Expressionism

in
Wozzeck

Two Operas - Two Epochs

by David Beloved
May 14 1999

Expressionism in Wozzeck

Alban Bergs opera Wozzeck is generally considered one of the referential examples of what
is called expressionist music. Saying this implies that it follows the guidelines marked by the style
generally known as Expressionism. However, and particularly in this case, it is difficult to give an
accurate definition of this style, for it is a movement that, as every other artistic, intellectual or
political manifestation of the beginning of the twentieth century, came up mixed with an enormous
confusion of ideological tendencies.
The term was first applied, toward 1910, to certain types of painting and literature, giving a
name for the new art created by painters like Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, Marc and Nolde, who
employed exaggerated perspectives and a use of color in an intense, emotional way, and writers like
Brecht, Zweig and Werfel. In music, on the other hand, although Schoenberg was already associated
with expressionist techniques at the beginning of that decade and he was a painter himself, the word
expressionist was not applied until 19181. This delay might reflect, as Arnold Schering remarks,
the fact that expressionist music had reached far fewer people by that time than had other forms of
expressionist art.2
The main idea of expressionist art was to create not what others will think of as beautiful, but
what the artists innermost necessities compel him to create, expressing himself, as directly and
intensely as possible, and avoiding any recurrence to traditionally accepted forms. The work of art
had to stand by itself, and anything extraneous to it should be revoked. In painting, these premises
led directly into abstract art, where theres nothing specifically represented.

Its first published application seems to have been by the Austrian composer and critic Henz
Thiesen, in an article published in July 1918.
2

Arnold Schering, Die expressionistiche Bewegung in der Musik (Leipzig, 1919), quoted in the
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. 6, 333.

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However, composers didnt need to go that far. In fact, one of the primary qualities of music
is that it represents nothing specific. Music imitates feelings, affections (like in the Baroque era),
emotions, but those were all abstract concepts that wouldnt be on the way toward musical purity, so
it eventually became the prototypical form of art of the expressionism, an abstract art by definition.
The problem was that, even though music was supposed to be attached to emotions and, by
extension, to the inner human being, there was something that interrupted this internal relationship:
the tonal system and the traditional forms. Tradition was there to block the imagination of the
composer, who was always tempted to make use of the system as it had been used in the past, thus
leaning on a strongly consolidated basis that would defend him against any kind of critique. Against
this, atonality became an essential ingredient of expressionist music. It wasnt a sudden change,
though, but a natural evolution from the extreme and expansive use of chromaticism of the turn of
the century.

Atonality was a tendency more than a requirement, so we cannot assume that all

expressionist music was atonal. Furthermore, not all atonal, non-12-tone music can be considered
expressionist, as far as emotional content is concerned. Purely atonal pieces were short, for there
was virtually nothing to hold the elements together, unless it came from an extra-musical reason, like
the text of an opera. Berg himself, in a lecture on Wozzeck given in 1929, said: The so-called
atonal style still lacked large-scale works . . . . And the reason for this was that in renouncing tonality
the style renounced with it one of the strongest and best-proved means of building small- and largescale formal structures.3 With a composer like Anton Webern, the miniaturist, the purist follower
of Schoenbergs revolution, expression relies on a secondary level, and the primary concern is
geometry, perfection and conciseness. But Alban Berg, who also followed Schoenbergs methods of
construction, invested the technique with a warmth of Romantic feeling4 that leads us to think of
Expressionism as an intensification of the late Romantic style, rather than as a rejection to it.

Douglas Jarman, Alban Berg: Wozzeck, (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 154.
4

Donald J. Grout and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music (New York: W. W. Norton,
1988), 520.

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The principal subject of Expressionism was the man as he saw himself in the modern world
and as he was described by modern psychology: helpless, isolated, fearful, anxious, ready to fight,
and these are all characteristics applicable to Wozzeck, the hero of Bergs opera. He is controlled by
forces that he did not understand, and driven by the irrational rules of his subconscious, as an answer
to his impotency against these forces. Despite the date of the drama (written in 1837), the story
fairly represents the postwar period in Germany, with its atmosphere infected by the morbid, bitter,
neurotic mood of the time. Peter Gay writes: the time from November 1918 to 1924, with its
revolution, civil war, foreign occupation, political murder, and fantastic inflation, was a time of
experimentation in the arts; Expressionism dominated politics as much as painting or the stage.5
Berg, as the majority of his contemporaries, had succumbed to the war fever, defending it as a
sacrifice that would ennoble and purify society. But, like most of those who still survived by the end
of the war, he became a fierce antimilitarist. This new posture was specially significant in Bergs
case because, besides the realization of the uselessness of war, the conditions of his military life
were harsh and depressing. He felt himself identified with Wozzeck, as he wrote to his wife in a
letter of 7 August 1918: There is a bit of me in his character, since I have been spending these war
years just as dependent on people I hate, have been in chains, sick, captive, resigned, in fact
humiliated. Without this military service I should be as healthy as before, . . .6
Harmony in Wozzeck is strange, colorful, atonal in most places and, combined with a very
thick contrapuntal texture, it reaches extremely high levels of complexity and sophistication, offering
a sensation of distortion that turns reality into a nightmare. Everything in the world of thoughts is
complex and this drama is not just a narration of events: It is Wozzecks lunatic vision of these
events, the reality as seen by an unbalanced creature, tormented by circumstances that are out of his
control but make him suffer. Every character in the play deserves an exhaustive psychoanalysis. In
a general view, they appear to be almost as insane as Wozzeck, grotesque, also tormented,
degenerated by the order that they themselves represent. Individually, they probably constitute the
worst examples of the social level each of them symbolize (this is a frequently used sign of the
5

Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968),

120.
6

Bernard Grun, ed. and trans., Alban Berg: Letters to his Wife (New York: St. Martins Press,
1971), 229

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pessimism of the time). Marie, as the sinful one among the poor, the Captain, as a pedant and
coward character at the top of the military class, the Doctor, as the immoral, paranoiac one among
the scientists (recently erected as a social class), and the Drum-major, as a brainless arrogant among
the soldiers. But we cannot forget that they appear to us the way Wozzeck (or Berg, for he identified
himself with his hero) sees them, that is, deformed, exaggerated. Music here develops an essential
role with its ability to describe sensations undescribable with words.

In this sense, it is

complementary in the best of the meanings of the word. It helps to make subjective matters
understandable, or, at least comprehensible. Music becomes visceral, property of the intuition. And
Expressionism is profoundly subjective, intuitive. The age of the reason and objectiveness died with
the Great War.
Ironically, parallel to the expressionist subjectivity, there is a strong naturalistic quality in
this opera, if we understand Naturalism as the exact, objective representation of reality as it stands.
Plight of poverty, stricken individuals and murder are shown in their maximal crudity, that is, as
crudely as they are in reality. Naturalism is used to enhance Expressionism. The cold sterility of the
Doctors office, evidenced by his compulsive methodicalness, helps stressing the immorality of the
Doctor. Marias paint-stripped room with no furniture, and her vulgar language, as used in the
discussion with her neighbor, demonstrate her level of poverty and sin, respectively. The cloudy,
black emptiness of the forest in scene two amplifies Wozzecks personal torment resulting from his
hallucinations. The simplicity of the sets allows efficient, yet expressive, use of the stage.
Berg uses a few leit-motifs, specially Wozzecks Wir arme Leut, although, rather than as
structural elements, they appear through the piece as dramatic calls to the subconscious memory of
the listener, like in the moment of Maries death, when, as Berg says, all the important musical
figurations associated with her are played very rapidly over this pedal point [a low B in the double
basses], as at the moment of her death the most important images of her life pass through her mind
distorted and at lightning speed.7 The main structural device that gives unity to this work is the
organization of scenes and acts in musical forms derived from classical patterns. This cohesion, as
Berg says, was achieved without using tonality and the formal possibilities which spring from it.8
7

Jarman, 167.

Jarman, 158

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But these patterns reveal themselves only after analysis. Traditional forms are used as a structural
frame for the three acts, and for each of the fifteen scenes individually. But it is not he composers
intention that they become perceivable, as seen in the next passage, written for the Modern Music
issue of November-December 1927:
. . . What I do consider my particular accomplishment is this. No one in the audience,
no matter how aware he may be of the musical forms contained in the framework of the opera,
of the precision and logic which with it has been worked out, no one, from the moment the
curtain parts until it closes for the last time, pays any attention to the various fugues,
inventions, suites, sonata movements, variations, and passacaglias about which so much has
been written. No one gives heed to anything but the vast social implications of the work which
by far transcend the personal destiny of Wozzeck. This, I believe, is my achievement.9

The music of Wozzeck is present in adequate measure, for it is not supposed to be the lead
role here. Berg adopts a posture of solidarity with his hero that is reinforced by the intimacy of the
music. Because this music, being subjective as it is, is intensely intimate, as if it came from the
interior of Wozzecks soul, and here relies the true value of this opera. It is a tremendous
coincidence of destiny that the rediscovery and first performance of such a visionary, unconventional
drama, unknown for the public since it was written some seventy years earlier, happens in
conjunction with the emergence of a new aesthetic trend that shares its horrifying, nightmarish vision
of events. In these terms, Wozzecks drama represents a masterpiece of culture in which literature
(the drama itself), plastic art (scene directions that can somehow be related to the world of image)
and music together constitute the aesthetic coronation of an age of revolution. Music, modestly in a
real second plane, becomes the essential vehicle of expression of the events and their psychological
implications. Wozzecks music is truly expressionist art.

Jarman, 153