Alban Berg

WOZZECK
ENGLI SH
www. wi ener- s t a a t s oper. a t
Alban Berg
WOZZECK
Synopsis 4
Wozzeck, Opera in thre acts (15 scenes) 8
About this evenings opera 12
Alban Berg | Biography 14
Georg Bchner | Biography 18
There is a silence in the world | Anna Mitgutsch 20
The real Wozzeck | Oliver Lng 28
Execution of the convict Woyzeck | Ernst Anschtz 32
But doctor ... when nature calls | Georg Titscher 34
Woyzeck | Georg Bchner 42
Alban Bergs Wozzeck and Georg Bchners Woyzeck | Irmgard Harrer 44
Music at the time of Wozzeck | Oliver Lng 50
Alban Berg | Interview 56
Musical form in Wozzeck | Johanna Graf 62
Vocal roles in Wozzeck | Erich Seitter 68
Wozzeck as I understand him | Rainer Bischof 70
Wozzeck a hopeless global dilemma? | Oliver Lng 78
The Vienna premire 82
The rst Vienna Wozzeck | Clemens Krauss 84
Breaking records with Wozzeck | Karl Lbl 86
Outstandig casts of Wozzeck at the Wiener Staatsoper 92
Synopses (French, Italian, Russian, Japanese) 94
Content
Wiener Staatsoper thanks Antal de Bekessy for generously supporting the
publication of its English programmes.
5 4
Synopsis Synopsis
SYNOPSIS
Scene 1
The poor soldier Wozzeck is shaving his Captain. This brings him a little
additional income. He has to feed Marie and their child, but is prevented
from marrying by service regulations. Wozzecks mind is not on his work,
which disconcerts the Captain.
Scene 2
Wozzeck is cutting sticks with his friend Andres. This also brings in a little
extra money. Once again, Wozzecks mind wanders: he has visions which
nally force him and his comrade to take ight.
Scene 3
Marie watches a glittering military band marching through her dismal street.
The magnicent Drum Major casts her a glance a bright moment in a dre-
ary life. Wozzeck looks in through the window, a striking contrast to the Drum
Major.
Scene 4
Wozzeck has yet another means of earning extra money: the Doctor is car-
rying out nutritional experiments with him. Wozzeck mistakes the Doctors
interest in his description of his visions for human sympathy. The Doctor
enthusiastically states his diagnosis: Aberratio mentalis partialis! xed
idea, paranoia.
Scene 5
The Drum Major has appeared outside Maries front door after duty. She
watches mockingly as he swaggers before her. Finally, she is no longer able
to resist him and takes him with her into the house.
Scene 1
Marie is pleased with a new pair of earrings. She tries to hide them when
Wozzeck enters, and then maintains that she found them. However, Wozzeck
does not believe it is possible to nd two earrings at once, but relents when
Marie becomes aggressive. He brings her his pay and the money he has
earned on the side, but does not stay.
Scene 2
The Doctor and the Captain meet in the street. The Doctor gets the Captain
worried with a terrible diagnosis. When Wozzeck comes along, they stop him
and amuse themselves by putting him on the Drum Majors trail by making
insinuations about Marie.
Scene 3
Wozzeck thinks he should be able to see Maries indelity in her face, but
she looks just the same as ever. When she becomes impertinent, he is about
to strike her, but lets his hand fall, and has to endure having her slam the
door in his face.
Scene 4
In the garden of a cheap tavern, drunk journeymen are giving speeches and
soldiers are dancing with maidservants. Marie and the Drum Major suddenly
appear. Wozzeck watches as the couple irt quite openly with one another:
he is about to rush over to them when the dance ends. Wozzeck mutters
gloomily to himself, and a fool smells blood.
Scene 5
The soldiers are asleep in their barracks. Wozzeck, however, is awake. He
can still see Marie dancing in his minds eye, and he sees a knife. The drun-
ken Drum Major bursts noisily in and shows Wozzeck who is the stronger of
the two of them. Wozzeck retires bleeding and muttering gloomily to himself.
ACT 1 ACT 2
7 6
Synopsis
Scene 1
Marie is sitting in her room at night. Desperately she seeks consolation in
the Bible. The child awakes, and she tells him a disheartening story. Like Mary
Magdalene, she too hopes to nd forgiveness.
Scene 2
In the evening Wozzeck is walking with Marie beside the pond. He holds her
back. They sit together shivering. The moon rises. Wozzeck trembles and
pulls a knife out of his pocket. When Marie attempts to ee, he cuts her th-
roat. She dies. Wozzeck runs away.
Scene 3
In a nearby tavern Wozzeck is drinking among the dancers, clinging to a
woman. Blood is discovered on Wozzecks arm, setting the entire room in
uproar. Wozzeck ees.
Scene 4
Wozzeck nds the knife beside the pond, and throws it out into the water.
However, he thinks it is still too near the bank, and wades deeper and deeper
into the pond. The water seems to him like blood, then it closes over his
head. The Doctor and the Captain come along, and, thinking they can hear
somebody drowning, hurry past.
Scene 5
Children are playing in the road. The story that Maries body has been found
spreads like wildre, and everybody runs to the pond to see what has hap-
pened. Only the child of Marie and Wozzeck does not yet understand
ACT 3
KS Christa Ludwig as Marie, Wiener Staatsoper, 1963
Wozzeck Wozzeck
9 8
WOZZECK
Opera in three acts (15 scenes)
Based on
Woyzeck (1836) by Georg Bchner, as edited by Karl Emil Franzos
Authors of the opera
Music: Alban Berg
Libretto: Alban Berg after Georg Bchner
Original language
German
Dedicated to
Alma Maria Mahler
Settings
The Captains room | An open eld | Maries room | The Doctors study |
Street in front of Maries door | A street in the town | Guardhouse at the
barracks | Wooded path by a pond | A tavern
Orchestra
4 utes, 4 oboes, 4 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, 1 contrabassoon,
4 horns, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, 1 contrabass tuba, 4 timpani, cymbals, bass
drum, small drum, switch, large tam-tam, small tam-tam, triangle, xylophone,
celeste, violin I, violin II, viola, cello, double bass
Onstage groups: Several snare drums;
Military band: 1 piccolo, 2 utes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns,
2 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 contrabass tuba, bass drum with cymbals, snare
drum, triangle;
A tavern band: 2 ddles, 1 clarinet, 1 concertina or accordion, 1 guitar,
1 bombardon (or bass tube);
1 upright piano
Chamber orchestra matching the orchestra for Arnold Schoenbergs Cham-
ber Symphony: 1 ute, doubling piccolo, 1 oboe, 1 English horn, 2 clarinets,
1 bass clarinet, 1 bassoon, 1 contrabassoon, 2 horns and a solo string quintet
Length
1.5 hours
Composition
In 1914 Alban Berg attended a performace of Bchners Woyzeck at the Vienna
Kammerspiele. Deeply impressed by this experience, Berg set about composing
the opera. His work was frequently interrupted, not least due to his being
called up for military service. He completed the opera in 1922. In 1924 three
fragments were premired in Frankfurt am Main. The opera was premired
on 14 December 1925 at the State Opera Unter den Linden in Berlin.
Autograph manuscript
Library of Congress Washington (score)
Music collection of the Austrian National Library (sketchbooks)
First performance at the Wiener Staatsoper
30 March 1930
Premire cast
Conductor: Erich Kleiber
Wozzeck: Leo Schtzendorf
Drum Major: Fritz Soot
Andres: Gerhard Witting
Captain: Waldemar Henke
Doctor: Martin Abendroth
1st Journeyman: Ernst Osterkamp
2nd Journeyman: Alfred Borchardt
Fool: Marcel No
Marie: Sigrid Johanson
Margret: Jessyka Koettrik
Roles:
Wozzeck
(baritone)
Drum Major
(heldentenor)
Andres
(lyric tenor)
Captain
(buffo tenor)
Doctor
(buffo bass)
1st Journeyman
(deep bass)
2nd Journeyman
(high baritone)
Fool
(high tenor)
Marie
(soprano/mezzo soprano)
Margret
(alto)
Maries son
Soldiers and apprentices,
women and girls, children
11
Wozzeck
10
Premire cast (Wiener Staatsoper)
Conductor: Clemens Krauss
Wozzeck: Josef von Manowarda
Drum Major: Gunnar Graarud
Andres: Hermann Gallos
Captain: Georg Maikl
Doctor: Hermann Wiedemann
1st Journeyman: Karl Norbert
2nd Journeyman: Viktor Madin
Fool: William Wernigk
Marie: Rose Pauly
Margret: Dora With
Premire cast 1987
Conductor: Claudio Abbado
Wozzeck: Franz Grundheber
Drum Major: Walter Raffeiner
Andres: Philip Langridge
Captain: Heinz Zednik
Doctor: Aage Haugland
1st Journeyman: Alfred ramek
2nd Journeyman: Alexander Maly
Fool: Peter Jelosits
Marie: Hildegard Behrens
Margret: Anna Gonda
KS Peter Klein as Captain, Wiener Staatsoper, 1955
About this evenings opera
13 12
ABOUT THIS EVENINGS OPERA
Alban Bergs Wozzeck tells the story of a mistreated individual who, spurned
by the world, plagued by visions, nally murders his own lover and seeks his
own death by drowning. The opera is based on the dramatic fragment by the
same name (although spelled differently) by Georg Bchner. The author wrote
it to draw attention to the hopelessness man experiences in the face of the
circumstances that govern his life. Alban Berg saw the play in 1914 at the pre-
sent Kammerspiele theatre in Vienna and decided to set it to music. The work
interrupted amongst other things by the First World War took many years
to complete. Wozzeck was premired in Berlin in 1925. The rst performance
at the Wiener Staatsoper followed ve years later, conducted by Clemens
Krauss.
Wozzeck is regarded as the rst complete atonal opera. The piece was written
in an age of general musical upheaval and plays a key role in the development
of modern music drama. In his Wozzeck, Berg used many historic forms as
structural elements, dispersed through the opera. He was less concerned with
developing a completely new style than he was with setting Bchners drama
to music as ttingly as possible and in keeping with the story.
After the rst performance, Wozzeck was kept on the schedule at the Wiener
Staatsoper for only two years. In 1938 the opera was banned; it was performed
again at the festivities for the reopening of the opera house on the Ring in
1955. The current production of Wozzeck, directed by Adolf Dresen, was pre-
mired in 1987 and revived on 24 March 2013.
Simon Keenlyside as Wozzeck, Wiener Staatsoper, revival 2013
Biography
15 14
ALBAN BERG | Biography
Alban Berg
1885 Birth of Alban Maria Johannes Berg on 9 February, the third son
of Conrad and Johanna Berg.
1900 Death of his father on 30 March. Composition of his rst songs.
1903 Attempted suicide. Birth of his illegitimate daughter Albine.
1904 Higher School Certicate. Hired as an unsalaried accounting
trainee by the Lower Austrian governors ofce.
Attended lectures on law and music theory. Private lessons with
Arnold Schoenberg.
1906 Terminated his employment as a civil servant after coming into
a considerable inheritance.
1907 First public performance of his works.
1910 Concludes his studies with Arnold Schoenberg.
1911 Marries Helene Nahowski on 3 May.
1913 Scandal at the premire of his Altenberg-Lieder at the Musik verein
in Vienna.
1914 On 5 May attends a performance of Georg Bchners Woyzeck
at the Kammerspiele theatre in Vienna. Decides to set the piece
to music.
1915 Conscripted into the army. Later transferred to the Viennese War
Ministry.
17
Biography
16
1921 Completes work on Wozzeck in April. The following year a piano
reduction is published, dedicated to Alma Mahler. She nances
private publication of the authors edition.
1924 On 15 July the Three Fragments from Wozzeck are premired
under Hermann Scherchen in Frankfurt.
1925 On 14 December, Wozzeck is premired at the Berlin State Opera
Unter den Linden under the baton of Erich Kleiber.
1928 Decides to set Frank Wedekinds plays Erdgeist and Die Bchse
von Pandora to music as Lulu.
1934 Completes the condensed score of Lulu. National Socialist cam-
paign against Alban Berg.
1935 Composition of a violin concerto dedicated to Manon Gropius,
Alma Mahlers daughter. Death of Alban Berg on 24 December
from complications from a carbuncle caused by an insect sting.
Gary Lehman as Drum Major, Wiener Staatsoper, revival 2013
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Biography
18
GEORG BCHNER | Biography
The son of a doctor, Georg Bchner was born on 17 October 1813 in Godde-
lau near Darmstadt. He studied medicine, natural sciences and philosophy in
Strasbourg and Giessen. In 1834 he founded the Society for Human Rights.
The same year, he wrote the revolutionary Der Hessische Landbote (The Hesse
Messenger), as a result of which had to ee in 1835. In this socially militant
pamphlet he highlighted the social injustices of his day and addressed the class
struggle. His rst dramatic work appeared the same year: Dantons Death. In
1836 he was awarded a Doctorate of Philosophy by the University of Zrich
(dissertation on the nervous system in shes) with subsequent trial lectures
and appointment as a lecturer in the department of philosophy.
He died of typhoid fever on 19 February 1837 in Zrich. His short story Lenz
appeared in 1838, the same year as his comedy Leonce and Lena. It was not
until 1913 that his dramatic fragment Woyzeck written in 1836 was rst per-
formed.
His works have been set to music by several composers, including:
Leonce und Lena:
by Julius Weismann (premire 1925)
by Paul Dessau (premire 1979)
by Friedrich Schenker (premire 1987)
Wozzeck:
by Alban Berg (premire 1925)
by Manfred Gurlitt (premire 1926)
by Kurt Pster (premire 1950)
Dantons Tod:
by Gottfried von Einem (premire 1947)
Jakob Lenz:
by Wolfgang Rihm (premire 1979)
Georg Bchner
There is a silence in the world | Anna Mitgutsch
21 20
THERE IS A SILENCE IN THE WORLD
When silence infiltrates language, reality loses its unquestioned reliability,
or as Wozzeck sings in the second scene of the first act: Hollow! Its all
hollow! // A chasm! Its shaking! Can you hear it? Something is following
us down there! Silence opens up gaps in the solid fabric of our perception.
But when silence interpolates music, the relationship is different: the two do
not exclude but rather complement each other. Music raises language to a
non-verbal level of comprehension, moves it forward, and lets it resound in
its moments of silence.
It seems paradoxical when literature chooses to introduce characters of
few words the stutterers who struggle with language as opposed to the
more articulate. These linguistically flawed characters reveal the abyss, they
de monstrate our powerlessness in the face of the insoluble enigmas of exis-
tence. Bchners Woyzeck is taciturn, a man who has trouble dealing with
words and coherent thoughts, yet he feels more urgently the mysterious
forces that remain hidden to others, precisely because he trusts his percep-
tions more than his reason. In Woyzeck, Bchner invented a character who
exhibits this kind of reticence with gripping and disturbing intensity. The
more the author leaves unsaid, the more blank space he entrusts to the
reader, the more vulnerable his work becomes and the more its interpreta-
tion is left to chance.
Although his intentions are unambiguous, Bchner left only a fragment of his
play, which, further reduced by Karl Emil Franzos, formed the basis for Alban
Bergs work. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Bergs opera is the way he
gave us the Woyzeck Bchner had in mind: a Wozzeck who knows more
than he can understand, an antihero who faces his social degradation with
little more than bemused obedience, who is driven by despair to madness,
and whose sole act of rebellion is the murder of the one person he loves. We
suffer with him and are outraged on his behalf.
Wozzeck is introduced as a junior officer who accepts negative assumptions
about his behaviour and moral conduct as obediently as he accepts orders.
He is at the very bottom of the hierarchy, ranking below everyone except
KS Franz Grundheber as Wozzeck and Philip Langridge as Andres, Wiener Staatsoper, 1987
There is a silence in the world | Anna Mitgutsch There is a silence in the world | Anna Mitgutsch
23 22
Andres and Marie. His monotonous Yes, sir, in response to everything from
comments on the weather to observations on morals, drives home through
its repeated staccato on a single note his puppet-like obedience.
Wozzeck! A name that blasts like a military command or cracks like a whip,
whether it comes from the captain, the doctor or the drum major, unvary-
ing in tone, aggressive, with the emphasis on the last syllable. An order and
a degradation in a word that is also his name. But Alban Berg knows better
than to give the play historical specificity: every society, every system has its
Wozzecks; every life is determined by power relations. He who has power
has licence to reason about morals; he defines freedom and virtue, how-
ever dull-witted he may be; he can, as Wozzeck puts it, speak in a genteel
way and be virtuous. His power invests him with language, his ease with
language gives him power. Wozzeck has access neither to power nor to
language. He stands outside bourgeois morality, and if he takes anything
for himself, he is considered presumptuous by those in power, he has no
right to anything. To him, society is as much a threatening force outside
his comprehension as nature and the whole universe. Wozzeck walks a fine
line between simple fool and visionary, lover and violent criminal, an abused
subordinate and a deranged outsider. A character like this can easily tip in
one or the other direction.
In Bergs opera, the music creates and sustains Wozzecks balance between
these extremes, and creates a tonal representation of his characteristic attri-
bute: his sixth sense for the incomprehensible, nameless force that grasps
man in its fist and can destroy him at any moment. When things are and
yet arent. // A fire! A fire rising from earth to heaven and a turmoil
descending like the last trump What a rumpus! The speech melody of
this and similar passages draws us into his terror of things he feels intuitively
but does not understand. We share his fear and ask ourselves: why does no
one else feel it? Wozzecks terror lies outside the discourse of power it
cannot pierce the self-confidence of the captain, nor the comfort the doctor
finds in science.
Wozzecks enigmatic visions, erupting with powerful imagery and condensed
to the extreme, arise from a different reality. We never ask ourselves whether
Wozzeck has gone mad; the text and the music do not permit that assump-
tion, and the images of his nightmares are too real for psychological inter-
pretation. Wozzecks fear of a fate he cannot control touches us. It reminds
us of Bchners uncertainty about mans free will. Alban Bergs loyalty to his
hero does not allow us to distance ourselves from Wozzeck the way the doc-
tor does: You have a remarkable obsession, a splendid aberratio mentalis
partialis.
Wozzeck is a prophet without language; when words fail him, he draws his
apocalyptic visions from the bible. For our part, we can conjure up images
from twentieth century reality when we hear: And lo, the smoke of the coun-
try went up as the smoke of a furnace. Alban Bergs opera was premired
in 1925. The first harbingers of the horrors of the century had already made
their appearance. But everything in this work has more than one reference
point. What Wozzeck sees is not just a distant apocalypse threatening man-
kind, it is his animal fear of an uncertain fate, projected onto a cosmic screen.
His speechlessness and vague realization of an ultimate terror turn out to be
within as well, the drama of the tormented soul absorbs all reality and anni-
hilates it. Wozzecks vision is that of a man who has no control over his life
and therefore feels all the more keenly how easily his world can be destroyed.
In the third scene of Act I, Wozzeck is alone with Marie and, as military
music and a lullaby intertwine, they are closer to each other in their fear
of the impending threat than they are in their love. Love is present as well,
but more subdued and easily drowned out. Were just poor people! this
outcry repeated like a leitmotif unites them. As does their horror in the face
of what is about to happen to them. Marie and the child are Wozzecks world
and until now they have been beyond the reach of the powers that humiliate
him. In order to keep his world intact, Wozzeck sells himself to the doctor as
a guinea pig: because my wife gets the extra money: thats why I do it. Marie
is all he thinks of as the doctor torments him with dietary experiments. What
can a marginalized person do other than sell himself?
Marie sells herself as well for a pair of earrings. Wozzeck reassures her: Its all
right, Marie! Its all right! and then: Were just poor people. Still facing her,
he continues in the intimate tone of the breadwinner for wife and child with:
Heres some more money, Marie, my wages and something from the captain
and from the doctor. Does someone raging with jealousy speak like this? Or
25
There is a silence in the world | Anna Mitgutsch
24
someone whose mind is unhinged by delusions? Wozzecks language may be
exalted and sometimes seem to lack context, and he may find it hard with his
uneducated mind to comprehend the mystery that rules and destroys his life.
But his emotions are more subtle than those of all the other characters, even
those of Marie. He is subservient in his military obedience, but he knows how
to defend himself against the captains definition of virtue and the doctors
notion of free will. He tries to convey his fear of existence and to protect his
small family, which does not belong to him, because nothing belongs to him,
not even himself. He may lack learning and ease of expression but he wants
to understand what threatens him and turns him into a victim.
Is Wozzeck responsible for his action? Would he have reached for the knife
and murdered Marie if he had other means at his disposal: power, language,
the ability and the right to defend his interests? He stands there, silent and
serious, as he is ridiculed. He sits silently off to the side while Marie dances
with the drum major. When he accuses her of infidelity, his words are not
a reproach, but an anguished, self-tormented outcry: There! Did he stand
there // like this? Or this? // The devil! Did he stand there? // I saw him!
// You with him! // Woman! And after the drum major has humiliated
him and confirmed Maries infidelity, he can say only: One after another!,
a sentence that can be interpreted in several different ways. One man after
another with Marie? Or one blow after another to destroy him? One murder
after another?
Must go, // on and on, the knife, the blood. These are the words and
images on which the literary work is grounded. Alban Berg also relies on the
impact of these key images. The tragedy describes an arc from Quiet, so
quiet, as if the world were dead in the second scene of Act I to Everything
silent and dead at the end of the third act, after the murder. In the conden-
sation of language, individual words become charged with expressive force,
obsessions erupt into tormented utterances which in turn take on the role
of leitmotifs.
Bchner does not tell us what to think of Woyzeck, he does not comment
on the murder of Marie in terms of bourgeois morals, which he rejects in
Franz Hawlata as Wozzeck and Michael Roider as Captain, Wiener Staatsoper, 2005
There is a silence in the world | Anna Mitgutsch There is a silence in the world | Anna Mitgutsch
27 26
his caricatures of the captain and the doctor. Wozzecks actions require no
explanation. The music helps us understand the character from within, when
we hear the unspoken on the threshold of words, the muted sentences, the
silence erupting into language, if only in fragments, words left over from an
unpronounced monologue, heavy with the weight of the unsaid. What hap-
pens to Wozzeck is too overwhelming to be couched in everyday language.
Who could find suitable words for the destruction of his world, the more so
in the very moment that it befalls him?
Wozzeck is without doubt a murderer. He is the first to say it: Murderer!
Murderer! Ah! Someone called. No, it was just me. And he finds death by
drowning in the blood that he has shed: But I must wash myself. Theres
blood on me. Heres a spot here another. Oh God! Oh God! I am washing
in blood the water is blood blood. Wozzeck is also a character who
reminds us of Job: a man, humiliated and deprived of everything, driven to
utter desolation and subjected to scorn because even the right to insist on
his dignity has been taken away. His suffering goes far beyond social injus-
tice, and his revenge is not that of a cuckold, but the response by a man to
the destruction of his life. Sir, I am just a poor devil! Shes all I have in this
world! he entreats the captain who has rocked his world with the insinua-
tion of Maries infidelity. Whether we see it as personal circumstances, fate,
a cruel god or, as Bchner calls it, the hideous fatalism of history, Maries
murder is certainly the element that makes the historical case a tragedy.
However, the opera does not end with murder and suicide. The last scene
returns to Maries and Wozzecks child, playing with a group of children who
search for dead Marie. Maries child follows them riding a hobbyhorse, and
the last scene ends with his bright song Hop, hop! Hop, hop! Hop, hop!
It is a terrifying image, even more disturbing than the violent deaths of his
parents. Is this the start of a new cycle of abandonment and social cruelty,
embodied in the hooting crowd of children who run to look at the corpse,
and the orphaned child left behind who does not yet understand his fate and
has no words for it?
The operas ending differs from Bchners play, in which the child makes
his last appearance before Maries death, when Woyzeck gives his son into
the care of retarded Karl. In a 1929 speech about Wozzeck, Alban Berg said
of his final scene: From the dramatic standpoint, it should be seen as the
epilogue following Wozzecks suicide, as the authors confession stemming
from the storyline of the theatre, indeed as an appeal to the audience who
also represent humanity. An appeal to society could not be more stirring.
The real Wozzeck | Oliver Lng
29 28
THE REAL WOZZECK
Georg Bchners dramatic fragment is based on three different historic
characters, from whom he took personality traits and deeds in different
measure for the fictional character. It should be noted that Bchner was
not the least interested in historical truth or reproduction, but saw the
historic events as the basis for a personal, social and political discussion of
his environment.
The historical eponym (Johann Christian Woyzeck) was born on 3 January
1780 in Leipzig, lost his mother when he was eight and his father at age 13.
A short while later he entered an apprenticeship as a wigmaker. During his
training he met the woman who later became his lover and his victim
Johanna Christiane Woost. However, Woyzecks life did not follow a straight
path. He changed jobs, could not find a true home, practised various different
professions, and ran afoul of the authorities. As a soldier, he served in various
regiments under different flags. During this time, he had an illegitimate child.
When he was 38 he left the military and returned to his home. He met up
again with Christiane Woost, who took him as her lover. Woyzeck drank,
his mental state became unstable and his condition bordered on neglect.
Penniless, often out of work and without a secure roof over his head, he stole
from a drum major. He heard voices, had problems with his environment and
once again with the authorities. A voice ordered him to kill his lover, and he
abused her on numerous occasions. He alienated himself increasingly from
society and became more and more of an outlaw. On 3 June 1721 he killed
his lover out of jealousy, stabbing her seven times.
What followed was an excessively long trial that revolved around the question
of whether or not Woyzeck was accountable for his actions. The doctor,
Johann Clarus, prepared several expert opinions, all of which confirmed that
he was accountable and therefore guilty. Three years later, on 27 August
1724, he was executed, but the case has never been completely cleared up.
The suspicion that the expert opinions declaring his accountability were
Johann Christian Woyzeck
31
The real Wozzeck | Oliver Lng
30
determined to see him punished is brought up time and again. At that time,
it was, according to the accusation, less an honest appraisal of his condition
than setting an example and attempting to do away with someone who was
disagreeable to better society.
Two further accounts were soon added to this tragic criminal story: in 1817
journeyman tobacco spinner Daniel Schmolling stabbed his lover and was
sentenced to life in prison; in 1830 journeyman linen weaver Johann Diess
murdered his lover, and he too was given a prison sentence. Apart from their
crimes, the factors linking these individuals were suspicion of a dysfunctional
mental state and their low social standing.
KS Walter Berry as Wozzeck, Wiener Staatsoper, 1955
Execution of the convict Woyzeck | Ernst Anschtz
33 32
EXECUTION OF THE CONVICT WOYZECK
The scaffold was set up in the middle of the marketplace. Fifty four cuirassiers
from Borna maintained order around the scaffold; the blood court was held
in the city hall. The death sentence was pronounced shortly before 10.30.
The convict then emerged from city hall; Goldhorn and Hnsel accompanied
him on either side and apparitors in armour, helmet and pikes to the front,
right and left of him. The clergymen remained down at the scaffold. The
convict went calmly, alone to the scaffold, knelt down and prayed aloud
with great decorum, untied his own neckerchief, sat down on the chair and
adjusted it. With great skill, the executioner swiftly severed his head, such
that it remained on the broad sword until the executioner twisted the sword,
and it fell off.
The blood did not yet spurt forth. A trapdoor opened through which the
body fell, still motionless on the chair on which it sat. It was immediately laid
in a coffin and carried accompanied by a guard to the anatomical institute.
The scaffold was dismantled straight away, and once this had happened, the
cuirassiers rode off. The shops, which had all been closed, opened again,
and everyone went about their business. Naturally there was no school that
morning.
Diary notation by Leipzig teacher Ernst Anschtz
about the execution of Johann Christian Woyzeck
Historical illustration of the execution of Johann Christian Woyzeck
35
But Doctor when nature calls | Georg Titscher
34
BUT DOCTOR ... WHEN NATURE CALLS
Wozzeck, a clinical study?
Georg Bchners dramatic fragment Woyzeck and also the opera Wozzeck
by Alban Berg, which adheres very closely to the story, feature a criminal
case involving a murder and a suicide. The crime alone would have inspired
neither the poet nor the composer to create a work of art. Wozzeck is
not simply a murderer who kills himself after committing the deed or
who drowns when searching for the weapon used in the crime. His fate is
complex. Bchner and Berg are interested in the motives and reasons that
led to the downfall of this man. What is it in us that lies, goes whoring, steals
and murders? as Bchner put it.
A question that suggests itself and has far-reaching consequences for
understanding the work is that of Wozzecks normalcy. Is he mentally ill
or is he a mentally normal misfit? What prompts him to do what he does?
Is he responsible for his actions or is he mentally incompetent? To answer
these questions we are in a situation that is unique in (opera) literature.
Firstly because Woyzeck was a person who actually lived, the description of
him in the play and the opera correspond to reality, and there are detailed
medical reports on him. Furthermore, because the author Georg Bchner
was himself a doctor, and finally because in the piece there is a doctor who
diagnoses Wozzeck.
Let us take a closer look at Wozzeck, as he appears to us in the opera and
affects the other characters. Slow down, Wozzeck, take it easy! One thing at
a time are the first words in the opera. The captain says them to Wozzeck
as the latter is shaving him. Throughout the opera, Wozzeck seems to be
hurried, as if driven by an internal motor, you always look so rushed, you
rush through life like an open razor, a person could cut himself on you.
The captain feels the latent aggression in Wozzeck. His live-in girlfriend
Marie thinks he looks perturbed. He cracks his fingers, a sign of heightened
tension. He does his work conscientiously enough, but mechanically. He is
submissive to his superior, automatically answering Yes, sir!, even to the
captains remark about the wind from south-north. Wozzeck also follows
Hermann Wiedemann as Doctor, Wiener Staatsoper, 1930
But Doctor when nature calls | Georg Titscher But Doctor when nature calls | Georg Titscher
37 36
the doctors orders, eating nothing but beans as a participant in a medical
study not to say as a human guinea pig.
He is not even allowed to cough, without the doctor chastising him for it:
You have been coughing again, coughing on the street, barking like a dog!
In Bchners original, this passage says You have been pissing on the street,
pissing against the wall like a dog. Alban Berg softened the text; was it really
not possible to sing about pissing in opera in the 1920s? Wozzeck answers:
But Doctor ... when nature calls. As is often the case when texts are toned
down, the original works better. Pissing against the wall more exactly
describes the situation: Wozzeck doesnt take the time to go to the toilet. He
probably doesnt even think about it, but only notices when nature calls. It
is not just in the presence of figures of authority that Wozzeck is tense; even
with Marie he cannot relax, he is always in a rush and distracted. She worries
about him: That man! So haunted! ... Hes going crazy with all that thinking!
Her concerns about Wozzecks mental state are justified. At the beginning
of the story he doesnt know what he can hold onto, because the world
seems so dark to him (Oh, when things are and yet arent! Oh! Oh! Marie!
When everything is dark ... what can you hold onto?). He is haunted by dark
thoughts (Im on the track of so many things), he blames the freemasons,
for what is not clear, and tells his friend Andres about his grotesque fantasies
(This place is cursed! In the evening, a head rolls around here!). He feels
persecuted (Marie, something was there again ... It followed me nearly as far
as town. Whats going to happen?). From time to time he also hears voices
that make him afraid, as he confidentially tells the doctor.
So much for Wozzecks behaviour and his clinical symptoms. Is it possible
to make a diagnosis? The doctor does: Wozzeck, youre suffering from
aberration Youll be put in the madhouse! You have a remarkable
obsession, a splendid aberratio mentalis partialis! Highly developed! The
doctor does a brief case history, asks if everything is going well and ascertains
a partial mental deviation from normality. He is thrilled by it and gives
Wozzeck a bonus.
Let us look more closely at the character of the doctor. As a doctor, I cannot
pass my colleagues over without comment, even if he is just a caricature of a
particular type of doctor (unfortunately still in existence). For him, Wozzeck
is a thing to examine, not a human individual. He is purely scientifically
oriented: Emotions are unscientific. He immediately curbs his annoyance
about the missed urine sample (in Bchners original) by checking his pulse.
For him, scientific objectivity alone is important. He is completely lacking
in empathy and cannot feel for others, a basic requirement for any doctor.
In cold blood, he explains to the captain that he will probably have a
stroke within the next four weeks due to his apoplectic constitution and
enthusiastically explains the consequences to him. When he says or sings to
Wozzeck: Nature, Wozzeck! Man is free! In man individuality is transfigured
into freedom!, it is a very cynical statement, because Wozzeck in particular
is unable to make his own decisions.
In the character of the doctor, Bchner and Berg are criticizing the claim to
absoluteness of enlightenment and a self-involved doctor who falls back on
the scientific viewpoint and is insensitive to the suffering of his patient. In
the opera, the doctors ambitions and striving for fame are emphasized more
strongly than they are in the play. Berg adds the words: Oh, my hypothesis!
Oh, my fame! I shall be immortal! Immortal!, and has him sing the word
immortal four times.
Returning to the case of Wozzeck. The historic Johann Christian Woyzeck
was thoroughly examined several times by court physician Clarus, professor
at the University of Leipzig. He wrote two extensive expert opinions on
Woyzecks mental condition and reached the following conclusion:
that Woyzecks alleged visions and other aberrations must be regarded
as hallucinations triggered by circulatory disorders and exacerbated by his
superstitions and prejudices to objectively and psychically induced visions.
Further, that there is no reason to assume that he has at any time in his life,
most particularly immediately before, during or after his murderous intent,
been in a state of mental disorder or that he has acted based on compulsive,
blind and instinctive urges, or in fact that he has ever acted on anything other
than normal, passionate stimuli.
Due to the complexity and exceptional difficulty of the case, Clarus
recommended that a second opinion be obtained. This was finally done, but it
produced the same result. In the still new discipline of psychiatry, the case was
discussed so heatedly that Clarus felt compelled to publish his opinion (1825).
But Doctor when nature calls | Georg Titscher
39 38
How would we now, nearly two hundred years later, judge the case of
Woyzeck? The historic Woyzeck and the character in the opera and the play
are consistent in their clinical symptoms, so that the character Woyzeck
continues to be discussed.
Without doubt he is not healthy in the clinical sense. To the extent that
the diagnosis of someone we do not know and on top of that has been
dead for many years is permissible and legitimate at all be it as a thought
experiment an evaluation would be possible based on Wozzecks behaviour
and knowledge of the symptoms.
Translated into the language of modern psychiatry, Wozzeck presents the
following symptoms: bizarre to magical/mystical paranoid delusional ideas,
depersonalization in the sense of thought insertion and derealization,
disrupted thoughts and reduced affective resonance (i.e. limited emotional
contact with the environment) with social behaviour disorder. Thus, in
accordance with the international classification of diseases (ICD-10) the
diagnosis of episodic paranoid schizophrenia can be made.
Since Wozzeck the character drowns in the pond while searching for the
murder weapon, the subject of reduced criminal liability due to his disease
and current day administration of justice is rendered unnecessary.
Would it have been possible to prevent the tragic events? This question is
still topical today, as we learn time and again from the media of comparable
murders prompted by jealousy under similar circumstances. If Wozzeck
were to encounter a doctor today who recognized his psychological need
and illness and transferred him to a psychiatrist, he would be able to receive
help. Wozzeck would ideally receive a multi-dimensional therapy with
psychotropic drugs, psychotherapy and sociotherapy that could prevent
psychotic decompensation and improve his condition. However, even today
schizophrenic individuals do not always receive adequate therapy, partly
because they lack the motivation and the ability to be consistent, and partly
because the difficult social circumstances of many of these ill people makes
financing difficult.
And so we come to the topic taken up by Bchner and Berg, that of social
circumstances. They portray Wozzecks illness, his crime and Maries fate as
the result of social conditions. In Bchners day, this view was considered
Wolfgang Bankl as Doctor, Wiener Staatsoper, revival 2013
41
But Doctor when nature calls | Georg Titscher
40
revolutionary, and even in the first half of the 20th century, the psychosocial
element in the development of schizophrenia was by no means accepted.
Bchners diagnosis means that Wozzecks illness and deed are the result
of social circumstances, at the time a revolutionary view. Inescapability from
a socially bad situation was significant also in the economic crisis in Alban
Bergs day and has unfortunately become topical again today. Wozzeck did
not have a chance, the unavoidable, the when nature calls is in effect for
his entire life.
Bchner was preoccupied with the inescapable, the inevitable in almost all
his works; in Dantons Death he described it explicitly: Who will curse the
hand on which the curse of necessity falls? Who articulated that necessity,
who? Bchner is a representative of Determinism, he talks of the dreadful
fatalism of history. For him, there is no individual freedom, the individual
is merely foam on the wave.
The We poor people musical theme shows how important social
Determinism also was to Alban Berg; it resounds time and again at key points
throughout the opera as a reminder motif.
Wozzeck is much more than a clinical case study. Opera and drama are an
appeal to our social conscience that is still valid today and humble us in the
face of the illusion of complete individual freedom.
Anne Schwanewilms as Marie, Wiener Staatsoper, revival 2013
Woyzeck | Georg Bchner Woyzeck | Georg Bchner
43 42
WOYZECK
Captain seated on the chair, Woyzeck is shaving him.
Captain: Slow down, Woyzeck, take it easy; one thing at a time! You are
making me quite dizzy. What shall I do with the extra 10 minutes if you finish
early today? Woyzeck, just think, you have a good thirty years to live yet. Thirty
years! Thats three hundred and sixty months! Not to mention the days! Hours!
And minutes! What will you do with such a vast amount of time? Get yourself
organized, Woyzeck!
Woyzeck: Yes, sir.
Captain: I get quite worried about the world when I start thinking about
eternity. Stay busy, Woyzeck, stay busy! Eternal: thats eternal, thats eternal
you can see that. But then again its not eternal at all, its just the twinkling of
an eye, yes, just the twinkling of an eye. Woyzeck, it makes me shudder to think
that the world takes a whole day to rotate. What a waste of time! Whats the
purpose of it all? Woyzeck, I cant even look at a millwheel any more, it makes
me feel melancholy.
Woyzeck: Yes, sir.
Captain: Woyzeck, you always look so rushed! A good man doesnt do that, a
good man with a clear conscience. Well, say something, Woyzeck! Whats the
weather like today?
Woyzeck: Bad, sir, bad: windy!
Captain: I can feel it. Theres a blustering out there. A wind like that has the
same effect on me as a mouse. (Cannily): I think its out of the south-north?
Woyzeck: Yes, sir.
Captain: Ha ha ha! South-north! Ha ha ha! Oh, you are so stupid, so horribly
stupid! (Moved) Woyzeck, youre a good fellow but (solemnly) Woyzeck,
you have no sense of decency! Decency, I mean when a fellow is decent, you
understand. It is a good word. You have a child without the blessing of the
church, as our reverend garrison chaplain says without the blessing of the
church. His words, not mine.
Woyzeck: Captain, the good Lord wont check to see if the poor little devil
had an Amen said over him before he was made. The Lord said: let the little
children come to me.
Captain: Whats that youre saying? What sort of an answer is that? Youre
making me quite confused with your answer. I dont mean him, I mean you,
you
Woyzeck: We poor people. You see, sir, its money. Money! People like me
with no money we dont set much store by decency in this world! Were also
made of flesh and blood. Our kind are badly off in this world and the next. I
reckon if we made it to heaven we would have to help make the thunder.
Captain: Woyzeck, you have no virtue! You are not a virtuous man! Flesh and
blood? When I lie by the window after the rain and look at the pretty white
stockings as they hop across the streets damn it, Woyzeck, I feel love! Im
flesh and blood too. But virtue, Woyzeck! Virtue! How am I supposed to pass
the time? I always say to myself: youre a virtuous man, (emotionally) a good
fellow, a good fellow.
Woyzeck: Yes, sir, virtue I havent figured it out yet. You see, we poor people,
we have no virtue, we just follow nature. But if I were a gentleman and had a
hat and a watch and a topcoat and fine words, then Id be virtuous all right.
Virtue must be a wonderful thing, captain. But Im just a poor wretch!
Captain: Its all right, Woyzeck. You are a good fellow, a good fellow. But you
think too much, its wearing you out. You always look so rushed. This talk has
quite got to me. Be off now, and dont run. Slowly, walk nice and slowly down
the street! Excerpt from Woyzeck by Georg Bchner
Bergs Wozzeck and Bchners Woyzeck | Irmgard Harrer
45 44
ALBAN BERGS WOZZECK AND
GEORG BCHNERS WOYZECK
Deeply moved, on 5 May 1914 nineteen-year-old Alban Berg watched the
premire of Georg Bchners drama Woyzeck, the first drama of despair
in German literature (Dietmar Holland), on the Kammerspiele stage at
Rotenturmstrasse 20 in Vienna. The composer, who had a great interest in
literature, immediately decided to use Bchners dramatic scenes as the text
source for an opera.
He wrote to his friend Anton Webern: It made such a tremendous
impression on me that I immediately decided (also on listening to it a second
time) to set it to music. It is not just the fate of this poor man, exploited and
tormented by everyone, that affects me so much, but also the tremendous
atmosphere in the individual scenes.
The action of the piece is based on an historic criminal case that was eagerly
at the time. In 1821, the wigmaker and barber Johann Christian Woyzeck
stabbed his lover to death in Leipzig. Public interest was attracted not so
much by the murder, but flared up due to the forensic physicians opinion
on the accountability of the murderer. In 1824 after a court case that lasted
three years Woyzeck was beheaded on the market square in Leipzig, before
a crowd of interested spectators (see page 32).
The son of a doctor, Georg Bchner was born in Darmstadt in the grand
duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1813. He had studied medicine and followed the
case with great concern. Twelve years later he started to write a drama based
on it. However, he did not write a documentary piece or a reconstruction
of the case. His lead character is a fusilier, the lowest-ranking soldier, whom
penury compels to provide private services for his captain and to volunteer as
a subject for human experiments being conducted by a doctor. He needs to
perform these humiliating and debasing services so that he can give money
to his lover Marie, who has a child by him. When Marie betrays him with the
strutting Drum Major, he stabs her to death.
From the very beginning, Bchners anti-hero Woyzeck exhibits the symptoms
of a psychosis. Material need, overwork, exploitation and a ninety-day diet of
Handbill for the performance of Woyzeck (Wozzeck) attended by Alban Berg at Vienna's
Residenzbhne
Bergs Wozzeck and Bchners Woyzeck | Irmgard Harrer Bergs Wozzeck and Bchners Woyzeck | Irmgard Harrer
47 46
beans, which the Doctor keeps prescribing for his experiment and to which
Woyzeck has contractually agreed, harm his body and soul. The murder is the
result of the progressive physical and psychological collapse of the murderer.
Bchner accuses not Woyzeck, but the representatives of the institutions
of the military and science, embodied by the captain and the Doctor.
Woyzecks crime was preceded by a social crime, the crime of downgrading,
marginalization and scorn. The devastating mass poverty in wide strata of the
population, especially in Hesse, form the background to this tragedy.
When Georg Bchner wrote down the story of Johann Christian Woyzeck,
he was 22 years old and was seeking asylum in Zrich. The student had
had to flee his home once before with the help of escape agents he had
fled to Strasbourg, which was known for its liberal asylum practices and
offered protection to German republican-minded intellectuals. As an ardent
supporter of the goals of the French Revolution, Bchner committed to
violence as a necessity to overthrow the feudal social system that he saw
in power in Hesse-Darmstadt and which he considered responsible for the
rampant destitution. He saw in the legitimized regimen a law that makes the
great mass of citizens beasts of labour trying to satisfy the unnatural needs
of an insignificant and spoiled minority. But the young Bchner was one of
the few fellow campaigners of his time to recognize that a revolution without
the involvement of the lower strata of the population is futile and doomed
to failure. He believed that radical enlightenment was critical to the success
of a revolution, and he practised this together with Friedrich Weidig in the
opposition newspaper The Hesse Messenger with the call, borrowed from the
French Revolution: Peace to the huts! War on the palaces!
In addition to achieving civil freedoms, Bchner was always also interested
in solving the social question: The relationship between poor and rich is
the only revolutionary element in the world. The secret organization Society
for Human Rights he founded with friends had the goal of establishing a
republican constitution, which he considered the only form to adequately
recognize human dignity.
The flourishing policy spy system in the grand duchy led to wanted posters of
Bchner being posted and his subsequent flight. Initially registered under a
false name, he later received a security card, a kind of interim identity card, so
that he could devote himself undisturbed to his philosophical and scientific
studies in Strasbourg.
He was working at the same time on the comedy Leonce and Lena and on
the novella Lenz about the poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. In 1835 he
published his revolutionary drama Dantons Death, on which he had been
working before his flight.
In summer and autumn 1836 Bchner worked on Woyzeck, in the autumn
he obtained his doctorate at the newly founded University of Zrich. In
Zrich he was able to set himself up as a private lecturer, giving lectures on
comparative anatomy. Shortly thereafter he received a provisional residence
permit as a special class asylum seeker. In spring 1837, Georg Bchner
contracted typhoid fever and died at the age of 24.
Woyzeck, left as a dramatic fragment and first edited by Karl Emil Franzos, is
Bchners sharpest indictment of blatant injustice, a social tragedy in which a
representative of the Fourth Estate, a proletarian, is at the heart of the action.
From the perspective of opera literature of the day, Alban Bergs use of
this story was shocking. Bergs revered teacher Arnold Schoenberg reacted
correspondingly to the plans of his pupil: opera should deal rather with
angels than officers servants. Berg nevertheless started to compose,
keeping a close eye on progress with the libretto, even though his work was
interrupted several times when he was called up for military duty. He later
admitted that through Wozzeck he had been able to come to terms with
some of his military experiences that had depressed and humiliated him.
Bergs text source was initially the edition revised by Karl Emil Franzos, who
had however made cuts and changes. The spelling Wozzeck instead of the
correct spelling Woyzeck that Bchner used can be traced back to Franzos.
Later, Berg studied other versions of the text, of which no. 92 from the Insel
Library was the most important.
From Bchners 27 dramatic scenes, he initially selected 17 which he then
compiled in a libretto with three acts, each with five scenes. In the process,
he tightened the story and created an arc of suspense spanning a three-part
structure, with exposition dnouement (turning point) catastrophe. By
submitting to the imperative requirement of giving each of these scenes and
each of the related entracte sections their own unmistakable features, and a
Bergs Wozzeck and Bchners Woyzeck | Irmgard Harrer
49 48
rounded off and finished character also in the music it came about quite
naturally that I incorporated everything that ensures consistent features on
the one hand and wholeness on the other: the much discussed incorporation
of old and new musical forms and therefore also those otherwise used only
in absolute music.
In April 1922 the instrumentation was complete, and the premire took
place on 14 December 1925 under Erich Kleiber at Berlin State Opera Unter
den Linden. The audience reacted for the most part with applause, easily
drowning out several whistles and some hissing, and the composer was
called back to the stage several times. The critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt
saw in the opera an event of significance to the history of music drama
in general . For critic Paul Zschorlich on the other hand, the music of
Alban Berg sounds truly ghastly The orchestra squeals, whinnies and
burps. Zschorlich could of course not prevent the opera from being
successful.
In a speech, Berg addressed his audience directly: From the moment the
curtain opens to the moment it closes for the last time, there should not
be one person in the audience who notices any of the various fugues and
inventions, string and sonata movements, variations and passacaglias, not
one whose mind is focused on anything other than the concept for this
opera, reaching far beyond the individual fate of Wozzeck.
And Schoenberg, as a Jewish emigrant to the USA, admitted years later: I
was extremely surprised when this gentle, shy young man had the courage
to embark on an undertaking that seemed doomed to failure: to compose
Wozzeck, a drama of such exceptional tragedy that seemed to exclude music.
Indeed, it even contained scenes from daily life, irreconcilable with the
notion of opera, which was still living off stylized costumes and standardized
characters. He succeeded. Wozzeck was one of the greatest operatic success
stories.
KS Max Lorenz as Drum Major, Wiener Staatsoper, 1955
Music at the time of Wozzeck | Oliver Lng
51 50
MUSIC AT THE TIME OF WOZZECK
The era in which Wozzeck was composed seems to us today to be an
extremely eventful one, crisscrossed with experimental and expansive
artistic processes. Above all it seems to be an era in which polystylistic trends
manifested themselves more markedly than in many other epochs. The
causes of this parallel development of various stylistic approaches is to be
found in many individual factors that influenced each other.
An obvious starting point to take here would be the music dramas of Richard
Wagner and the opera oeuvre of Giuseppe Verdi, both of which greatly
influenced later generations both consciously and unconsciously, as disciples
or adversaries. Yet in the early 20th century more and more new trends
developed that drifted steadily further apart in a diverse environment. It
is significant that it was not just tonal language that changed; a number of
associated parameters also underwent radical modification. To mention but
one example, there was the phenomenon of social transformation taking
place, and, associated with that, aspects of reception: although the style
gaining an increasingly strong footing, later designated light music, had an
influence on serious music (also later so named), it soon went its own way.
New music developed more robustly than before. It was very distinct
from traditional forms and was no longer supported by the public at large
or even by a sizeable clientele. If Verdi could almost without challenge be
called a unique talent, if Wagner embraced the devotion and opposition of
an audience equally intensely in his work, if Puccini was generally widely
accepted, there was suddenly especially with the Second Viennese School
a new movement that was neither adopted on a wide scale nor well received
by broad sections of the population. The influence of radio and of the first
recording techniques also changed how people listened to music and musical
life and led to the development of completely new instruments. In the 1920s
personalities like Leon Theremin experimented with the aetherphone,
Jrg Mager with the spherophone, and Maurice Martenon with the ondes
Martonot named after him all instruments that tried to take advantage of
new technical possibilities.
Page from the score of Wozzeck, Alban Berg's autograph
Music at the time of Wozzeck | Oliver Lng Music at the time of Wozzeck | Oliver Lng
53 52
In addition, as traditional forms were left behind and individual traditions
eliminated, basic standpoints were redefined and greater freedom was
allowed in dealing with forms and compositional approaches. Numerous
artistic forms of expression evolved, there was overlapping between the
different approaches, alternating between deliberate recourse to historic
forms and abandonment of tonality.
The different directions cannot be conclusively described, even in extremely
summary terms; for this reason a few glimpses at trends and key works
at the opera in Vienna from the years around the composition and first
performance of Wozzeck must suffice. These by no means cover the entire
spectrum of compositionally important works, but they at least give a
manageable overview of music drama events (in Vienna). This overview does
not cover the artistic concepts of the various directions (Richard Strauss /
Franz Schalk 1919 1924, Franz Schalk 1924 1929 and Clemens Krauss 1929
1934), nor does it include those works that were premired well before
their first performance at the Staatsoper, such as Andrea Chnier (premire:
1896, first performance at the Wiener Staatsoper: 1926).
First the rather short list of world premires. The year 1919 saw one of
the most important world premires at the opera house on the Ring: Die
Frau ohne Schatten, his last Romantic opera, as Richard Strauss called it,
based on a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Strauss ends the fairy tale in
a gleaming C major, as if signalling a final conglomeration of (late) Romantic
sensory forces. The following year, two world premires of works by Felix
von Weingartner: Die Dorfschule (in subject matter and music, an allusion to
the buffo operas of the past) and Meister Andrea, a Japanese tragedy. In 1921
Julius Bittners Die Kohlhaymerin followed, a humorous work reminiscent
of operettas.
Wilhelm Kienzls Sanctissimum, a melodramatic allegory came out in
1925, a folksy work about a minstrel who sins against his art, which drew the
following remarks from the Wiener Zeitung: Kienzl sings the song as it was
given to him, but pulls no harmonic, rhythmic or melodic face as he does so.
The same year, Marco Franks Das Bildnis der Madonna was presented, a
Renaissance artist drama with a tragic ending, in which the reviewers at times
detected strains of Puccini, Strauss and Wagner. The staged premire of Igor
Stravinskys Oedipus Rex was undoubtedly more spectacular: in its ritual flow
the one-hour piece exhibits similarities with other Stravinsky pieces, such
as Le Sacr du printemps and Les Noces: Stravinsky had the French text for
his piece translated into Latin to achieve a more mysterious colouring in the
sound of the language.
The list of Staatsoper first performances during these years is more extensive
and begins to start in the year 1919 again - with Hans Pfitzners Palestrina.
Pfitzners key music drama makes extreme demands of an opera house as
does Die Frau ohne Schatten, incidentally: a large orchestra and a sizeable
cast frequently bring a festival opera to mind. It would be all to easy simply
to categorize Pfitzner as part of the Wagnerian succession, precisely because
despite leitmotiv technique he applies the technique it very differently
from Wagner and was also a child of his time in his treatment of dissonance.
Drawing on 16th century music, naturally also in terms of theme, and
especially artful counterpoint work characterize the piece.
Franz Schrekers Die Gezeichneten and Puccinis Trittico were both on the
program in 1920, the same year as a double performance of Schoenbergs
Gurrelieder took place. In 1921 Die Tote Stadt by Erich Wolfgang Korngold
was heard for the first time. His profuse, late Romantic musical language
was received with enthusiasm; however a short while later the work was
entirely displaced by a completely different kind of work. On 31 December
1927, Ernst Kreneks Jonny spielt auf (world premire 1927) overwhelmed
audiences. The following year the opera was scheduled thirty times, eclipsing
Korngolds Das Wunder der Heliane which had premired a short time
earlier. The surprisingly new facet of Jonny spielt auf lay in the skilful
combination of the various stylistic elements and the musical exploitation
of individual trendy momenta, such as jazz, but especially in the up-to-the-
minute language, in the examination of art at different levels.
In general, Zeitoper (opera of the time) was in season. It recounted stories
straight from life, mostly tongue-in-cheek and playing at being modern. The
action took place in living rooms and hotel foyers, the characters were mostly
contemporary people who on every occasion had modern problems. And
items of daily usage also played a role. Telephone, loudspeaker, radio, the
Zeitoper set out to be parodistic, and sometimes also socio-critical.
Music at the time of Wozzeck | Oliver Lng Music at the time of Wozzeck | Oliver Lng
55 54
Paul Hindemiths Cardillac also has the artist as its topic, however in a far
different manner from Jonny spielt auf (premire: 1926, first Staatsoper
performance: 1927). In this work, the tenor saxophone spurned at the time
as a jazz instrument was used as the lead instrument for the title role. The
polyphonic style of Hindemith, in which the melodic element can only be
understood from the interplay of simultaneously occurring strains, drawing
on baroque forms, the use of arioso and recitative-like elements, instruments
in concert and at times creating rhythms initially caused many opera
reviewers in Vienna to be extremely critical of Hindemith. The Neue Freie
Presse reported: The composer of this opera is in fact not far distant from
the recently proclaimed music of movement and machines: of movement
with contrapuntal impediments, of the machine as the carrier of soulless
mechanics.
Just prior to that, Puccinis Turandot was first heard at the Wiener Staatsoper
(October 1926, world premire in Milan in April of the same year), and
Franco Alfanos Madonna Imperia, an opera incorporating elements of
both verismo and Impressionist-sounding music. A short while later, in 1929,
Maurice Ravels LEnfant et les Sortilges was first heard at the Opera House
on the Ring (world premire 1925).
Richard Strauss Intermezzo (world premire in Dresden in 1924) was
performed for the first time at the House on the Ring in 1927. It is a
conversation piece which with autobiographic elements deals with
marital conflict. Strauss himself called the piece a bourgeois comedy. One
and a half years later, the Staatsoper presented his Egyptian Helen for the
first time. For this opera, Strauss turned once again to mythological opera,
with libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
It is an important aspect of Staatsoper history that significant, representative
works of the era, such the operas of Kurt Weill or most of Leo Janceks
operatic oeuvre (with the exception of Jen ufa which was premired in 1918
and performed at least twice in 1926, after an eight-year break), as well as
Arnold Schoenbergs Die glckliche Hand and Zoltn Kodlys Hry Jnos
did not make their way onto the season schedule. By contrast, Korngolds
adaptation of Eine Nacht in Venedig was first presented in 1929. Works
by Max von Oberleithner (Die eiserne Heiland) and Jaromr Weinberger
(Schwanda der Dudelsackpfeifer) were performed in the same year 1930
as Bergs Wozzeck.
Even though as already indicated the repertoire of the Staatsoper cannot
be considered representative of the long list of European operas written in
this era, the list of world premires and first performances at the House on
the Ring in this time clearly reveals the breadth and diversity of the music
composed in an age of new beginnings and structural re-examination; music
that in its stylistic variety and intertwining of different epochs became a focus
of cultural history and achieved a milestone status like few others before it.
Interview
57 56
ALBAN BERG | Interview
Wozzeck is generally described as the first completely atonal opera. However,
there is no absolute consensus on the term atonality. When it first surfaced,
people initially used it primarily for the compositions of the Second Viennese
School (in other words Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern),
although precisely these composers rejected the term as such. Simply put,
the term is widely used to indicate the absence of a distinct tonal centre. A
great number of works by a wide variety of composers and schools then fall
under this definition.
The following is an excerpt from an interview that Alban Berg gave on this
topic on 23 April 1930 on Radio Wien.
Well then, dear Maestro Berg, let us begin!
Alban Berg: You begin, then. Id rather have the last word.
Are you so sure of your ground?
Alban Berg: As sure as anyone can be who for a quarter of a century has
taken part in the development of a new art; sure, that is, not only through
understanding and experience, but which is more through faith.
Fine! It will be simplest, then, to start at once with the title of our dialogue:
What is atonality?
Alban Berg: It is not so easy to answer that question with a formula that
would also serve as a definition. When this expression was used for the first
time probably in some newspaper criticism it could naturally only have
been, as the word plainly says, to describe a kind of music with a harmonic
course that did not correspond to the laws of tonality previously recognized.
Which means: in the beginning was the Word, or rather a word, that
was to compensate for the helplessness with which people faced a new
phenomenon.
Alban Berg: Yes, that, but more too: this designation of atonal was
doubtless intended to disparage, as were words like arrhythmic, amelodic,
Alban Berg
Interview Interview
59 58
question much more easily. Even if certain harmonic possibilities are lost
through abandonment of major and minor, all the other qualities we demand
of a true and genuine music still remain.
Today people know that atonal music for its own sake can be fascinating,
inevitably in some cases where there is true art! Our problem is only to
show whether atonal music may really be called musical in the same sense
as all earlier music. That is, to show, as you have said, whether if only the
harmonic foundation has changed, all the other elements of former music
are still present in the new.
Alban Berg: That I declare they are, and I could prove it to you in every
measure of a modern score. Prove above all to begin with the most
important that in this music, as in any other, the principal voice, the theme,
is fundamental, that the course of the music is in a sense determined by it.
But is melody in the traditional sense at all possible in atonal music?
Alban Berg: Yes, of course, even vocal melody.
Well, so far as song is concerned, Mr Berg, atonal music surely does follow
a new path. There is certainly something in it that has never been heard
before, I would almost like to say, something temporarily shocking.
Alban Berg: Only as concerns harmony, on that we agree. But it is quite
wrong to regard this new melodic line as taking an entirely new path, as you
declare, in comparison to the usual characteristics of melodic procedure,
or even as never before heard and shocking. Nor is this true of a vocal line,
even if it is marked with what someone recently described as intervals of an
instrumental chromaticism, distorted, jagged, wide-spaced; no that it thereby
totally disregards the requirements of the human voice.
I never said that, but I cannot help feeling that vocal melody and melody in
general does seem never to have been treated like that before.
Alban Berg: That is just what I am objecting to. I maintain on the contrary
that vocal melody, even as described, yes, caricatured, in these terms has
always existed, especially in German music. I further maintain that this
asymmetric, which came up at the same time. But while these words were
merely convenient designations for specific cases, the word atonal I must
add: unfortunately came to stand collectively for music of which it was
assumed not only that it had no harmonic centre (to use tonality in Rameaus
sense), but was also devoid of all other musical attributes, such as melos,
rhythm, form, in part and whole. As a result, today the designation as good as
signifies a music that is no music. In fact it is used to imply the exact opposite
of what has heretofore been considered music.
Aha, a reproach! And a fair one, I confess. But now tell me yourself, Mr
Berg, does not such a distinction indeed exist, and does not the negation of
relationship to a given tonic lead in fact to the collapse of the whole edifice
of music?
Alban Berg: Before I answer that, I would like to say this: even if this so-called
atonal music cannot, harmonically speaking, be brought into relation with a
major/minor harmonic system, still, surely, there was music even before that
system in its turn came into existence
... and what beautiful and imaginative music! ...
Alban Berg: ... so it doesnt follow that there may not (at least considering
the chromatic scale and the new chord forms arising out of it) be discovered
in the atonal compositions of the last quarter century a harmonic centre
which would naturally not be identical with the old tonic. Even if this could
not happen in the form of a systematic theory
I find your doubts unjustified!
Alban Berg: All the better!
You have not yet answered my question whether there does not indeed exist
a distinction such as that implied in the word between earlier music and
that of today, and so whether the giving up of relationship to a keynote, a
tonic, has not indeed unsettled the whole structure of music?
Alban Berg: Now that we have agreed that the negation of major and minor
tonality does not necessarily bring about harmonic anarchy, I can answer that
Interview
61 60
so-called atonal music, at least insofar as it has emanated from Vienna, has
also naturally adhered to the masterworks of German music in this respect
and not with all due respect to Italian bel canto opera. Melody that is
linked with harmony rich in progressions, which is almost the same thing as
being bold, may naturally, so long as one doesnt understand the harmonic
implications, seem distorted. This is no less the case with a thoroughly
chromatic style of writing, for which there are hundreds of examples in
Wagner. But take rather a melody of Schubert, from the famous song Letzte
Hoffnung. Is that distorted enough for you? Or the following phrase from the
song Wasserfluth (measure 11-12), which is barely understandable without
the harmonic basis.
To stay with Schubert, the melodist par excellence, what would you say
about this treatment of the vocal line from the song Der strmische Morgen
(measure 4-8)? Are these not typical examples of an extremely jagged vocal
line? And this, for a particularly wide-spaced?
You will find similar, quasi instrumental lines in Mozarts vocal melodies.
Just take a look at the score for Don Giovanni. For example the following
music for Donna Elvira (measure 1), as if written for strings, or the disguised
clarinet music in the same aria (measure 5) or the instrumental music in the
Leporello-Zerlina duet (measure 30-31) or the entire role of Donna Anna,
or to name a particularly striking example of a jagged, wide-spaced melody
with a two-octave range the following music from Cos fan tutte (Act I,
Fiordiligis aria, measure 9-13)! You see that there is another treatment of the
voice from the one that has always been held up to us as a model and which
essentially distinguishes itself only through extreme use of sustained tones
in the upper fifth of the voice in question. However, as the classics have
shown, the human voice is also an extremely agile instrument, expressive
in all registers, animated and yet capable of declamation indeed, an ideal
instrument. You will also see from these examples from the classics that it
has nothing to do with atonality if a melody, even in opera music, departs
from the voluptuous tenderness of Italian cantilena. It is an element that you
will furthermore seek in vain in Bach, whose melodic potency nobody will
deny.
Josef von Manowarda as Wozzeck, Wiener Staatsoper, 1930
Musical form in Wozzeck | Johanna Graf
63 62
MUSICAL FORM IN WOZZECK
Solutions to the Opernproblem?
Alban Bergs Wozzeck was written after the so-called Second Viennese School
had systematically completed the step towards atonality. For the creation of a
full-length opera by these composers, this meant amongst other things that
a conventional form the logic of which was traditionally not insignificantly
governed by the rules of harmony was no longer possible.
Berg was fully aware of this new situation: he expressly examined these
challenges and questions also at a theoretical level. With the aid of more
stringent, in many instances older forms of music, he created a basic musical
and structural framework on the basis of which he was able to dedicate
himself entirely to the consummate arrangement at all levels of a drama as
complex as Woyzeck. The other remarkable thing about his reflections was
his preoccupation with an opera dilemma according to Wagner, and also
his very deliberate recourse to the latters concept of drama. Thus it was
that one of the most important works of music theatre was created at the
beginning of the 20th century, apparently in the midst of a crisis, to which
Berg found an individual and logical solution.
The moment I decided to write an opera, I had no other intention ... than
to give to the theatre that which belongs to the theatre. In other words, I
intended to arrange the music in such a way that it would be aware at all
times of its obligation to serve the drama. As can be seen from this quotation
taken from the treatise The Opera Problem, Alban Berg committed his first
opera to classical drama, which Richard Wagner in particular had last used in
connection with (his) music theatre. Over and above this, Berg firmly turned
his back on the overpowering music dramatist Wagner because he strove
to achieve musical variety, which, according to Berg, must inevitably be in
opposition to through-composed passages. Like other composers of music-
theatre works at this time, to an extent he was left with no other option
than to develop his own dramaturgy, to create alternative form models, and
to follow new paths solutions to the opera problem.
KS Heinz Zednik as Captain, Wiener Staatsoper, 1987
Musical form in Wozzeck | Johanna Graf Musical form in Wozzeck | Johanna Graf
65 64
The aforementioned drama now finds an entirely tangible counterpart in
the basic arrangement of Bergs Wozzeck, because the three acts follow
the classical structure of the drama through exposition, dnouement and
subsequent catastrophe. The protagonist Wozzeck and his contemporaries
are introduced in the first act. The dramatic development of the second act
unfolds from Wozzecks initial, faint suspicions about Maries fidelity right up
to his confrontation with the drunken Drum Major bragging coarsely about
the adultery he has committed. Wozzecks murder of Marie in the third act as
well as his vain search for the knife, in the course of which he himself drowns
in the pond, represent the catastrophe, which is followed by a short epilogue.
With respect to the music too, each of the three acts is conceived in a
larger form establishing the context. Thus each of the five character pieces
exposes the five persons of the first act (suite, rhapsody and hunting song,
military march and lullaby, passacaglia, rondo). The second act represents a
symphony in five movements (allegro, fantasy and fugue, largo, scherzo and
trio, rondo). The six inventions on various musical parameters (invention
on a theme, a note, a rhythm, a chord, and a key) form the third act. When
presented in this way, the completely symmetrical structure of three acts,
each with five scenes, becomes immediately apparent, along with their exact
musical equivalents (the additional sixth invention is merely a separate
orchestral epilogue). In addition, the transition between individual scenes is
achieved with short symphonic preludes, entractes and postludes.
The opera Wozzeck is often described as the first atonal music theatre work
of significant scope and significant length (Berg himself however argued for
differentiation in the term atonal). The utilization of actual strict forms is
just one possible way of ensuring cohesion in a piece of music over a longer
period even without the structures prescribed by harmony. More expansive
contexts can also be achieved using other intrinsic elements of form, some
of which Wagner made use of not least in his very specific form dilemma:
motif-theme unity and working with extremely vivid leitmotifs (e.g. a kind of
murder weapon motif) or motifs of more symbolic importance (e.g. a rushing
motif for Wozzeck, fear or secrecy motifs characterizing Marie), symphonic
entractes or at the harmonic level the closing chords for each act built using
the same notes but in different arrangements; these are all techniques for
creating cohesion that Berg deliberately used. Using certain rhythmic basic
patterns and resorting to older musical forms or compositional techniques
are also methods of creating structure (for example dances, marches,
passacaglias and fugues). Of great importance to Berg was also the technique
of variation, of which he made extensive use in this opera.
Given the fact that Berg considered that even the music should serve the
drama, form seems to be no more than a tool. Berg himself expressly
rejected the idea that he had developed innovations for music theatre with
Wozzeck, but rather refers to the single achievement on his part that he
considers as such: the fact that all these forms cannot be distinguished by
the listener, that the structure and distribution of forms function as a unit,
without dwelling on detailed analysis and a particular focus on individual
elements. The rather meticulous distribution of forms may therefore not be
perceived in its individual components; however, as a musical foundation,
this artful structure spills over into our perception, thereby giving it
enormous expression.
Is Wozzeck then, as implied time and again in various studies, the ultimate
music drama in the Wagnerian sense? Although completely disregarded up
to now in this text, as they do not ostensibly relate to the musical form,
the source text and Bergs treatment of the same are naturally extremely
relevant in his work. Although when working on Wozzeck Berg believed he
faced more of a musical task than a literary one, which can only be tackled
using the laws of musical structure and not with those of dramaturgy, it is
not misguided to talk of a very close interconnection between these two
components. This may be a basic characteristic of music theatre in general,
but in the case of Wozzeck the disposition of forms chosen by Berg seems
especially appropriate to the drama.
Despite the intricate formal design, or possibly even precisely because of
this, Berg achieved the greatest possible dramatic expression and powerful
sympathy with the protagonists suffering, causing Adorno to declare
Wozzeck the first model of music of real humanism. Furthermore, the
symphonic entractes and the previously mentioned motif-theme tradition
seems to bring to bear much at the symphonic level that Wagner strove for
with his almost absolute idea of the symphony. Music theatre history had
67
Musical form in Wozzeck | Johanna Graf
66
evidently reached a turning point with its opera problem (in our context
reduced to a form problem) and the resulting search for new options in
terms of forms. With Wozzeck, it now faced unrelated new trends, such as
those of the Second Vienna School, which for their part broke the mould in
regard to form and structural formal principles.
Not in his wildest dreams would Berg apparently have tried to reform the
art form of opera. Rather, he posed the disputatious question: Must we
always keep on refining things? Regardless of whether such remarks by
Berg should be taken seriously as modest restraint or should merely cause
us to smile, Wozzeck was apparently composed without the least theoretical
aspirations; Berg was not afraid of categorical and stylistic classification. The
following question that he asked might even seem nave: Is it not enough
to have the opportunity of writing beautiful music for good theatre, or,
more precisely, to write such beautiful music that it can despite that be
turned into good theatre? And yet it seems to be this, which is perhaps
not impartiality but rather a conscious focus on and intuitive trust in the
essentials, that allowed a masterpiece of this magnitude to be created, and
in the case of Wozzeck with which Berg in fact gave to the theatre that
which belongs to the theatre.
KS Falk Struckmann as Wozzeck, Wiener Staatsoper, 1995
Vocal roles in Wozzeck | Erich Seitter Vocal roles in Wozzeck | Erich Seitter
69 68
VOCAL ROLES IN WOZZECK
Although the premire took place in 1925 in other words some 90 years
ago this music drama is still considered a contemporary opera. Alban
Berg boldly incorporated parts of Bchners dramatic fragment almost word
for word and composed perhaps the most revolutionary opera of the 20th
century. The atonal music brilliantly underscores the staged/dramatic blocks
of action in almost film-like, bizarre, abrupt segments (in this context I always
think e.g. of Fritz Langs Metropolis).
The individual roles are predetermined by the role type and vocal character,
leaving little room for casting compromises. The word singing actor applies
here and rightly so.
Wozzeck demands a rich, dramatic earthy baritone, capable of conveying
all the mood changes in word and sound (from the stupid, lifeless timbre
of the downtrodden man to the rebelling, raging murderer and distraught
suicide victim). It was with this role that Walter Berry, then just 25 years
old, laid the foundation for his international career. Other outstanding
performers of this role have included Theo Adam, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau,
Franz Grundheber and Geraint Evans.
Marie requires a lyric dramatic soprano with sensuous timbre and a broad
range of expression (from longing to anger and seduction, to prayer and
fear) all the way through to spoken declamation. Given the vocal range,
this role can also be sung by a mezzo soprano (like Santuzza) in this case
the sensuously seductive nature of the role comes to the fore. I remember
Christa Ludwig, Waltraud Meier, Brigitte Fassbaender in the role; famous
soprano performers have included Christel Goltz, Anja Silja and Hildegard
Behrens.
The Captain should be cast with a tenor with a strident, sharp sound, a true
character tenor who must communicate the text clearly in order to convey
the sadistic, smooth, almost diabolical character. Peter Klein, Gerhard Stolze
as well as Heinz Zednik were ideal in this role. For the Doctor, an opera
house needs a character bass who can render the partially alarming medical
diagnoses in a dry tone. A lyric dramatic tenor is needed for the Drum Major,
capable of great power and gleaming lustre. He needs explosive high notes to
portray this showy, athletic, brutal character with the necessary vocal colour.
Hans Beirer was wonderful, but so were James King and Thomas Moser.
Andres should be cast with a young lyric tenor, a Mozart tenor with a bright
voice he is the only nave shining light in the opera. The smaller roles too
should not be underestimated; they each require a casual, relaxed style, both
dramatically and vocally. The Fool a pithy character tenor must have a
good falsetto, the two journeymen a full lyric bass and a rich lyric baritone
must be young singers with fresh vocal lustre. And Margret should ideally
sung by a lyric mezzo soprano with sensuous timbre.
Wozzeck as I understand him | Rainer Bischof
71 70
WOZZECK AS I UNDERSTAND HIM
It is a great pleasure and a great honour for me to accept the Wiener
Staatsopers invitation to say a few personal words about Alban Bergs
Wozzeck. Since my composition teacher was Hans Erich Apostel, who in turn
was a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, I feel that I am a legitimate
grandpupil of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg.
I do not have favourite works in any of the arts. But a work that I can identify
with due to my intense preoccupation with it generally gains a favourite
status; at the moment, Wozzeck is my favourite opera.
Bergs Wozzeck expresses the spirit of an entire era in a way that almost no
other opera does. For me, it is more even than that: it is the conclusion of a
period of development spurred by a specific historical impetus: the cultural
and scientific heyday that set the tone in Vienna in around 1900, with a lead
time and follow-up reaching into the 1930s, until the evil spirit of National
Socialism destroyed everything.
When talking about music in this context, one should not fail to mention
Gustav Mahler, as he should be regarded as the forerunner and role model
of the Schoenberg-Webern-Berg triumvirate. The important factor in this
intellectual development is the symbiosis of ethics and art, in fact giving
them almost equal ranking, and a high level of education in all areas of art,
but especially in music and literature. Mahler one of the most highly erudite
composers of all times gave his two young colleagues Webern and Berg the
well-intentioned advice of emulating him. Read Dostoyevsky anyway,
that is often more important than the theory of harmony and counterpoint,
Mahler once said to the two young composers. Weberns answer to Mahler
was: But we have our own Strindberg anyway.
The extremely broad range of education in all areas of art and science was
the humus that caused the arts in fin-de-sicle-Vienna to flourish. Reason was
inspired by imagination sometimes even over-inspired and gave birth to
reasoning in imagination as an essential foundation of the arts.
For me, Bergs Wozzeck is the last great milestone, the accumulation of an
educational breadth in European culture that probably no longer exists.
Perhaps Ernst Kreneks opera Karl V should be also mentioned in this
KS Hildegard Behrens as Marie, Valentin Heidrich as Maries Son, Wiener Staatsoper, 1987
Wozzeck as I understand him | Rainer Bischof Wozzeck as I understand him | Rainer Bischof
73 72
context. One can learn an enormous amount about the development of
art from Bergs Wozzeck and diagnose the specifically Viennese aspect of
Viennese cultural intellect from this opera, and naturally also from Bergs
entire oeuvre. It (Bergs uvre) is faithful to an Austrian tradition: the
note of resignation discovered by Schubert, but also the folk-like quality of
Raimunds dialect, with its simultaneously foolish and wise combinations of
scepticism and catholicity, in Der Bauer als Millionr and Valentin in Der
Verschwender. For all its austere refinement of compositional technique,
Bergs music speaks in dialect. The performance instruction Viennese given
above a theme in the violin concerto anything but a superimposition of
folkloric seasoning divulges as much. (Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg.)
Berg started with a designation that was making the rounds as a topic of
discussion, namely opera as a total work of art, or gesamtkunstwerk in the
Wagnerian sense of the term. Berg takes over Bchners poetry, but changes
Bchners Woyzeck not only linguistically into Wozzeck; through the story
and not least through his own life he also changes our perspective of the
people and problems portrayed in Wozzeck.
The arts and humanities have the capacity to change the times, and this was
one of the great topics in art at the end of the 19th century and early 20th
century. From Sren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson to
Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the elements that flowed directly into music
made it possible for music as a temporal art to look at events both forwards
and backwards. The titles Schoenberg gives the movements in his Pieces for
Orchestra op. 16 Premonitions, The Past illustrate this in the same way as
does the title of his monodrama op. 17: Erwartung.
Schoenberg altered the first chord, a seventh chord, of Beethovens
Symphony no. 1 without changing it, because this change occurs only in the
mind, and Berg altered Bchner in the same manner. In all Berg biographies,
Bergs abhorrence of war is emphasized, and in the final analysis also a
dissociation from the military. This is clearly expressed in Bergs depiction
of the soldier Wozzeck and the Captain who is his superior. Bergs personal
exploits and experiences from his time as a soldier are autobiographically
incorporated in this work. The crucial discussion at the time involved music as
it related to two stances: programme music versus absolute music. In Mahler,
this disconnection as an internal programme was resolved by a notion of
introspection that was widely reflected in philosophy. In Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche, inwardness becomes one of their central themes and is construed
by Mahler based on a letter of Beethovens as the composers inner
programme. In a book about Alban Berg, Constantin Floros, for example,
called this inner programme music as autobiography. Closely related to this
is experience, so that it can be resurrected again in art. An outline of social
circumstances is associated with it, incorporating both the idea of society and
the idea of the individual in equal manner. The theme of woman is likewise
taken up by Strindberg, Ibsen, Tolstoy and Weininger and has an impact on
the thinking of this and subsequent generations.
Seen in this way, Wozzecks Marie and the difficulties she creates for
herself through her affair with the Drum Major in Bergs opera can only be
understood through Strindberg, even though Strindberg was not born until
after Bchners death. Seen in this light, the Fool I smell blood, blood
as a madman without a controlling intellect is a visionary with roots as
a herald of future events in the holy illness of Hellenistic times, epilepsy.
This concept influenced Russian literature by way of Byzantine culture.
Dostoyevskys The Idiot and Mussorgskys Fool in Boris Godunov are just
two examples.
The timeline is interrupted here, as the Fool can see into the future. Berg
also anticipates history with the character of the demon Doctor, a forerunner
of Dr Mengele. The aphorism by Karl Kraus Progress makes wallets out of
human skin provides the model. In this context I refer to a definition of
Bergs Wozzeck by Adorno: Wozzeck: not the virtuoso application of the
latest achievements to the already dubious genre of grand opera, but rather
the first paradigm of a music of genuine humanism (Theodor W. Adorno,
Alban Berg). With Wozzeck, Alban Berg wrote an opera. This seems to
be a trivial statement: is it not, however, because he was trying to create
a gesamtkunstwerk in the sense of the Hellenistic term mousik. In the
Hellenistic concept, mousik consisted not merely of the portrayal of events
at a theatre, Theos God, but also portraying events through movement,
word and sound. The religious implication is self-evident; perfection,
transposition of events, fragmentation of time, emphasis on naturalism.
75
Wozzeck as I understand him | Rainer Bischof
74
From this definition of the gesamtkunstwerk in Wagner, Berg tries to create
a link between dance, as Wagner saw it (see Opera and Drama, The Art of
the Future), as mimic art = movement in the music with the events. The
end of the opera Wozzeck provides an outstanding example of this. After
Maries son is told by the other children of the death of his mother, which
the child cannot yet understand, an insistent quaver line (invention on a
quaver figure) in the flutes and the celeste moves onto the weak beat in
the measure (closing) and breaks off. The instruments stop playing, but the
music continues to resonate internally, unsoundingly, because the problem
of the innocent as the tragedy of humanity will never end. Music must not
always sound (Thomas Mann, Dr Faustus). Here Berg introduces a theory
of time from Bergsons philosophy into his opera of social sympathy, as
Wozzeck was often referred to.
However, Wozzeck is not an opera reflecting European cultural history.
For me, Wozzeck is the central work seeking a new order, based on the
old principles of order in the development of music. Wozzeck is strictly
through-composed, formal music that encompasses all the formal schemes
of western music. In this regard of Bergs Wozzeck, the terms symphony and
opera they were once one and the same shake hands. Berg is absolutely
aware of this, as can be seen from a letter in which he gives Adorno advice
for his Wozzeck speech. Adorno answers him: I followed your directives, as
far as was possible within the framework of the whole. In other words, I did
not harp on about forms. (letter Theodor W. Adorno to Berg, 23 November
1925). Berg knows that a misunderstanding could arise here; after all, he was
writing an opera.
Time and again, Berg calls for bel canto in his writings, explicitly for his
Wozzeck. Berg also wanted beautiful tone at points when the performer must
declaim the music; the great model was Schoenbergs Erwartung. For it is
not well understood that modern melodies made up of cantabile phrases
(I might take one of hundreds of examples from Schoenbergs Erwartung)
not only can be beautifully sung, but if they are to have their proper value
must be beautifully sung, just like the famous La donna mobile. (Alban
Berg, Voice in Opera)
Michael Pabst as Drum Major and Catherine Maltano as Marie, Wiener Staatsoper, 1997
Wozzeck as I understand him | Rainer Bischof Wozzeck as I understand him | Rainer Bischof
77 76
This problem applies to Maries prayer just as it does to Toscas prayer. Both
pray and plead, both are in despair, but one, Marie, accuses the world and
wrangles with her sinful fate. The other, Tosca, tries to soften Scarpias
heart with the beauty of her singing and her personality.
In his search for a new order, Berg has not yet reached the point where
he applies the twelve-tone technique already developed by Schoenberg,
but in Wozzeck he alludes to a relationship with Schoenbergs twelve-tone
serialism. That would only have made sense if I had elaborated more
in one or two cases: for example the six-note chord in the suicide scene
(relationship with Schoenbergs twelve-tone technique) (Alban Berg, letter
to Adorno, 3 November 1925).
It is precisely in this regard that the major significance and also the charm
of Bergs music for Wozzeck lies. In this connection I would like to mention
not only a filtering through of twelve-tone serialism, but also of tonality
filtering through. If one disregards the D-minor key, which characterizes
Wozzeck significantly in certain passages, as with Berg the free tonalities are
interwoven with a shadow of tonality. In Wozzeck it becomes necessary to
change the musical language from diatonic to free tonality and then further
in the search for twelve-tone technique. This gives the music its unmistakable
charm and import.
Nevertheless the desire to express oneself in an almost romantic fashion
remains unchanged. we remain incorrigible romantics! Even my new
violin concerto reconfirms it! (Letter from Alban Berg to Watznauer,
16 September 1935). Wozzeck simply is still a romantic opera; as such,
fluctuating between naturalism, verismo and vision, bundled as a musical
idea in symphonic form, still dedicated to the Wagnerian leitmotif practice
for example in the variations on the theme Wir arme Leut. Adorno realized
very clearly that Wozzeck could even have roots in Bach. It is an attempt to
understand Wozzeck as Passion music (Letter from Theodor W. Adorno to
Berg, 3 November 1929). This shows the music history breadth of Wozzeck.
Alban Bergs Wozzeck is more than an opera, it is a key work in Western
music culture.
Wozzeck poses a central question in opera history: is opera as a genre
development of music and drama a product of the past reaching its zenith
in the 19th century (Verdi, Wagner), and is it therefore no longer the artistic
expression of our time due to the new musical language embedded in twelve-
tone technique? Alban Bergs second opera Lulu gives one possible answer.
Is Schoenbergs invention of twelve-tone serialism the last salvation of the
Western order in music? It asserts a claim to a principle of order, and can this
salvation also be seen as the genre of opera? Every single opera of our day
poses this question anew. Regardless of whether exhausting the diminutive
form of operetta or the new opera substitute of the musical, despite
everything, opera sui generis lives on in both the past and the present.
Wozzeck a hopeless global dilemma? | Oliver Lng
79 78
WOZZECK A HOPELESS GLOBAL DILEMMA?
His suffering was greater than his mothers love: / Sunk in dejection,
they both went into the house... Apart from many childrens novels, these
closing lines of his poem First Despair have remained in my memory from a
childhood laced with Erich Kstner. At the time I did not like this text at all,
precisely because of its sad message, and indeed also albeit subconsciously
due to the discovery that grief and sadness may be greater than love.
Without as yet being really able to deal with these concepts, I was irked by
the irresolvable nature of the situation. No brilliant rescue that I had always
dreamt about in my childish imagination, and no happy end either. So it
must be true and even in young years one begins to suspect this fact: it is
darkness that has the final word, that pain, essentially inflicted from outside,
has the final word. A world that can also be dark and hostile. Antoine de
Saint-Exuprys conclusion that there is no gardener for men touches us time
and time again in view of the many people humiliated and maltreated by Fate.
This terrible mystery oppressed me. How could they have become these
lumps of clay? Into what terrible mould were they forced? What was it that
marked them like this, as if they had been put through a monstrous stamping
machine? A deer, a gazelle, any animal grown old, preserves its grace. What is
it that corrupts this wonderful clay of which man is kneaded?
Alban Bergs Wozzeck tell a similar tale. In this case, the world is distorted
from the very beginning, the despair in life of the title character is all-pervasive.
What Berg shows is basically an inexorable story of human culpability and the
failure of a positive conditio humana, a sketch in hopelessness.
Man as a prisoner of the circumstances that surround him and determine
his fate, without giving him a chance to break out of his predetermined role
or choose a more humane path. This was Bchners approach in Woyzeck
after he had moved away from the social revolution of imaginary burning
palaces. Man was tossed in there devoid of any guilt and forced into a
heartless environment that controlled him with industrial ruthlessness, with
fatalistic absoluteness. The despair that was quite appropriate here could
not be cooled by a socially protesting fury: it was to a certain extent an
ontological necessity. Belief, hope failed in the face of a reality that was not
KS Herwig Pecoraro as Captain, Wiener Staatsoper, revival 2013
Wozzeck a hopeless global dilemma? | Oliver Lng Wozzeck a hopeless global dilemma? | Oliver Lng
81 80
even cold, but simply detached to a certain extent: all the isms, from Marxism
to existentialism, lose their effectiveness. It was not possible to win here,
where circumstances do not permit actions, where the human freedom of
rebelling, triumphing or overcoming no longer exists. And what of love? At
least Wozzeck loves Marie, or at least he searches for a hold or a home.
The circumstances: these are excessively personally connoted, even if they
carry a human countenance. This is why Bchner divided the world in two
halves and Berg took up this model. On the one hand, people exposed
to misfortune who are given names, like Wozzeck and Marie, and on the
other impersonal functions that are interchangeable due to their malice.
The Captain and the Doctor, for instance, do not have their own names,
they merely carry out the roles of unquestioning bystanders; details of their
personalities are unimportant, just the fact that they exist. They are the
prison in which man sits.
This is why, in the final analysis, it is only Wozzeck who actually commits a
definitely punishable offence. Nowadays the crimes committed by the Captain
and the Doctor would be subsumed as mental cruelty, or perhaps bullying,
but they are much harder to grasp or define precisely than is Wozzecks deed.
The Doctor, for example, is dehumanized by his devotion to some obscure
research project, the primary aim of which is not the physical and mental
destruction of Wozzeck. The Drum Major is also more a symptom of Maries
loneliness than he is guilty of any special malevolence towards Wozzeck. And
can Marie be reproached for anything? She, too, is one of the poor people,
clutching at a small piece of good fortune. In fleeing from reality, they wish to
be happy at least once, to be desired, and to find a way out of an oppressive
present. Marie does this only out of the depths of her despair and her bleak
outlook. Once again we must ask the question: is it circumstance that forces
her to do this? Would she have given herself to the Drum Major if Wozzeck
had been wealthy and healthy, if her world had been warm and friendly, the
future blissful and rosy?
Bchners interest and Bergs too can be deduced from the historic
criminal case (see page 28). There the question was whether and to what
extent the murderer Woyzeck was actually accountable for his deed, or
whether due to his mental illness he was even able to grasp his guilt. There
can be no doubt that Wozzeck is insane (see page 34), but we can also take
a more general view of his soundness of mind. Can he be reproached for the
deed in view of the circumstances? Did circumstances make a culprit of him?
Did he stand a chance? To put it another way: did he even have a free will at
all? Both the drama and the opera make the viewer feel a sympathy towards
him that excuses him.
Both Bchner and Berg depict the world as a place that simply has no place
for positive catalysts. Evil is not in inherent in individual people, nor is it
Wozzecks deed, but rather the makeup of the world itself. Wozzeck does
not stand a chance right from the start, even if one or the other character
had behaved differently. His mental handicap can also be seen as a general
restriction of his opportunities.
And yet one should not mistake art for reality. It is precisely the representation
of such a hopeless situation in theatre that can awaken human vigour. And it
can be a function of the theatre to arouse a defensive attitude to this world in
the members of the audience. If this is successful, then Wozzecks suffering
has served a purpose. And this would provide an exit from a senseless
existence, as well as allowing the hope that there is hope. Perhaps we can see
things differently from Bchner and Berg: perhaps in spite of everything it
is not just circumstances that determine our fate. Then Wozzeck would be
guilty despite all our sympathy, although his guilt and his acceptance thereof
would mean his personal freedom. He would then have a chance of defying
circumstances. My love will overcome the chill of death, sings Amelia in
despair to the dying Simon Boccanegra in the opera of the same name. In the
case of this opera, love did not have the power to do so. But in reality? One
has only to believe gardeners for men!
The Vienna premire
83 82
THE VIENNA PREMIRE
Alban Berg, one of the leading champions of modern music, has his opera
Wozzeck currently being performed at the Wiener Staatsoper; the opera
is based on Bchners well-known drama. We have to admit that after the
atonal works of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and others, we approached this work
with a certain trepidation; one party praised the work to the skies, the other
condemned it to hell. For our part, we are happy to admit that Alban Berg
could be the eagerly anticipated Messiah who by dint of genuine ability across
the board unites the old and the new direction of true art. Bergs music
is inherently melodic, his tone painting admirably expressive, disrupted
only sporadically by bizarre ideas in the orchestra; however it must be
acknowledged that he has given an extremely brittle manuscript nothing less
than operatic treatment and put it into his style of music, demanding respect
even from his opponents. How much of that is due to the Vienna opera is
hard to assess, and the entire ensemble, under the inspiring direction of
Clemens Krauss, offered a vocal, acting and scenic performance that is above
all praise. Heading the list is Josef von Manowarda, whose Wozzeck bounced
him to the very forefront of the stage world, and Rose Pauly, whose acting and
singing were simply perfect. Georg Maikl was like a character of out Spitzweg
and gilded the role with the sweet lustre of his bright tenor voice. Hermann
Weidemann gave an extremely distinctive performance as the Doctor,
and Gunnar Graarud was super as the Drum Major. Hermann Gallos, Karl
Norbert, Viktor Madin and William Wernigk, and Dora With complemented
the outstanding ensemble wonderfully. Lothar Wallerstein provided excellent
direction, and the sets by Oskar Strnad created a authentic setting for this
most idiosyncratic of works that is certain to arouse considerable interest.
Review of the Vienna premire in Wiener Bilder, March 1930
Rose Pauly as Marie, Wiener Staatsoper, 1930
The rst Vienna Wozzeck | Clemens Krauss
85 84
THE FIRST VIENNA WOZZECK
I am proud and happy that we were able to achieve such a success with
the work of a Viennese poet. Although I never doubted from the start that
with Wozzeck we would have an opera to be proud of, in the theatre all too
often things turn out differently from what one had expected. This time we
were pleasantly surprised, and all those who feared that this opera without
melodies would not appeal to the Viennese were proved wrong. Once
again we saw that Vienna opera audiences have a very keen sense of what is
genuine and dictated by honest artistic intentions.
To be sure, this work contains much that will be surprising and foreign
to many listeners. However, they knew instinctively that this was not the
case of an artist pushing himself forward just for the sake of becoming
a talking point, pour pater le bourgeois, but rather a serious and great
artist building on the things that we have taken over from our great artists,
seeking new paths and new forms of expression in music that are in
keeping with contemporary trends. Without the wholehearted commitment
of our artists to this work that they recognized as a good thing, it would
have been quite impossible to put on this difficult piece which was not
immediately accessible even to our artists in such a way that the critics of
our performance would find such complimentary praise as was indeed the
case, and that we accepted with such gratitude.
Naturally we exaggerated when we wrote that a hundred rehearsals would
be necessary; in all we had some twenty orchestral rehearsals and of course
a number of individual rehearsals that I cannot put a number on. But I
think that one would not have been able to reproach us even for a hundred
rehearsals, because this is merely evidence that we did not want to present
the piece to the audience until we had the feeling that we could offer the
best that we were capable of.
Clemens Kraus on the premire at the Wiener Staatsoper
From: Neues Wiener Journal, 2 April 1930
Handbill from the rst performance at the Wiener Staatsoper
Breaking records with Wozzeck | Karl Lbl
87 86
BREAKING RECORDS WITH WOZZECK
Wozzeck and Vienna: every older opera-goer thinks immediately of two
individuals: Oscar Fritz Schuh and Walter Berry. Schuh mounted two
productions of Alban Bergs opera here after the war, and for thirty years
starting in 1955 Berry was for us the incarnation of Wozzeck, a role he sang
47 times at the Staatsoper.
In an era in which quotas seem to be so important, it seems legitimate to call
the unforgettable Walter Berry a record holder. Numbers that have become
rare in the opera world today prove it. Between 1950 and 1995, i.e. in the
45 years in which he was a member of the Staatsoper ensemble, he sang no
less than 78 roles starting with the jailer in Tosca and the night watchman
in Die Meistersinger, still at the Theater an der Wien, to lead roles, and not
just in operas by Mozart. Thanks to digital media we can re-experience how
charming a Papageno he was and what an impressive, distinctive Wozzeck.
No other singer has made as many recordings of Wozzeck as Walter Berry.
He can be heard on five different CD recordings, starting with the complete
recording made at the Staatsoper re-opening in 1955 (on Andante) with
Christel Goltz as Marie (conductor: Karl Bhm).
Oscar Fritz Schuh, for decades one of the most influential directors (not just
with regard to the Viennese Mozart style of the post-war era), can also be
considered a record holder today. He directed Wozzeck for the first time
in 1931, in Gera in Germany. At that time, I was 27, he reminisced in an
interview half a century later, and very happy that Alban Berg was pleased
with my work. He attended a few rehearsals and was a great inspiration,
because nothing was too naturalistic for him.
After the war, the Teatro San Carlo in Naples requested a production of
Wozzeck by the trio of Schuh, Caspar Neher and Karl Bhm. That was in
1949, in other words three years before Oscar Fritz Schuhs first Staatsoper
production for the Theater an der Wien. We thought it was hopeless, said
the director, thinking back, because Naples tended to put on productions
after at most ten days of rehearsals. We asked for a rehearsal period of 60 days
and were amazed that our demand was met. In that production the lead role
KS Walter Berry as Wozzeck and KS Christel Goltz as Marie, Wiener Staatsoper, 1955
Breaking records with Wozzeck | Karl Lbl Breaking records with Wozzeck | Karl Lbl
89 88
was played by a baritone whom Viennese audiences remember as Scarpia,
Iago, and Falstaff: Tito Gobbi.
Oscar Fritz Schuh directed Wozzeck again in 1951, for the Salzburg Festival,
again with Neher and Bhm. This spurred a debate in the Salzburg state
parliament in the course of which this programme idea, when it became
know, was described as filth and trash, Schuh remembered, and people
considered that such works were completely unsuitable for the festival. A
year later we took a guest performance of this production to Paris. That
was the very first performance of Bergs opera in that city. Albert Camus
sat in one box, Jean Cocteau in another, and next to him Igor Stravinsky.
Unforgettable.
Such memories, which are not at all untypical for Austria in the post-war
period, prompted a little research into the performance history of Wozzeck.
After the premire at the Berlin State Opera (conductor: Erich Kleiber) in
December 1925, another 19 performances had followed by November 1932,
after which all further performances of the opera were banned. After Berlin,
the opera was performed in 25 other European cities between then and the
1930s, including Prague and Leningrad, where Wozzeck was sung in Czech
and Russian, as well as Philadelphia in the USA. The first performance at the
Wiener Staatsoper took place on 30 March 1930; another 14 performances
had followed by November 1932. After that, Wozzeck was not performed in
Vienna again until 1952.
Alban Bergs rise to fame therefore began in Germany. In her book Alban
Berg Erich Kleiber. Letters between Friends (published by Seifert, Vienna),
Martina Steiger states that for Berg the cancellations by German opera
houses must have been particularly painful as the National Socialists rose
to power. One of the first was Coburg Regional Theatre, which had to
renege on a contract that had already been signed. Kassel, Dessau and
Breslau followed. The letters addressed to the Viennese publisher (Universal
Edition, UE) cited political events or cooptation as the reason. Karl
Bhm was the most forthright, writing in May 1932 to UE from Hamburg:
I regret that I cannot conduct Wozzeck for the time being. I have been
specifically forbidden to do this. Since, as you know, we are dealing with
certain movements, we simply have to comply.
We know about Alban Bergs personal situation during these years from the
above mentioned correspondence. In a letter to Erich Kleiber dated 8 March
1934, Berg complains: The abrupt dwindling a year ago of all revenue
from Germany (which accounted for a good three quarters of my total
income) and finally the shameful failure of the Wiener Staatsoper ... have
meant that I have been almost without income for a year. Naturally UE helps
me as much as they can but that only increases my debt to them The
Library of Congress in Washington wants to purchase the manuscript of the
score and is offering me a thousand dollars for it
Berg asked Kleiber his opinion on the price and also wanted to know where
the score was. Kleiber answered four days later: I sent the score to UE some
time ago at their request A thousand dollars is a lousy price. You can easily
ask at least 2,500 dollars for it. That national museum really can pay more
for it.
If you read letters like these and consider that the success story of Wozzeck
was in fact rudely interrupted by the influence and regimen of National
Socialism and its representatives, it is all the more pleasing that a true boom
has occurred in last 30 years on the CD market. In 1980 there were only five
Wozzeck recordings available on long-play records. In 2013, 22 (in words:
twenty-two!) CD recordings are available. Access to historical material has
become less complicated.
Despite outdated recording techniques, the 1951 New York production
conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos is still an exciting music drama (on
Sony). The same applies to the Munich recording made in 1970 (on Golden
Melodram) with Theo Adam and Wendy Fine. It is dominated by Erich
Kleibers son Carlos, who detected and brought out details in Bergs music
in a way that almost no other conductor has.
From Vienna we have a studio recording made in 1979 with Eberhard
Waechter as Wozzeck (!) and Anja Silja (on Decca conductor: Dohnnyi)
and a beautiful Staatsoper live recording on Deutsche Grammophon (1987)
with Franz Grundheber and Hildegard Behrens (conductor: Abbado).
Wozzeck shows up on the list of DVDs six times: from the Wiener Staatsoper
in the 1987 Dresen production (on Arthaus) with Grundheber and Behrens
(conductor: Abbado), from Barcelona in a Calixto Bieito production (on Opus
91
Breaking records with Wozzeck | Karl Lbl
90
Arte) with Franz Hawlata and Angela Denoke (conductor: Sebastian Weigle),
a 1994 production from Berlin directed by Patrice Chereau (on Warner) with
Franz Grundheber and Waltraud Meier (conductor: Barenboim), also in a
Mussbach production from Frankfurt. There is an exciting DVD of the first
in-house Wozzeck production at the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre in 2010 (on Bel
Air). Georg Nigl sang the title role, Teodor Currentzis was on the rostrum, and
director Dmitri Tcherniakov transported the action to the current day, with
Internet and mobile phones, TV news and other little private perversities.
Despite articulation problems, it too is a strong production in musical terms.
The magnificent film made by director Joachim Hess in 1970 with the
orchestra and chorus of the Hamburg State Opera partly in the studio and
partly between houses and outdoors is also worth seeing (on Arthaus on
DVD). Toni Blankenheim is Wozzeck, Sena Jurinac, who never sang this role
in Vienna, was brought to Hamburg to perform Marie, the conductor was
Bruno Maderna. And if Oscar Fritz Schuh remembered that his rehearsals (in
1931 in Gera) were not naturalistic enough for the composer, you can be
sure: if Alban Berg had known that you could see Jurinac and Blankenheims
breath in the cold air on the river bank, he would have been just as delighted
by so much skilfully applied film naturalism as he would have been by the
performances of the two protagonists.
KS James King as Drum Major, Wiener Staatsoper, 1981
93 92
OUTSTANDING CASTS OF WOZZECK
AT THE WIENER STAATSOPER BEFORE THE REVIVAL
Conductor: Claudio Abbado, Michael Boder, Karl Bhm, Heinrich Hollreiser,
Berislav Klobucar, Clemens Krauss, Seiji Ozawa, Simone Young
Wozzeck: Theo Adam, Walter Berry, Franz Grundheber, Franz Hawlata,
Josef Herrmann, Gottfried Hornik, Josef von Manowarda, Gerhard Stolze, Falk
Struckmann
Drum Major: Jan Blinkhof, Gunnar Graarud, Josef Kalenberg, Josef Hopfer-
wieser, James King, Max Lorenz, Thomas Moser, Michael Pabst, Wolfgang
Schmidt, Lszl Szemere, Fritz Uhl
Captain: Peter Klein, Georg Maikl, Michael Roider, Gerhard Stolze, Heinz
Zednik
Doctor: Karl Dnch, Walter Fink, Aage Haugland, Franz Hawlata, Alfred Jerger,
Rudolf Mazzola, Hermann Wiedemann
Marie: Wanda Achsel, Karan Armstrong, Hildegard Behrens, Christel Goltz,
Christa Ludwig, Catherine Maltano, Rose Pauly, Deborah Polaski, Irmgard
Seefried
KS Deborah Polaski as Marie and Wolfgang Schmidt as Drum Major, Wiener Staatsoper, 2005
Outstandig casts of Wozzeck at the Wiener Staatsoper
Intrigue Intrigue
95 94
INTRIGUE
Scne 1
Franz Wozzeck, un pauvre soldat, rase son capitaine, pour lui cest un revenu
supplmentaire. Il doit nourrir Marie et leur enfant mais il na pas le droit de
se marier, le rglement le lui interdit. Wozzeck est distrait, ce qui inquite le
capitaine.
Scne 2
Wozzeck et son camarade Andres taillent des btons. Cela aussi reprsente un
gain supplmentaire. Encore une fois, Wozzeck est distrait, il a des visions qui,
nalement, lui font prendre la fuite avec son camarade.
Scne 3
Marie voit passer une fanfare militaire tincelante dans sa rue sans intrt. Le
superbe tambour-major lui jette un regard, une claircie dans une triste exis-
tence. Wozzeck regarde par la fentre : un grand contraste avec le major.
Scne 4
Encore un autre salaire dappoint pour Wozzeck: le docteur se sert de lui pour
ses expriences dittiques. Alors quil lui dcrit ses visions, Wozzeck prend
lattention que lui accorde le docteur pour de la compassion humaine. Cepen-
dant, le docteur diagnostique avec enthousiasme : Aberratio mentalis partialis!
ide xe, paranoa.
Scne 5
Le tambour-major se prsente en priv la porte de Marie. Elle regarde amu-
se comme il se pavane devant elle. Finalement, ne pouvant plus lui rsister,
elle le fait entrer chez elle.
Scne 1
Marie est ravie davoir une nouvelle paire de boucles doreilles. Lorsque
Wozzeck entre, elle essaie dabord de les dissimuler puis elle afrme les avoir
trouves. Wozzeck ne croit pas que lon puisse trouver deux boucles doreilles
en mme temps. Marie devenant agressive, il cde. Il lui apporte sa solde et
ce quil a gagn en supplment mais il ne reste pas.
Scne 2
Le docteur et le capitaine se rencontrent dans la rue. Le docteur effraie le ca-
pitaine en lui annonant un diagnostic terriant. Wozzeck passe, les deux
hommes larrtent et prennent plaisir faire des allusions malveillantes au
sujet du tambour-major.
Scne 3
Wozzeck pense quil devrait sapercevoir de lindlit de Marie pourtant elle
est comme dhabitude. Lorsquelle se montre insolente, il veut la frapper, il
laisse pourtant retomber sa main et doit supporter quelle lui claque la porte
au nez.
Scne 4
Dans le jardin dune auberge modeste, o des ouvriers ivres tiennent des
discours et des soldats dansent avec des servantes, Marie et le tambour-major
apparaissent soudain. Wozzeck les observe irter sans gne, il veut se prcipi-
ter sur eux mais la danse sachve juste cet instant. Wozzeck parle seul dun
ton lugubre et un fou sent lodeur du sang.
Scne 5
Les soldats dorment la caserne. Wozzeck, lui, reste veill: il voit toujours
Marie danser devant ses yeux et il voit un couteau. Ivre, le tambour-major arrive
en faisant du vacarme et montre Wozzeck lequel des deux est le plus fort.
Wozzeck saigne et parle seul dun ton lugubre.
ACTE 1 ACTE 2
Trama
97
Intrigue
96
TRAMA
Scena 1
Il povero soldato Franz Wozzeck sta radendo la barba al suo capitano. Ci gli
assicura un reddito supplementare. Deve mantenere Marie e il loro glio, per
non gli permesso di sposarla siccome le norme di regolamento lo impedis-
cono. Wozzeck distratto, il che preoccupa il capitano.
Scena 2
Wozzeck sta tagliando i bastoni insieme al suo compagno Andres. Anche ci
un guadagno in pi per lui. Wozzeck di nuovo disattento, ha visioni che in
n dei conti mettono in fuga lui e i suoi compagni.
Scena 3
Marie osserva una banda militare scintillante nel suo vicolo squallido. Il mag-
nicente tamburmaggiore le getta uno sguardo: un istante luminoso in una
vita triste. Wozzeck guarda dalla nestra: un grande contrasto rispetto al mag-
giore.

Scena 4
Un altro reddito supplementare per Wozzeck: Il dottore fa degli esperimenti
siologico-nutrizionali con lui. Wozzeck considera lattenzione del dottore nei
confronti alla descrizione delle sue visioni come una simpatia umana. Il dottore
per emette con entusiasmo la diagnosi: Aberratio mentalis partialis! idea
ssa, paranoia.
Scena 5
Il tamburmaggiore appare come persona privata davanti alla porta di Marie.
Con ironia lo osserva camminando in modo impettito davanti a lei. Alla ne
non riesce a resistergli e lo porta con s nella casa.
ATTO 1 Scne 1
La nuit, Marie est dans sa chambre. Elle est dsespre et cherche consolation
dans la Bible. Lenfant se rveille, elle lui raconte une histoire triste. Elle espre
trouver le pardon comme Marie-Madeleine.
Scne 2
Cest le soir, Wozzeck et Marie marchent le long de ltang. Il la retient. Ils sont
assis et frissonnent. La lune se lve. Wozzeck se met trembler et tire un cou-
teau de sa poche. Comme Marie veut se sauver, il lui coupe la gorge. Elle meurt.
Wozzeck senfuit.
Scne 3
Dans une auberge des environs, Wozzeck boit au milieu des danseurs et se
joint une voisine. On dcouvre du sang sur le bras de Wozzeck, toute la salle
est alerte. Wozzeck senfuit.
Scne 4
Prs de ltang, Wozzeck cherche le couteau, le jette dans leau, pense quil est
encore trop prs du bord, avance toujours plus loin dans ltang, leau lui
rappelle le sang, ensuite il disparat, englouti. Le docteur et le capitaine passent
par l, ils croient entendre quelquun qui se noie et sloignent en hte.
Scne 5
Des enfants jouent dans la rue. On a trouv le corps de Marie et cette nouvelle
sest rpandue comme une trane de poudre. Avides de sensation, tous courent
vers ltang. Seul lenfant de Marie et Wozzeck ne comprend pas encore ...
ACTE 3
Trama Trama
99 98
ATTO 2 ATTO 3 Scena 1
Marie ammira i nuovi orecchini. Quando entra Wozzeck vuole nasconderli, poi
dice di averli trovato casualmente. Wozzeck non crede che si possano trovare
due orecchini allo stesso tempo. Quando Marie diventa aggressiva, lui cede.
Le consegna il salario e pure tutto ci che ha guadagnato, per non resta.

Scena 2
Il dottore e il capitano sincontrano per strada. Il dottore affanna il capitano
con una diagnosi sconvolgente. Passa Wozzeck, i due lo fermano e si divertono
a fare delle allusioni che lo mettono sulle tracce del tamburmaggiore.
Scena 3
Vedendo Marie Wozzeck pensa di dover riconoscere la sua slealt lei per ha
laspetto di sempre. Nel momento in cui lei diventa insolente vuole picchiarla,
per fa cadere la sua mano e deve sopportare che lei sbatte la porta di fronte
al suo volto.
Scena 4
Nel giardino di una birreria dove garzoni artigiani ubriachi tengono concioni
e i soldati ballano con le domestiche, appaiono allimprovviso Marie e il tam-
burmaggiore. Wozzeck osserva come entrambi amoreggiano con disinvoltura,
sta per avventarsi sulla coppia. In questo momento la danza per nisce.
Wozzeck sta parlando fra s e s sottovoce e in tono cupo e un pazzo sente
odore di sangue.
Scena 5
I soldati dormono nella caserma. Wozzeck invece sveglio: tiene ancora pre-
sente Marie mentre balla e vede un coltello. Il tamburmaggiore ubriaco sopra-
vviene con grande chiasso e dimostra a Wozzeck chi il pi forte. Wozzeck
sanguina e parla fra s e s in modo sinistro.
Scena 1
Di notte Marie sta seduta nella sua stanza. Disperatamente cerca di trovare
conforto con la lettura della Bibbia. Il glio si sveglia, lei gli racconta una storia
triste. Spera di trovare perdono come Maria Maddalena.
Scena 2
Di notte Wozzeck e Marie passeggiano lungo lo stagno. Lui la ritiene. Stanno
seduti e hanno i brividi di freddo. La luna sorge. Wozzeck trema e tira un
coltello fuori dalla tasca. Nel momento in cui Marie vuole fuggire, Wozzeck le
taglia la gola. Muore. Wozzeck scappa via.
Scena 3
In una taverna vicina Wozzeck beve tra i danzanti e si aggancia ad una persona
seduta vicino. Sul braccio di Wozzeck viene scoperto sangue il che allarma tutta
la sala. Wozzeck fugge.
Scena 4
Sullo stagno Wozzeck cerca il coltello, lo getta nellacqua, ritiene che si trovi
ancora troppo vicino alla riva, entra nello stagno sempre pi profondo, lacqua
gli pare sangue, poi lacqua lo copre. Il dottore e il capitano passano, assumono
di aver sentito una persona che annega e si allontanano in fretta.
Scena 5
Bambini stanno giocando sulla strada. Come il propagarsi di un incendio si
diffonde la notizia che il cadavere di Marie stato scoperto. Avidi di sensazi-
oni tutti corrono allo stagno. Solo il glio di Marie e di Wozzeck non capisce
ancora
101 100

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Imprint
106
Wiener Staatsoper Season 2012/2013 Director Dominique Meyer,
Alban Berg, Wozzeck
Revival, 24 March 2013
Programme concept and general editor:
Andreas Lng, Oliver Lng
Graphic Design and layout:
Miwa Nishino
Article origination:
With the exception of those by Ernst Anschtz, Georg Bchner, Alban Berg, Clemens Krauss
and the synopsis all articles were written for this programme.
The synopsis was written by Adolf Dresen.
Reproduction is permitted only with prior approval of Wiener Staatsoper GmbH / Dramaturgy Dept.
Images:
Michael Phn (Cover, p. 12, 17, 38, 41, 78), akg-images (p. 14, 19, 50, 56)
Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig (p. 28, 32), sterreichisches Theatermuseum (p. 35, 60,
82), Axel Zeininger (p. 20, 25, 62, 67, 75, 92), Foto Fayer (p. 7, 86), all other images from the
archives of the Wiener Staatsoper.
Unsigned images or those with ancillary copyright woho could not be reached are requested to
furnish information for subsequent acknowledgement.
English translation:
Andrew Smith
English translation (There is a silence in the world):
Anna Mitgutsch
Translation of the synopses:
Franois Labranche (French), Annette Frank (Italian),
Mag. Noriko Aoyagi (Japanese), Interlingua (Russian)
Authors and holders of neighbouring rights, who were unavailable regarding retrospect
compensation are requested to make contact.
Media owner Publisher:
Wiener Staatsoper GmbH, Opernring 2, 1010 Wien
Printed by:
Druckerei Walla GmbH