Straus, through Viennese coffee house culture.[45] 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 Die Ahnfrau [de]. As in Pelléas, Berg linked Wozzeck's scenes with short interludes,[46] while keeping Büchner's jagged brutality and eerie realism.[47]

Berg worked mainly from writer Paul Landau [de]'s Wozzeck–Lenz: Zwei Fragmente (Wozzeck and Lenz: Two Fragments; 1909, reprinted 1913; Insel–Verlag [de]), which mostly just resequenced Franzos's 26 scenes.[48] Theater director Arthur Rundt [de], whose scene cuts Berg mostly followed, had used it in 1914.[49] That year, scholar Hugo Bieber [de] tied the play to Clarus's Woyzeck.[50] In 1919, scholar Georg Witkowski issued a critical edition claiming Franzos's omissions, edits, and additions ruined Büchner's play.[51] 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).[52] 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, Helene [de].[53][d] Berg's epilogue was not Franzos's or Landau's final scene,[55] but it was more Franzos's invention than Büchner's.[56]

1914–22: History of composition process

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1914–1916: Genesis amid war

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Trahütten villa
Driveway
Half-timbered aspects

On frugal Sommerfrischen (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.[57] Then war erupted, and his patriotism was cooled by Karl Kraus's attack on "the cash register of world history".[58]

Karl Kraus, 1913

Long fearing death from severe asthma, then a possibly allergy-related somatic symptom disorder, Berg was first deemed unfit.[59] 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.[60] "[H]ad I been declared fit ... my 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.[61] In mid-1915, Berg was conscripted anyway and bought the play while finishing Three Pieces for Orchestra.[62]

That winter, he began another opera with the working title Nacht (Nokturn) (Night/Nocturne; 1915–1917, unfinished).[e] 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 film[f] 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 Jakob brottas (Jacob Wrestles).[65] Berg used musicodramatic ideas from Nacht (Nokturn), like snoring, in Wozzeck.[66]

As of February 1916, Berg was still sketching Wozzeck's outline, in four acts and 23 scenes.[67] He wrote Helene of Austrian prisoners of war "imprisoned and starving in unheated stalls" under the Allies[68] and was himself first assigned 30-hour guard-duty shifts in Vienna.[69] 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:[70]

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 combat[71] and served as a one-year volunteer (Einjährig-Freiwillige) 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.[72] In August, he wrote Helene: "For months I haven't done any work on Wozzeck. Everything suffocated, buried!"[73]

1917–1918: Resolve and state collapse

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In early 1917, Berg wrote playwright Erhard Buschbeck [de] that his two opera ideas were "equally old".[74] 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.[75] He marked 1917 as the symbolic year he committed to Wozzeck in a letter to Schoenberg that August.[76] Likely from his war service,[77] which in the same letter he called "slavery" that might go on "for years",[78] 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:[79]

There was probably some natural relationship between me and this poem.[g] ... 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.

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).[81] 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).[69] "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."[82] 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".[83] He planned to use traditional song forms and variations and to alternate thematic and more fluid, Erwartung-inspired scenes. He gave the Captain and Doctor more Sprechstimme (half-singing, half-speaking) roles, as in melodrama, later shifted to conventional singing ones.[84]

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.[85]

That year, Schoenberg hired him at the Society for Private Musical Performances to help with administration, rehearsals, music arrangements, and writing.[86] The Bergs caught Spanish flu that fall, and the pandemic worsened labor shortages and hunger,[h] both of which were prevalent amid the war and its aftermath.[88] His family's farm and country estate at Lake Ossiach, the Berghof,[89] faced nearby food riots (in Villach)[90] and business failure.[91] 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.[92] That November, Berg's military service ended with several armistices and Austro-Hungarian defeat. "I am again a person!", he told Buschbeck.[93]

1919–1922: Progress through war's aftermath

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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 Prague[94] and hoped to premiere the orchestra pieces there and in Dresden through the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.[95] In concert advertisements he sent to Berg for these "Progress Concerts", he tied the revolutions of 1917–1923 to a spiritual "revolution in art".[96]

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.[97] The government had instituted production quotas and resorted to confiscation for food rationing.[98] "[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.[99]

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,[100] writing Schulhoff that a nation like Germany[i] might "deserve" its defeat for how it "treats its greatest".[101][102][j] He blamed the war and its aftermath on capitalism, militarism, the press, and, uncharacteristically, Jews,[104] calling himself an "antimilitarist" like Kraus,[105] who polemically examined journalism and German–Jewish assimilation.[106] 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.[107]

A view of the village of St. Andrä, perhaps including the Berghof, on Lake Ossiach outside Villach[108]

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 Musikblätter des Anbruch [de], the music journal of Universal Edition, though he might have even less time to compose.[109] That April, Johanna sold the landed property as he wished and as another family member had advised.[110] 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.[111]

In 1921, nearing the Austrian hyperinflation, the Society closed,[112] and Johanna kept planning her family's future.[113] She had disparaged Helene's passive income from financial assets (in Austrian kronen) as miserly and unreliable[114] and worried that Berg might "live in penury" by componiererei (fooling around composing).[115] With dollars from her late son Herman's Florida estate, she funded New York trusts managed by Geo. Borgfeldt & Co. [de], a firm long tied to the family,[116] 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.[117] While polishing and orchestrating Wozzeck, Berg recalled that Schoenberg had "tried to take away all my pleasure in [the opera]".[118] In June 1922, he wrote Schoenberg that it was done.[119]

Composition

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Scoring

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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).[120]

Roles

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Roles, voice types, premiere cast
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

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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

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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[121]

In Wozzeck, like much of his work, Berg navigates dialectics of form and content, and structure and function, often integrating and dissolving musical material cyclically.[122][k] Small,[l] fluid, sometimes purely rhythmic motifs recur in new contexts and undergo intricate transformations, helping to shape organic unity.[124] 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.[125] Frequent tempo gradations and contrasts accrue formal and dramatic significance.[126]

Like earlier composers, Berg innovated on operatic tradition. Not wanting Wozzeck and his œuvre to seem Romantic or passé,[127] he said he preferred strict musical form to "the Wagnerian recipe of 'through-composing'",[128][m] though the opera is Wagnerian in many respects (e.g., complexity, unmoored emotionality).[130] 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.[131]

Büchner's text repeats phrases as motifs, like "ein guter Mensch" (a good person), "wir arme Leut" (we poor folk), and "eins nach dem andern" (one after the other). He develops some ideas into short, recurring sections, whether from Bible quotes or, like Wozzeck's visions, from Apocrypha. Berg does something similar throughout the music:[132] variation techniques dominate act 3, monomaniacally 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).[133] He knew few, if any, would hear all these structures but used their patterns and the play's linked scenes and repeated lines to shape musicodramatic repetition.[132]

Berg adopted Franzos's overall dramatic structure (exposition, development, catastrophe),[52] which Fritz Mahler summarizes:[134]

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.[135] But among the many devices unifying Wozzeck, harmony may function mainly to articulate structure and to convey expression.[136][n]

\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 } } >>
Structural chords in Wozzeck[138]

Motifs

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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:

\new Staff \with { \remove "Time_signature_engraver" \remove "Bar_engraver" } \relative c' { \clef bass r8 dis-- b--[ e,--] g4-- } \addlyrics { Wir ar- me Leut! }

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.[139] Berg 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.[140]

The smallest leitmotif, the single pitch B, symbolizes the murder. Soft at the end of act 2, when Wozzeck, beaten, whispers "einer nach dem andern" (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. 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 [Sachlichkeit] of money ... be better represented?"[141]

Altered idioms

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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 danse macabre 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 Die Fackel [de] by 1916.[142] Marie's orphan plays among children singing "Ringel, Ringel, Rosenkranz, Ringelreih'n" (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".[143]

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.[144] 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.[145]

Musicodramatic synopsis

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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 Lied "Der verlorene Haufen" (referring to forlorn hope) or the popular soldiers' Volkslied "Morgenrot".[146][o]

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".[148]

Act 1

[edit]

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.[p] The whole chromatic is completed, with the eleventh pitch in the oboe and the twelfth in the bassoon.[150]

The Captain lectures Wozzeck as wind blows outside[151]

Scene 1 (Suite) unfolds in episodes of obbligato parts. A wind quintet melodically suggests shifting, ambiguous harmonies as the curtain rises (m. 4) and the prelude begins:[152] Wozzeck is shaving the Captain, assenting in monotone to orders to go "slowly! One thing after the other!"[153] In the stately pavane, the Captain ruminates on eternity in analogy to a mill wheel, painted with a circle of fifths.[154] He calls Wozzeck a "good man" who has "no sense of morality" in the contrabassoon cadenza,[155] then scorns Wozzeck's nonmarital son in falsetto as winds imitate a church pipe organ.[156][q] Wozzeck quotes Mark 10:14 in double variations and sings over diminished sevenths in the air: it is hard for "we poor folk" to be good.[157] If they reached Heaven, he cries, "we'd all have to manufacture thunder!" to accented triads across the whole chromatic.[158] 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.[159]

In a brief interlude, this material is transformed, building to climax as the curtain rises again.[160]

Scene 2 (Rhapsody and Hunting Song)

\new PianoStaff << \new Staff = "treble" { \relative c' { \clef treble \omit Staff.TimeSignature \override Stem.transparent = ##t <des ees aes> <c f b> <e b' dis> } } \new Staff = "bass" { \relative c, { \clef bass \omit Staff.TimeSignature \override Stem.transparent = ##t <c e'> <ees ges'> <f a' \parenthesize c> } } >>
Rhapsody chords gravitate to C[161]

In the rhapsody on three chords evoking tonic, dominant, and subdominant,[162] Wozzeck and fellow soldier Andres gather firewood at sunset.[163] "This place is accursed!" says Wozzeck repeatedly,[164] fearing its toadstools (poisonous mushrooms)[165] and recounting a tale of someone who died three days and nights after finding a severed head there.[166] As a foil,[167] this alternates with strophes of Andres's rustic Jagdlied  [de] (hunting song) in 6
8, sung on the first two chords as if in G major (increasingly off-key as he becomes uneasy).[168][169] Wozzeck describes a hollow Earth, a firestorm, and a "crashing noise coming down, like trumpets".[170] "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.[171]

The music segues as the scene changes: clarinets imitate distant bugles, the curtain falls,[165] and a funeral march begins as they retreat,[171] descending in a lament bass from C to F.[172] This march is transformed when a military band nears as the curtain rises.[171]

Wozzeck gives Marie money

Scene 3 (March and Lullaby)

This rowdy band marches toward Marie's window,[173] and she joins in song (with an altered melody from Mahler's "Revelge").[174] 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 to an ostinato, her "waiting music", entranced. He arrives and shares his visions.[175] A C-major triad marks his providing money and affection.[176] 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 stern, rational Doctor, whom Wozzeck hails as "Herr Coffin Nail",[176] 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

[edit]
Wozzeck gazes at Marie

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.

Folks carouse in the tavern

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, "Lustig, ... aber es riecht ... Ich riech Blut!" ("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

[edit]

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.

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.[177] 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.[178]

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" motif[179] as the harmony resolves into tonal closure back in D minor (m. 370).[178]

\new PianoStaff << \new Staff = "treble" { \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" } } } \new Staff = "bass" { \relative c' { \clef bass \omit Staff.TimeSignature \override Stem.transparent = ##t <b c>1 <bes>1 <bes, des fes aes>1 <a d f a>1 <d, a' f' a>1 } } >>

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 nonmarital son appears unaffected, even when it is shouted at him. After some delay, he follows, oblivious and now an orphan.

Reception

[edit]

Wozzeck is among the most renowned 20th-century modernist operas, holding a position like that of Tristan und Isolde in the prior century.[180] John Deathridge called it "one of the undisputed masterpieces of modern opera".[181] Its dissonant, psychological idiom recalls Schoenberg's Erwartung,[182] and its tormented, outcast antihero[183] 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.[184][r] Audiences have long responded to its emotional force and elements of post-romanticism,[186] and it has captivated musicians as a work that rewards musical analysis.[187][s]

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.[188] Publicly, Berg mostly focused on his music in the opera but backed Alexander Landau's 1926 socialist view (Wozzeck's suffering is not his, but ours: we must act, not blame) and Otto Brües [de]'s 1929 view, from the Book of Job (Wozzeck as Job).[189] 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.[190] Its hybrid form has been compared to that of Cardillac, Ferruccio Busoni's Doktor Faust,[191] and Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos.[192]

Gurlitt's Wozzeck

[edit]

Wozzeck's Vienna premiere also inspired Manfred Gurlitt.[193] Premiered four months after Berg's opera[194] and also published by Universal Edition, Gurlitt's Wozzeck discomfited Berg.[193] They worked without any knowledge of each other,[194] and Gurlitt's work has remained in the shadow of Berg's.[194] Examining Gurlitt's piano–vocal score, Berg found it "not bad or unoriginal" but a weak "broth ... even for arme Leut [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.[193]

Performance history

[edit]

Wozzeck and Berg's strategy made him famous.[195] The opera was produced 27 times after its 1925 premiere, until the Nazis suppressed it starting January 1933.[196]

1921–1925: Promotion, publication, and premiere

[edit]

Schoenberg saw Wozzeck's Particell (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!"[197] With funds from dedicatee Alma Mahler and a loan from May Keller, with whom his sister Smaragda then had a lesbian relationship,[t] 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.[200]

That April, Die Musik published the lullaby with Ernst Viebig [de]'s rapt review: "It is in the form of the piece that the composer opens up new paths", "perhaps" to a "truly 'musical opera'".[201] (Wozzeck was not a "conventional 'music drama'", Klein wrote in Anbruch, but had a "new kind of structure" with "all the forms of absolute music" and a "formal musical development".[202][u]) Then, in exchange for Wozzeck, Universal Edition published Three Pieces for Orchestra.[204] Webern debuted two (Präludium and Reigen) at Heinrich Jalowetz's and Paul Pella [de]'s "Austrian Music Week" that summer in Berlin, drawing more press.[205][206]

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 Fragments 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 Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (ADMV) festival,[207] prompting Adorno to study composition with Berg.[208]

Premiere placard

Berg helped with staging and rehearsals in Berlin.[209] There were at least 137,[210] and Berlin State Opera manager Max von Schillings quit over a funding clash.[209] Wozzeck was regarded as the first full-scale atonal opera.[211] Many music writers, including Vienna's Paul Stefan and Prague's Erich Steinhard [de], and composers, including Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Adorno, and Stefan Wolpe, attended the dress rehearsal.[209] The 14 December 1925 premiere was a succès de scandale with some disruptions.[212]

Wozzeck achieved sustained expressive coherence despite a post-tonal musical language[191] and was covered internationally and at length.[213] 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.[214] Wozzeck was staged throughout Germany and Austria until Nazi Germany suppressed "degenerate music".[212]

1926: Czech Vojcek

[edit]

In 1926, Otakar Ostrčil translated and led the Czech-language premiere of Wozzeck (Vojcek)[213] 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."[215] Antonín Šilhan wrote as much in Národní listy, and Emanuel Žak [cs] tied the opera's degeneracy to Jewish Bolshevism in Čech [cs], while Zdeněk Nejedlý mocked them, praising Wozzeck in Rudé právo. The Bohemian State Committee quickly banned it.[216][217][v] 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".[218]

1927: Leningrad

[edit]

In 1927, the Association for Contemporary Music, spearheaded by Nikolai Roslavets, staged Wozzeck at Leningrad's Mariinsky Theatre with Boris Asafyev's assistance,[219] Vladimir Dranishnikov [ru] 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".[220] Here Wozzeck was, he continued, "a sensation ... in purely artistic, not political, terms".[220] He wired Helene "huge, tumultuous success", but reviews were mixed.[221] Dmitri Shostakovich attended all eight or nine performances.[222][223] Amid Stalinism and worsening relations with Germany,[219] Wozzeck was not restaged in Russia until 2008.[224]

1929: Small-town arrangement and lectures

[edit]

Oldenburgisches Staatstheater conductor Johannes Schüler proved that Wozzeck could succeed in a small-town theater with few rehearsals.[220] Berg and Erwin Stein cut sections from four to three musicians, yielding an orchestra of about 60.[225][226] Berg first gave his "Lecture on Wozzeck" before this premiere, then in 11 more cities.[220]

1930: Viennese premiere and polemic

[edit]

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.[227] 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".[228] Neue Freie Presse critic Julius Korngold wrote a polemical review:[227]

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 Opera'") he delivered at the Kulturbund (cultural association) and in a scripted Radio Wien talk "What Is Atonal?" with critic Julius Bistron.[227] Following Schoenberg, he argued that music predating the common practice period entailed post-tonal possibilities, rejecting the label "atonal" as denoting loss rather than specifying innovations. He saw Schoenberg's music and his own as historically grounded in a long line of chromaticism through that of Max Reger and Johannes Brahms back to Franz Schubert and Mozart, preserving continuity with old forms, motivic development, loosely triadic elements, and the centrality of melody.[229]

1931: Philadelphia and New York

[edit]

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.[227]

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'd met Berg in 1928 via pianist Josefa Rosanska, called Josephine Rosensweet, who was Rudolf Kolisch's soon-to-be wife, when they went to Berg's home to hear the Kolisch Quartet play Berg's Lyric Suite).[230]

Calling the audience "brilliant", The New York Times's conservative critic Olin Downes wrote of an "astonishing" success and hailed Berg's word painting:[231]

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:[231]

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:[231]

[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.

1932–1952: British broadcasts and premiere

[edit]

In 1932, Henry Wood led the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a studio performance of the Wozzeck Fragments broadcast by Schoenberg pupil Edward Clark.[232] In 1934, Adrian Boult conducted Wozzeck in a Queen's Hall concert performance also broadcast by Clark.[233][234] In 1952, it was staged at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.[212]

Effect on Berg: success before suppression

[edit]
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,[235] mostly from Wozzeck performances in Central Europe.[236] 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.[236] Busy attending to his success and enjoying independence, he declined vacations with Schoenberg and Schreker's offers of a Berlin Musikhochschule appointment.[191] He benefited from new relationships with Kleiber, Karl Böhm, and Gian Francesco Malipiero, and was appointed to the ADMV jury.[237]

Performances 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.[238] 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.[239] As a tribute following Berg's 1935 death, Webern intended to conduct the Fragments in Barcelona, where he became overwhelmed at the 1936 world premiere of Berg's Violin Concerto.[240]

Influence

[edit]

Krenek

[edit]

Berg and Krenek were acquainted at the salons of Alma Mahler,[241] who was a close friend of the Bergs[242] (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.[241] 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.[243] 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 Marie[241] (whose role, he wrote, such music elevated).[244]

Shostakovich

[edit]

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 (the melodic motifs recall Berg's tavern polka, to 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 depict its sinking (paralleling Wozzeck's drowning). A policeman sees. He interrogates in hysterical falsetto, with a high climax, laughter, and final deflation (like Wozzeck's first scene). The barber replies in a clipped, spoken manner (echoing Wozzeck's monotonous assents).[245]

Others

[edit]

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".[246] It also influenced Luigi Dallapiccola,[247] who used the same tetrachord as Wozzeck's "wir arme Leut" motif in the climactic betrayal scene of the opera Il prigioniero (1944–1948).[248] The one-act opera C'est la guerre (1960–1961) by Emil Petrovics [hu] shows Wozzeck's influence in its taut Expressionism and ironic use of popular tunes.[249][250]

In later German opera, Wozzeck influenced the style of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten and Wolfgang Rihm's Jakob Lenz.[251]

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).[252] 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).[253]

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.[254]

Other arrangements

[edit]

Besides Stein's arrangement,[225] John Rea's arrangement is for 22 singers and 21 instrumental parts.[120]

Recordings

[edit]
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 Recording[w]
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 Walter Raffeiner [de] 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

[edit]

The Hamburg State Opera's 1970 production was filmed at a deserted castle for director Joachim Hess [de]'s 1972 TV film Wozzeck, broadcast on Norddeutscher Rundfunk.[255]

References

[edit]

Notes

[edit]
  1. ^ For example, Symbolist Stefan George's poetry was often set by the Second Viennese School.[27] Shreffler described his poems as "hyperexpressive", eliciting "equally vivid and extreme music".[28] They may have influenced Schoenberg's atonal turn in the String Quartet No. 2.[29] Webern set fourteen George texts, ten as atonal Lieder Opp. 3–4.[30] George translated Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, from which Berg took the hidden text of his Lyric Suite and three poems for Der Wein.[31]
  2. ^ Schoenberg called Kokoschka "the greatest living painter".[32] Kokoschka was nearly arrested at the 1909 production of his play Murderer, the Hope of Women,[33] on which Paul Hindemith's first expressionist opera Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen is based.[34] Its gender conflict may have influenced Schoenberg's Die glückliche Hand.[35] After the Nazis' defeat, in 1951, Kokoschka expressed interest, at Will Grohmann's suggestion, in producing Wozzeck, though this never transpired.[36]
  3. ^ Berg set Rilke's "Traumgekrönt" in Seven Early Songs.[37]
  4. ^ Kammerer was scandalized by fraud allegations and died by suicide in 1926.[54]
  5. ^ Drafts surfaced in 2006.[63]
  6. ^ Berg used film in his next opera, Lulu.[64]
  7. ^ Dichtung ("poem") is a German term combining meanings of invention, fiction, poetry, and imaginative creation. It gained prominence in the late 18th century as Herder used it to denote the authentic poetic language of humanity, acquiring nationalist connotations of true inspiration against the claimed artifice of French Literatur and becoming the dominant term for German literary production through Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, and Gervinus. Use declined after World War II.[80]
  8. ^ This hunger led to the creation of the Volksernährung [de] and featured in the Lebensfähigkeitsdebatte Österreichs [de].[87]
  9. ^ The First Austrian Republic had just been created from the Republic of German-Austria.
  10. ^ Innovative classical music had long faced unreliable support despite successes, as with Wozzeck. Amid widespread poverty, Schoenberg's Society was a subscription business model for sustaining Neue Musik (new music) by composers across Europe through performance. It grew out of open rehearsals. Schulhoff soon co-founded a Prague Society for Private Musical Performances.[103]
  11. ^ The musical subject has long been likened to the topic of an oration, the idea from which all others grow. The Formenlehre [de] (form theory) of Adolf Bernhard Marx develops this notion in a Romantic spirit often via Beethoven's music (e.g., the "Muss es ein?" motif from Beethoven's String Quartet No. 16). Marx synthesizes historical–teleological (Hegelian, developmental) and genetic–biological (Goethean, morphological) conceptions, balancing inherited forms with unfolding of content through organic thematic–motivic growth, in which students learn to expand units into complex designs as they internalize new possibilities. A dualism between form as generative-and-unique or fixed-and-conformational emerged through pedagogical codification, often valorizing the former. Schoenberg arguably carried these notions forward with his own concepts of a Grundgestalt (basic shape or idea) and developing variation, and even viewed tonality as a kind of provisional inheritance in his Harmonielehre (harmony theory). Adorno treated such dualisms as co-constituting, historically dynamic, and socially grounded.[123]
  12. ^ Adorno called Berg "master of the smallest link."
  13. ^ Werfel, likely the Bergs' closest literary friend, had disparaged Wagner's "bloated excess" and "garrulous monotony" in favor of Verdi, perhaps shaping Berg's view of Wagner as "antiquated".[129]
  14. ^ Analysts use sets to describe compositions as coherent structures, but Schoenberg's atonal logic was motivic and preliminary. He emphasized its value as descriptive and creative rather than prescriptive and determinative, holding that no harmonic "laws" had been codified.[137]
  15. ^ Webern explored such themes in, among other Lieder, his 1915 setting of "Der Tag ist vergangen ("The day has ended"), a pious Volkslied from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.[147]
  16. ^ The melodic motion, a major seventh, is often used for ecphonesis.[149]
  17. ^ In the 19th and early 20th century, many Austrian and German soldiers generally needed permission to marry. Low pay, barracks life, and military regulations made it practically unattainable.
  18. ^ Wozzeck has also been described as more "highbrow" than Grimes, sometimes polemically.[185]
  19. ^ Lulu accrued less interest as its third act was initially unavailable.[187]
  20. ^ Smaragda briefly married Adolf Freiherr von Eger, son of the Austrian Southern Railway director, in 1907. Her lesbianism became evident through affairs with diseuse Marya Delvard [de], actress Erika Stiedry-Wagner [de], and her sister-in-law Alice Berg. She also competed with Berg for Helene. They accepted her. Helene wrote Berg, "Did I come out and say that same-sex love was degenerate? ... Let's call it a love of beauty." Still, when Berg sought the blessing of Helene's (legitimate) father, he wrote that Smaragda's sexuality was his family's "desperate sorrow".[198] Berg altered the form and text of Frank Wedekind's plays in Lulu to humanize the lesbian Countess Geschwitz, whose near-final music has two motifs linked to Marie in Wozzeck: the "waiting" ostinato and an F♯–G–B–C♯ chord.[199]
  21. ^ In 1924, composer Emil Petschnig [de] countered that Berg "simply raise[d] the question [of form in opera] yet again."[203]
  22. ^ Brian S. Locke called the "Wozzeck Affair" the "most important event at the Czechs' National Theater in the interwar period".[216]
  23. ^ The set included a bonus LP of Berg's lecture on Wozzeck, read in English by Noël Goodwin, with music examples conducted by Boulez.

Citations

[edit]
  1. ^ Watkins, Glenn (2003). Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War. Sponsors, Sukey and Gil Garcetti, Michael P. Roth, and the Roth Family Foundation (First hardcover ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 232–241. ISBN 978-0-520-23158-0.
  2. ^ Hall 2011, 26–38; Simms and Erwin 2021, 176.
  3. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 17–21, citing Berg's "long love epic" titled "Hanna" as well as his "Bergwerk" or "Mining Drama" project.
  4. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 56, quoting Berg on Brahms's German Requiem, with phrasing likely from the Beethoven-attributed epigraph to Spemanns Goldenes Buch der Musik: "Music is a form of revelation higher than all wisdom and philosophy".
  5. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 4–5, quoting Schoenberg.
  6. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 119–124, 140–142, 175, quoting Berg's letter to Schoenberg.
  7. ^ Berg 2014, 327; Simms and Erwin 2021, 175–176.
  8. ^ sfn & Hall, 26–38; 2011 & Simms and Erwin, 179, 181–185; 2021.
  9. ^ a b Simms and Erwin 2021, 180.
  10. ^ Reddick, John (1990). "The shattered whole: Georg Büchner and Naturphilosophie". In Cunningham, Andrew; Jardine, Nicholas (eds.). Romanticism and the Sciences (Hardcover ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 326, 328. ISBN 978-0-521-35602-2. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  11. ^ Dedner, Burghard (2017). "Producing 'thoughts by means of the body'. Büchner and the Enigma of Consciousness". In Gillett, Robert; Schonfield, Ernest; Steuer, Daniel (eds.). Georg Büchner: Contemporary Perspectives. Amsterdamer Beitrage zur neueren Germanistik (in English and German). Vol. 89. Founding editor, Gerd Labroisse; series editors: William Collins Donahue, Norbert Otto Eke, Martha B Helfer, Sven Kramer; cover, Armin Smailovic (Hardcover ed.). Leiden: Brill. pp. 31, 34. ISBN 978-90-04-33859-3. ISSN 0304-6257. Archived from the original on 15 July 2024. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  12. ^ Reddick, John (1994). Georg Büchner: The Shattered Whole (Hardcover ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-19-815812-7. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  13. ^ Guthrie, John (1995). "Introduction". In Reddick, John (ed.). Georg Büchner: Woyzeck (2nd revised ed.). London: Duckworth Books. pp. 17–20. ISBN 978-1-85399-374-9. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  14. ^ Reddick 1994, 6.
  15. ^ Perle 1980, 24; Reddick 1994, 108–110; Simms and Erwin 2021, 180–181.
  16. ^ Büchner, Georg (1993). "Selected Letters". In Reddick, John (ed.). Georg Büchner: Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings (Revised paperback ed.). London: Penguin Publishing Group. pp. 195–196. ISBN 978-0-14-044586-2. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  17. ^ Thompson, Peter (2017). "Büchner, Science and the Metaphysics of Contingency". In Gillett, Robert; Schonfield, Ernest; Steuer, Daniel (eds.). Georg Büchner: Contemporary Perspectives. Amsterdamer Beitrage zur neueren Germanistik (in English and German). Vol. 89. Founding editor, Gerd Labroisse; series editors: William Collins Donahue, Norbert Otto Eke, Martha B Helfer, Sven Kramer; cover, Armin Smailovic (Hardcover ed.). Leiden: Brill. pp. 55–59. ISBN 978-90-04-33859-3. ISSN 0304-6257. Archived from the original on 15 July 2024. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  18. ^ Lukács, György (1993). "The Real Georg Buchner and his Fascist Misrepresentation [1937]". In Livingstone, Rodney (ed.). German Realists in the Nineteenth Century [translated reprint, with editor's introduction, of Ferenc Jánossy's Deutsche Realisten des 19. Jahrhunderts (1951)]. Translated by Gaines, Jeremy; Keast, Paul (First hardcover ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. pp. 86–88. ISBN 978-0-262-12171-2. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  19. ^ Lukács, György (19 February 1937). Blunden, Andy (ed.). "The Real Georg Büchner and his Fascist Misrepresentation" ["Der faschistisch verfälschte und der wirkliche Georg Büchner", originally published in Das Wort]. Marxists Internet Archive. Georg Lukács Archive. Translated by P, Anton. Archived from the original on 15 February 2025. Retrieved 11 November 2025. As a great realist, however, he portrayed Woyzeck [...]. And in the short story fragment Lenz, Büchner has his hero, the well-known friend of Goethe's from his youth, express the following commitment to true realism: '[...] Try once to immerse yourself in the life of the little one and reproduce it in the twitches, the hints, the whole delicate, hardly noticed play of expressions [...]. They are the most prosaic men under the sun; but the vein of feeling is the same in almost everyone, only the shell through which it has to break is more or less dense. You just have to have an eye and an ear for it.'
  20. ^ Reddick, John (1993). Georg Büchner: Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings (Revised paperback ed.). London: Penguin Publishing Group. pp. xiv–xvii. ISBN 978-0-14-044586-2. Retrieved 11 November 2025.
  21. ^ Reddick 1994, 9–10, 74–75, 252–267.
  22. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 179–180, 190, 200.
  23. ^ a b Simms and Erwin 2021, 180–181.
  24. ^ Perle 1980, 23, 25, 32; Simms and Erwin 2021, 180–181.
  25. ^ Reddick 1994, 327, quoting Clarus: "Freiheit des Willens", "Willensfreiheit", "freier Vernunftgebrauch"; Simms and Erwin 2021, 180–181.
  26. ^ Guthrie 1995, 14–15 (26n6), 19–21.
  27. ^ Barnouw 1999, 73–74; Schroeder 1999, 232–233, 236; Shreffler 1999, 253; Simms 1999a, xiii–xiv; Simms 1999b, 136–137, 157–158, 182n33; Simms and Erwin 2021, 4, 281, 306, 308, 485n62.
  28. ^ Shreffler 1999, 266.
  29. ^ Barnouw 1999, 73–74; Simms 1999a, xiii–xiv; Simms 1999b, 136–137, 157–158, 182n33; Simms and Erwin 2021, 4.
  30. ^ Shreffler 1999, 267.
  31. ^ Schroeder 1999, 232–233, 236; Simms and Erwin 2021, 281, 306, 308, 485n62.
  32. ^ Simms 1999b, 159.
  33. ^ Barnouw 1999, 118n20.
  34. ^ Stewart 1991, 74.
  35. ^ Simms 1999b, 159–160.
  36. ^ Görner 2020, §7A. "Progressive Restoration, or in the Middle of Loss".
  37. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 71, 75.
  38. ^ Stewart 1991, 23.
  39. ^ Griffel 2018, xxi.
  40. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 175, 181.
  41. ^ Schroeder 1999, 185–186, 209–210; Simms and Erwin 2021, 175–176.
  42. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 175–176, quoting Berg's letter to Helene.
  43. ^ Stewart 1991, 79–80.
  44. ^ Schroeder 1999, 210.
  45. ^ Schroeder 1999, 185–186, 209–210.
  46. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 181, quoting Berg's letter to Webern.
  47. ^ Hall 2011, 26–38; Watkins 2003, 232–241.
  48. ^ Perle 1980, 24, 28n16; Simms and Erwin 2021, 179.
  49. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 179.
  50. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 182, citing Hugo Bieber's "Wozzeck und Woyzeck".
  51. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 182–183, citing Georg Witkowski's 1919 "Büchners Woyzeck".
  52. ^ a b Simms and Erwin 2021, 179 quoting Franzos, 183–184.
  53. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 38–43, 182, 243, 319.
  54. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 53.
  55. ^ Perle 1980, 34, 41.
  56. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 183–184.
  57. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 36, 46, 108, 147, 175–178, 185–186, 295.
  58. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 147–149, quoting Karl Kraus's 1914 "In dieser grossen Zeit" ("In these great times").
  59. ^ Perle 1980, 19; Simms and Erwin 2021, 23–26, 150–151, quoting Berg's 1912 letter to Schoenberg: "I went to a professor in Vienna [whose] opinion is that it is a nervous irritability or an oversensitivity of the mucous membranes ... of the nose [which] are extremely irritated by pollen in the air ... caus[ing symptoms]".
  60. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 23–26, 393, et passim: Berg's remedies included opioid analgesics, laxatives, cocaine solution, menthol, Arsenferratone, and Brunswick Mum; quoting Adorno: "Part of this hypochondria came from addiction"; "Berg lived, as he once said, from aspirin and tea, and he probably enjoyed the euphoric aspects of illness"; "[he was of] that generation of artists who felt the ailing Tristan to be a model".
  61. ^ Hailey 2010, 13–14, 30n9, quoting Berg's 1914 letter to Schoenberg.
  62. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 141, 150, 175–178, 181, 473n5.
  63. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 175–178, 473n9.
  64. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 328.
  65. ^ Busch 2010, 94–103; Simms and Erwin 2021, 175–178.
  66. ^ Busch 2010, 103–104.
  67. ^ Hall 2011, 28–31; Simms and Erwin 2021, 151, 474n38, citing one of Berg's Wozzeck notebook with the Wozzeck scene outline.
  68. ^ Perle 1980, 20, quoting Berg.
  69. ^ a b Simms and Erwin 2021, 151.
  70. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 151, quoting Berg's 14 April 1916 letter to August Göttel.
  71. ^ Hailey 2010, 15.
  72. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 12, 31–32, 150–153, 223, 435, 442, citing Karl Berg's letter of having "offered [Berg] a position at the War Ministry" and questioning Soma Morgenstern's account.
  73. ^ Hall 2011, 33, quoting Berg's 22 August 1916 letter to Helene.
  74. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 177, quoting Berg's letter to Buschbeck.
  75. ^ Hailey 2010, 12–13, quoting Helene's "Dokumentation"; Simms and Erwin 2021, 147, 185–186, 295.
  76. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 178, 473n10: "as always the date was largely symbolic"; quoting Berg's 13 August 1917 letter to Schoenberg.
  77. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 185, 474n31, citing Berg.
  78. ^ Perle 1980, 19–20, 188, quoting Berg's 13 August 1917 letter to Schoenberg.
  79. ^ Berg, Alban (2014a). "A Conversation with Alban Berg, by Oskar Jancke". In Simms, Bryan (ed.). Pro Mundo–Pro Domo: The Writings of Alban Berg, edited with commentaries by Bryan R. Simms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 327. ISBN 978-0-19-976406-8. Retrieved 26 October 2025.
  80. ^ Décultot, Élisabeth (2014). "Dichtung". In Cassin, Barbara; Apter, Emily; Lezra, Jacques; Wood, Michael (eds.). Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Translated by Rendall, Steven; Hubert, Christian; Mehlman, Jeffrey; Stein, Nathanael; Syrotinski, Michael. Princeton: Princeton University Press. pp. 215–220. ISBN 978-0-691-13870-1.
  81. ^ Hailey 2010, 12–13, quoting Helene's "Dokumentation"; Simms and Erwin 2021, 147, 179, 185–186, 295, citing Berg's second Wozzeck sketchbook.
  82. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 181, 474n22, quoting Berg's 7 August 1918 letter to Helene.
  83. ^ Perle 1980, 20, quoting Berg's 19 August 1918 letter to Webern.
  84. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 187–188, 474n41, quoting Berg's 19 August 1918 letter to Webern.
  85. ^ Brand, Hailey & Harris 1987, vii, 93, 95–98.
  86. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 161–162.
  87. ^ Fritz, Judith. "Den Mangel verwalten". Die Welt der Habsburger – Der Erste Weltkrieg (in German). Retrieved 30 November 2025.
  88. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 161–163.
  89. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 12–13, 16, 108.
  90. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 161, quoting Johanna's 5 August 1918 letter to Berg.
  91. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 164.
  92. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 161, quoting Zweig's memoir The World of Yesterday.
  93. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 5–9, 161.
  94. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 95.
  95. ^ Hall 2011, 40–41, quoting Berg's and Schulhoff's letters; Simms and Erwin 2021, 188–189.
  96. ^ Hall 2011, 40–41, quoting Berg's and Schulhoff's letters.
  97. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 162–174, 429–430, quoting Helene Berg's name for the affair.
  98. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 108, 162–163.
  99. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 161, 471n52, quoting Berg's 27 November 1919 letter to Schulhoff.
  100. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 149–150: The petition was writer Romain Rolland's "declaration of mind". Berg followed Kraus and Schoenberg in not signing. Schoenberg "sp[oke] out": "Even before the war [World War I], the greatest German composers were pushed aside and virtually every 'modernist' was proud to take his modernism from Debussy while wanting nothing to do with me or Mahler. ... Are we now to lose our hegemony in music too? Certainly art is a common inheritance of all nations, but if this common inheritance is to be spread equally everywhere, then we Germans will have to give our music away with nothing in return. The victors even before the war treated us differently [...]. I'm not for a politics of art but [... w]hen I think of music, I think only of German music!".
  101. ^ Ljubibratić, Vanja (2024). "Aesthetic Contrasts and Symbolic Correlations Between Alban Berg and Erwin Schulhoff in Their Letters and Opera Narratives" (PDF). Musicologica Slovaca. 15 (41): 9–11. doi:10.31577/musicoslov.2024.1.1. Archived (PDF) from the original on 14 November 2025. Retrieved 14 November 2025. Schulhoff [sent] Berg a large extract from Schoenberg's letter, where the latter attacks Schulhoff [...]. Schulhoff then continued that Schoenberg ... suffers from 'war psychosis' [...]. [O]n 27 November 1919, Berg partially responds: '[Y]ou are very much mistaken if you think of me as an imperialist or even a militarist. ... I asked myself whether a nation that treats its greatest [people] like the Germans did does not deserve to be defeated. ... I still believe in the German people ... who name Beethoven and all the greats up to Mahler and Schoenberg. For example, France (despite Debussy, Ravel, Satie) and other lesser countries, did not produce the people who finally had a Karl Kraus ... who was able to prove and show ... the depth of the most impotent government of a Franz Joseph, and the ... idiotic militarism and mercantilism etc. in Prussia.'
  102. ^ Hall 2011, 40–41, 195n10, quoting Berg's 27 November 1919 letter to Schulhoff: "whether a people [Volk] who treat their greatest the way the Germans did and do, don't deserve to be conquered".
  103. ^ Brand, Juliane; Hailey, Christopher; Harris, Donald, eds. (1987). The Berg–Schoenberg Correspondence: Selected Letters [with Introduction, Translator's Preface, and Annotations]. Book design, Jacques Chazaud (Softcover reprint ed.). London: The Macmillan Press Ltd. pp. xiv–xvii, 263–264, 274n11, 275n1. ISBN 978-1-349-09831-6. Retrieved 14 November 2025.
  104. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 149, quoting Berg's 27 November 1919 letter to Schulhoff.
  105. ^ Perle 1980, 20–21, quoting Berg's 27 November 1919 letter to Schulhoff: "fierce antimilitarist"; "somewhere Kraus says, 'It is still worse to be forced to salute!'".
  106. ^ Reitter, Paul (2008). The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-siècle Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 80–83: "Kraus sets up A Crown for Zion as his response to Zionist soliciting. ... Zionists might celebrate Jewish particularities [but] in the idiom of German nationalism[:] they have modeled their new Jewish culture after German ideology. In laying out the paradox of an assimilationist Zionism, Kraus enlists antisemitic stereotypes ... in ... a reflective polemic against a controversial movement in Jewish culture, and with quite a bit of irony. ... Kraus too lobbies for assimilation. He wants total integration, ... the utter 'dissolution' of Judaism will end the 'thoroughly corrupt Jewish society'[:] the liberal Viennese press. These Jews promote ... the interests of the 'money Jews' (Geldjuden) who finance their newspapers [...]. ... Kraus posits that Judaism is inimical to enlightened cosmopolitanism", et passim: 12, 18, 28–30, 85–86, 106, 195n106, 215n31. ISBN 978-0-226-70970-3.
  107. ^ Perle 1980, 20–21, quoting Berg's 27 November 1919 letter to Schulhoff: "I don't think you will soon again find such an enraged antimilitarist as I am"; "What names does the Entente have (outside of Russia) that ring of idealism as these [Luxemburg and Liebknecht] do?".
  108. ^ Berg, Alban (1971). "Part Two: 1911–1920". Alban Berg: Letters to His Wife. Editor, translator, and annotator Bernard Grun with assistance from Helene Berg, Franz Willnauer et al. New York: St Martin's Press. p. 168.
  109. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 167–174, quoting Berg's letter to Webern.
  110. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 165–166, 167, 188, 295: Herman.
  111. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 188, 191, citing Berg's August letter to Kassowitz.
  112. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 188–189.
  113. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 15–16, 55–58, 162–167, 188, 370–371.
  114. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 108, 163, 165–167, 188, quoting Johanna: "You have only me ... provid[ing] for you because we can't depend on Helene, who won't touch any of her money. That we—Charly and I—work all the time to bring in money and to maintain our assets, this you know [...]".
  115. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 163, quoting Johanna's 1918 letter to Berg.
  116. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 12–15, 30, 161, 188, 291, 474n42, quoting Johanna's 9 May 1922 letter to Geo. Borgfeldt & Co. [de] in English.
  117. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 188.
  118. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 177, 188, 473n7, quoting Berg's May 1922 letter to Helene.
  119. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 189.
  120. ^ a b "Alban Berg – Wozzeck – Reduzierte Fassung (21 instrumente) – John Rea". Universal Edition. Retrieved 9 December 2010.
  121. ^ Headlam 1996, 72; Perle 1980, 127–128.
  122. ^ Headlam 1996, 6–12, 47, 408n5; Schmalfeldt 1983, 26–27.
  123. ^ Schmalfeldt, Janet (2011). "The Beethoven–Hegelian Tradition and the 'Tempest' Sonata". In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music. Oxford Studies in Music Theory. Series editor, Richard Cohn (Illustrated hardcover ed.). Berkeley: Oxford University Press. pp. 10–11, 23–37, 160–163, 270n28, 270n33, 270n38. ISBN 978-0-19-509366-7.
  124. ^ Headlam 1996, 1, 7–8, 10, 13, 47–50, 52, 125–126, 128–134, 408n3, 408n8, 408n9; Perle 1980, Ch. 4, "Representation and Symbol in the Music of Wozzeck".
  125. ^ Headlam 1996, 6–7, 46–47, 102, 114–124.
  126. ^ Headlam 1996, 23, 59–60, 101, 121, 125.
  127. ^ Hailey 2010, 17; Simms and Erwin 2021, 175, 192–193.
  128. ^ Deathridge 2005, 24; Schroeder 1999, 227, quoting Berg's 1929 "Lecture on Wozzeck".
  129. ^ Schroeder 1999, 194, quoting Berg in 1923: "this antiquated Wagner music".
  130. ^ Deathridge 2005, 24; Hailey 2010, 20.
  131. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 176, 192–193.
  132. ^ a b Simms and Erwin 2021, 192–193.
  133. ^ Headlam 1996, 52.
  134. ^ Pople 1997, p. 148.
  135. ^ Jarman 1979, 20–21, 47 Ex. 49, quoting Berg's "Lecture on Wozzeck"; Schmalfeldt 1983, 42–43, 48–59; Simms and Erwin 2021, 190–191, 339.
  136. ^ Jarman 1979, 15–17.
  137. ^ Dunsby, Jonathan; Whittall, Arnold (1988). Music Theory: In Analysis and Practice (Hardcover ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 120–121: "Schoenberg, ... in his belief in the inevitably evolving forces at work in music, is content to rely on the aural adaptability of the listener [...]. [B]ecause Schoenberg was never able to discover the harmonic 'laws' ... he was stimulated to develop the motivic laws [yielding] the twelve-note method as he ... practised it", 152–153: "Apart from [Allen] Forte, ... other[s] have published pitch-class-set analyses of large-scale atonal compositions. Janet Schmalfeldt's study of Wozzeck ... argu[es] that 'the fundamental pitch-structural components ... share complex interrelationships that can be formally summarized [with sets]'", 155: quoting Schoenberg, "One may sooner sacrifice logic and unity in the harmony than in the thematic substance, in the motives, in the thought-content", 203: "abstractions and classifications of pitch-class-set analysis are likely to be more impressive ... the larger the work", 204: "set analysis has focused on a vital principle, even if its actual analytical practices are open to question", et passim: 16–19, 54–56, 81–82, 106, 119–125, 150–172, 191, 199–200, 206–207, 217. ISBN 978-0-571-10065-1.
  138. ^ Jarman 1979, 47 Ex. 49, quoting Berg's "Lecture on Wozzeck".
  139. ^ Schmalfeldt 1983, 41, 60–62, 208, 251n12 quoting Werner König [de] and George Perle.
  140. ^ Schmalfeldt 1983, 54, 62–63, 208, 215, 251n15.
  141. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 200, quoting Berg.
  142. ^ Watkins 2003, p. 231, 233, 237.
  143. ^ Rose, Michael (2013). The Birth of an Opera: Fifteen Masterpieces from Poppea to Wozzeck. W. W. Norton. p. 375. ISBN 978-0393060430. Retrieved 2015-05-09.
  144. ^ Hailey 2010, 14, paraphrasing Hailey.
  145. ^ Jarman 1979, 18n1.
  146. ^ Watkins 2003, p. 217, 485n18.
  147. ^ Watkins 2003, p. 229–231.
  148. ^ Berg 2014, 327.
  149. ^ Beaumont 2010, 150–153.
  150. ^ Beaumont 2010, 146–147, 150.
  151. ^ John 1990, 61–62; Perle 1980, 45.
  152. ^ Beaumont 2010, 146, 150, 159–160, 160, 161n20; Jarman 1989a, 25; Perle 1980, 46–49, 186; Schmalfeldt 1983, 34–35, 45–46.
  153. ^ Jarman 1989a, 25; Perle 1980, 41, 46; Schmalfeldt 1983, 34, 37–38, 250n10: Berg wrote Helene (7 August 1917 from Trahütten) that "a long-sought idea for one of Wozzeck's entrances" occurred to him as he had walked home and "went uphill very slowly", "rest[ing] frequently 'according to regulations'".
  154. ^ Jarman 1989, 25–26, 62, 64; Jarman 2010, 202, 216–218; Perle 1980, 128; Schmalfeldt 1983, 148, 234: presented as eight descending fourths.
  155. ^ Beaumont 2010, 159–160; Schmalfeldt 1983, 45–46.
  156. ^ Jarman 1989a, 26.
  157. ^ Jarman 1989a, 26–27; Schmalfeldt 1983, 39–42.
  158. ^ Hall 2011, 114–115, Fig. 7.9; Perle 1980, 46–48, 174.
  159. ^ Beaumont 2010, 150; Jarman 1989a; Jarman 2010, 212, 217; Perle 1980, 46; Schmalfeldt 1983, 39–42, 45–47.
  160. ^ Jarman 1989a, 27.
  161. ^ Perle 1980, 138, Ex. 103.
  162. ^ Berg, Alban (2014b). "Lecture on Wozzeck: The 'Atonal Opera'". In Simms, Bryan (ed.). Pro Mundo–Pro Domo: The Writings of Alban Berg, edited with commentaries by Bryan R. Simms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 235. ISBN 978-0-19-976406-8. Retrieved 26 October 2025.
  163. ^ Jarman 1989a, 27–28.
  164. ^ Perle 1980, 49, 143.
  165. ^ a b Jarman 1989a, 28.
  166. ^ Schmalfeldt 1983, 212.
  167. ^ Schmalfeldt 1983, 85.
  168. ^ John 1990, 27–28; Perle 1980, 49, 143.
  169. ^ Schmalfeldt, Janet (1983). Berg's Wozzeck: Harmonic Language and Dramatic Design (First hardcover ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 63. ISBN 978-0-300-02710-5.
  170. ^ Jarman 1989a, 130; John 1990, 42, 66; Perle 1980, 39; Schmalfeldt 1983, 77, 218, 220; Watkins 2003, 227, 235–236.
  171. ^ a b c Watkins 2003, 235–236.
  172. ^ Perle 1980, 138.
  173. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 235–236; Watkins 2003, 217, quoting Olin Downes.
  174. ^ Jarman 1989b, 189, citing Glen Watkins; John 1990, 28.
  175. ^ Jarman 1989a, 28–30.
  176. ^ a b Simms and Erwin 2021, 200.
  177. ^ Watkins 2003, p. 237.
  178. ^ a b Jarman 1979, 17–18, Ex. 1.
  179. ^ Headlam 1996.
  180. ^ John 2010, 12–13.
  181. ^ Deathridge 2005, 24.
  182. ^ Franklin 2024, 17.
  183. ^ Hailey 2010, 14.
  184. ^ Fisher 2000, 26–27.
  185. ^ Franklin 2024, 15, 37, 50.
  186. ^ Jarman 1979, 2.
  187. ^ a b John 2010, 12.
  188. ^ Watkins 2003, p. 6, 233.
  189. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 185, citing Alexander Landau's "Die Musik und das soziale Problem" and Otto Brües's "Über Georg Büchner".
  190. ^ Stewart 1991, 65.
  191. ^ a b c Hailey 2010, 17.
  192. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 176.
  193. ^ a b c Hailey 2010, 20.
  194. ^ a b c "Gurlitt: Wozzeck (Roland Hermann, Celina Lindsley, Anton...) – review". Classical-music.com.
  195. ^ Hailey 2010, 17; Simms and Erwin 2021, 189, 211–213, 216.
  196. ^ Jarman, Douglas (1979). The Music of Alban Berg. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-520-03485-3.
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  198. ^ Simms and Erwin 2021, 13, 46–47, 51, quoting Helene and Berg.
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Bibliography

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Further reading

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