Wozzeck

Büchner and Woyzeck

Trained in biology and medicine,^[8] Georg Büchner taught comparative anatomy at the University of Zurich.^[9] A Romantic in science like his patron Lorenz Oken,^[10] he treated taboo literary topics (sex, religion, and politics)^[11] and stressed characterization over narrative.^[12] He held proto-Marxian views^[13] and, for his first play, Danton's Death (1835), studied the French Revolution. It "crushed" him, he wrote his fiancée Minna Jaeglé in 1834, calling human nature a "terrible sameness" and individuals "froth on the waves" in a "ridiculous struggle against an iron law".^[14]

His work expresses a unity of opposites from Hegel and Spinoza.^[15] Philosopher György Lukács called him a literary realist, citing his call for artists to "submerge themselves in the life of the ... humblest person and ... reproduce it with all its faint agitations, hints of experience, the subtle ... play of his features" (Lenz, 1835).^[16] German literature scholar John Reddick argued his style expressed paradoxes in mosaics, as in a "shattered whole": "All my being is in this single moment", says Leonce at the breaking point (Leonce and Lena, 1836).^[17]

Based on romantic femicide cases in a medical journal to which Ludwig contributed, mainly physician Johann Christian August Clarus's on military barber Johann Christian Woyzeck,^[18] Woyzeck mixes the grotesque with tragicomedy.^[19] For the competency evaluation, Clarus reported that Woyzeck had episodic psychosis but "freier Vernunftgebrauch" (free use of reason) and "Willensfreiheit" (free will), leading to trial (conviction, 1821; beheading, 1824).^[20] Büchner died of typhus in 1837, leaving an untitled, fragmentary script with shifting character names^[21] (perhaps an open drama [de]).^[22]

Toward Berg's Wozzeck

Milieu and influences

Shaped by Symbolism's exaltation of cultural outsiders, Berg came from the same expressionist milieu as novelist Franz Kafka, painter Emil Nolde, and poets Gottfried Benn, Rainer Maria Rilke,^[c] and Franz Werfel.^[38][d] Oskar Kokoschka saw Büchner as an early expressionist^[44] (and later considered producing Berg's Wozzeck).^[45] His 1909 play Murderer, the Hope of Women recalls Woyzeck^[44] and influenced expressionist opera,^[e] which had explored grotesque psychology and violence since Richard Strauss's Salome and Schoenberg's Erwartung (Expectation). Wozzeck, following Strauss's Elektra and Schoenberg's Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand), continued this.^[48]

Berg's tastes were broader than Schoenberg's or Webern's.^[49] He shared their love of Mahler,^[50] Johannes Brahms,^[51] and Richard Wagner^[52] but played a wide repertoire, including opera, piano four hands with his family. His sister Smaragda, a Theodor Leschetizky pupil and later Vienna State Opera musician, sang his first songs at home^[53] and likely introduced him to writer Karl Kraus and the impressionism of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.^[54] His brother Karl (Charly or Charley), also a singer, loved Wagner.^[55]

Berg first saw his wife Helene [de], who trained as a Wagnerian singer, at the opera and wooed her with songs.^[56] He saw Salome's Graz premiere in 1906 and attended many rehearsals of Paul Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-bleue, studying its "thousands of splendid passages".^[57] Through Viennese coffee house culture at forums like the Café Museum, he met innovative, popular figures ranging from the prodigy Erich Korngold to operetta composers Franz Lehár and Oscar Straus.^[58]

Berg saw Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande as a model of modernist Literaturoper, a direction he had explored in drafting a libretto based on Franz Grillparzer's play Die Ahnfrau [de]. As in Pelléas, he linked Wozzeck's scenes with short interludes^[59] while keeping Büchner's jagged brutality and eerie realism.^[60] He may have also drawn from Franz Schreker's Der ferne Klang, having prepared its piano-vocal score in 1911^[61] (though he disliked Schreker's next opera, Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin).^[62]

1914–16: Genesis amid war

On frugal Sommerfrischen (summer vacations), often at his wife's family farm and villa in Trahütten, Berg precomposed Wozzeck from as early as 1914, conceptualizing and sketching perhaps two scenes while continuing to compose Three Pieces for Orchestra. He hesitated when Schoenberg said the play was unsuitable.^[63]

War erupted, and Kraus's attack on "the cash register of world history" cooled Berg's patriotism.^[64] Long fearing death from severe asthma, then a possibly allergy-related somatic symptom disorder, Berg was first deemed unfit by the Austro-Hungarian Army.^[65] His pupil Theodor W. Adorno saw a tortured artist's hypochondriasis and substance dependence in his self-medication and physician visits, including to Sigmund Freud.^[66] "My spirit would ... have broken", Berg wrote Schoenberg, rejecting "a past time and a beloved place" as evoked by a bell to bait "curious Russian heads" from trenches to shoot.^[67]

Berg was conscripted in mid-1915 and bought the play while finishing Three Pieces for Orchestra.^[69] That winter, he began the unfinished opera Nacht (Nokturn) (Night/Nocturne; 1915–17).^[f] Its semi-autobiogaphical protagonist falls asleep discussing philosophy with his subconscious Other. A nostalgic, erotic, and nightmarish dream sequence ends with a film^[g] of a dark mountain forest thinning into snowfields at dawn. It recalls Schoenberg's Erwartung and Glückliche Hand and Strindberg's Jakob brottas (Jacob Wrestles).^[72] Berg used musicodramatic ideas from Nacht (Nokturn), like snoring, in Wozzeck.^[73]

By February 1916, working 30-hour guard-duty shifts in Vienna, Berg was still outlining Wozzeck in four acts and 23 scenes.^[74] That April, on office duty at a military base in Bisamberg, he described deserters being strappadoed and confined in remote, lice-ridden barracks surrounded by barbed wire.^[75]

Their arms are crossed and tied behind ... then hoisted up on a tree so that the prisoner can only stand on his toes. When he can do that no more, he hangs until he faints from the pain. ... I'll have to tell you [more] in person.

He never saw combat.^[76] As a one-year volunteer (Einjährig-Freiwillige) officer, he was assigned that month to the Imperial War Ministry, likely via his brother Karl there (not Helene's possible nonmarital father Franz Joseph I).^[77] In August, he wrote Helene: "For months I haven't done any work on Wozzeck. Everything suffocated, buried!".^[78]

1917–18: Resolve and state collapse

In early 1917, Berg wrote playwright Erhard Buschbeck [de] that his two opera ideas were "equally old".^[79] That summer, he worked on Wozzeck on several weeks' leave at Trahütten, composing at the piano each morning. He sketched outside while foraging for mushrooms and hiking the mountains, lakes, and springs, and read at night. Helene saw this "love of nature" in his music, including Wozzeck.^[80] In an August letter to Schoenberg, he marked 1917 as the symbolic year he committed to Wozzeck.^[81] Likely from his war service,^[82] which he called "slavery" that might last "for years",^[83] he saw more subjugation than poverty in Wozzeck. Asked in 1930 what "inner point of contact" moved him, he said:^[84]

There was probably some natural relationship between me and this poem.^[h] ... Wozzeck is no simple "we-poor-people" play. What happened to Wozzeck can happen to any poor person, regardless of ... clothing ... to anyone who is subjugated ... and cannot defend himself.

In summer 1918, on six weeks' leave at Trahütten, Berg revised the libretto and finished two scenes, likely the second scenes of acts 1 and 2.^[86] That June, he wrote Schoenberg of being "degraded to the point of self-loathing" (in 1924, he drafted a letter to Kraus confiding he had experienced suicidal ideation).^[87] "There's a bit of me in [Wozzeck]", he wrote Helene that August, having lived the war "just as dependent on people I hate ... in chains, sick, captive, resigned, humiliated."^[88] Praising the drama's "unheard-of intensity of mood", he wrote Anton Webern that "the fate of this poor man, exploited and tormented by all the world ... touches me".^[89] He planned to alternate thematic song forms with Erwartung-inspired motivic variations. He gave the Captain and Doctor more Sprechstimme (half-singing, half-speaking) roles, as in melodrama, but later used more conventional singing.^[90]

That year, Schoenberg hired him at the Society for Private Musical Performances to help with administration, rehearsals, music arrangements, and writing.^[92] The Bergs caught Spanish flu that fall, and the pandemic worsened labor shortages and hunger^[i] amid the war and its aftermath.^[94] The Berghof, his family's farm and business at Lake Ossiach,^[95] faced failure^[96] and nearby food riots in Villach.^[97] "Starving and freezing millions" crowded Vienna, writer Stefan Zweig recalled, where "revolution or ... catastrophe" seemed possible amid unfolding state collapse, including the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and German revolution of 1918–1919.^[98] That November, Berg's military service ended with armistices and Austro-Hungarian defeat. "I am again a person!", he wrote Buschbeck.^[99]

1919–22: Progress through war's aftermath

In July 1919, Berg finalized Wozzeck's symmetrical scene order, finishing act 1 in four weeks before copying parts for Three Pieces for Orchestra that August. Wounded veteran and composer–pianist Erwin Schulhoff played Berg's Piano Sonata in Prague^[100] and hoped to premiere the Orchestra Pieces there and at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.^[101] In advertisements he sent Berg for these "Progress Concerts", he tied the revolutions of 1917–1923 to a spiritual "revolution in art".^[102]

That fall, Berg and Helene faced what she called the "Berghof Catastrophe". His mother Johanna, having enabled his composing with an appanage, sought their help managing the Berghof. Wartime mismanagement of its guest house and tavern caused feuds as the family gathered there partly in hunger.^[104] The government had imposed production quotas and resorted to confiscation for food rationing.^[105] Despite "freezing and having nothing to live on", Berg emphasized that he was "happy" in a November 1919 letter to Schulhoff, recalling war "years of suffering and humiliation at a low rank, not composing a single note".^[106]

Schulhoff had circulated an internationalist artists' petition, and in this letter, Berg sympathized, while, following Schoenberg, prioritizing Austro-German art music.^[107] Berg wrote that a nation like Germany^[j] might "deserve" its defeat for how it "treats its greatest".^[108][k] He blamed the war and its aftermath on capitalism, militarism, the press, and, uncharacteristically, Jews,^[110] calling himself an "antimilitarist" like Kraus,^[111] who polemically examined journalism and German–Jewish assimilation.^[112] Berg asked Schulhoff who among the Entente, "outside Russia", had the same "ring of idealism" to their names as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, recently murdered Spartacist uprising leaders.^[113]

Berg gradually resisted his family's demands at the Berghof, writing Webern in March 1920 that he would instead need to make money by editing, teaching, and writing, including for Musikblätter des Anbruch [de], the music journal of Universal Edition, though he might have even less time to compose.^[114] That April, Johanna sold the landed property as he wished and as another family member had advised.^[115] In July, he planned three scenes (likely 1, 3, and 5) of act 2 in the shape of a four- or five-movement symphony, finishing them by August.^[116]

In 1921, the Society closed as the Austrian hyperinflation began.^[117] Johanna kept planning her family's future.^[118] She distrusted Helene's krone-based passive income^[119] and feared that "componiererei" (fooling around composing) would impoverish Berg.^[120] With dollars from her late son Herman's Florida estate, she funded New York trusts managed by Geo. Borgfeldt & Co. [de], a firm long tied to the family,^[121] enabling Berg to keep composing. He finished act 2 in Vienna (as Helene visited Bad Hofgastein) and act 3 in Trahütten by October.^[122] While polishing and orchestrating Wozzeck, he recalled that Schoenberg had "tried to take away all my pleasure" in it.^[123] It was done, he wrote Schoenberg in June 1922.^[124]

Roles

Costume design (sketches, Didier Sainderichin)

More information Role, Voice type ...

Roles, voice types, premiere cast

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

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Instrumentation

Pit orchestra: 4 flutes (all double piccolos), 4 oboes (4th doubles English horn), 4 B♭ clarinets (1st doubles A, 3rd–4th double E♭), bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 F horns, 4 F trumpets, 4 trombones (alto, 2 tenor, bass), tuba, 4 timpani drums, 2 bass drums (1 with rute), suspended cymbals, bass-drum cymbal, crash cymbals, snare drum, 2 tam-tams (1 small), triangle, xylophone, celesta, harp, string section (14–16 first violins, 14–16 second violins, 10–12 violas, 10–12 cellos, and 8–10 double basses)

Military band: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 E♭ clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 F horns, 2 F trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, bass drum, crash cymbals, snare drum, triangle

Chamber orchestra: flute (doubles piccolo), oboe, English horn, 2 clarinets (E♭, A), bass clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, 2 F horns, 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass

Tavern band: C clarinet, F bombardon (or muted tuba), out-of-tune upright "tavern" piano, accordion, guitar, 2 fiddles

Structure

Like earlier composers, Berg innovated on operatic tradition. Wanting his work to avoid seeming Romantic or passé,^[139] he said he preferred strict musical form to "the Wagnerian recipe of 'through-composing'",^[140][m] though Wozzeck is Wagnerian in its complexity and unmoored emotionality.^[142] His hybrid approach is an integrated number opera. Each act and scene has an old or abstract musical form in the manner of absolute music, yet with dramatic significance, like the passacaglia for the Doctor's exam or the triple fugue for the love-triangle innuendo.^[143]

Büchner's text repeats motifs: "ein guter Mensch" (a good person), "wir arme Leut" (we poor folk), and "eins nach dem andern" (one after the other). From Bible quotes to Wozzeck's Apocryphal visions, he builds ideas into sections. Berg's music similarly accrues structure.^[144] Act 1 uses a chord progression (scene 2) and twelve-tone theme (scene 4). Act 3 uses a pitch (scene 2), rhythm (scene 3), hexachord (scene 4), tonality (interlude), and duration (scene 5).^[145] These patterns, along with the repeated lines and linked scenes, help shape musicodramatic repetition.^[144]

As Berg's pupil Fritz Mahler summarized,^[146] Wozzeck retains Franzos's overall dramatic structure (exposition, development, catastrophe):^[26]

More information Drama, Music ...

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

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Harmony and motifs

Structural chords^[147]

A quasi-cadential gesture closes each act, where it would be "distinctly evident", Berg said, that "the circle of harmony comes full close", realized in an oscillation of blurred sonorities derived from two structural chords. The combined eight-pitch set of these chords, when transposed or inverted, can span the whole chromatic. Many scholars note that Berg seems to draw both harmony and melody from transformations of this set, often forming isomorphic figures built from segments of whole tones varied by semitone placement.^[148]

But in Wozzeck, unlike in the athematic (motivic) Clarinet Pieces (1913), Berg integrates harmony with thematic material to articulate larger structures and convey expression.^[149][n] For example, he repeatedly uses the low-register fifth G–D as a stabilizing pedal point that links Marie and the Drum Major and imparts brief tonal grounding to otherwise nontonal passages.^[152] The tritone B–F fatefully recurs at the curtain and throughout to signify Wozzeck's torment, especially tension with Marie and, to a lesser extent, the Captain.^[153]

At the same time, Berg uses such focal pitches and often register for frame of reference^[154] and added meaning.^[155] For example, the single pitch B symbolizes the murder^[156] and dominates that scene.^[157] Soft at the end of act 2, when Wozzeck, beaten, whispers "einer nach dem andern" (one after the other),^[158] B crescendos repeatedly^[157] and expands from unison B₃ into octaves:^[159] Marie's last cry ("Hilfe!", or "Help!") spans two, from B₅ to B₃.^[160] (As B is here, so is F a pedal in Wozzeck's death scene.)^[161]

"Wir arme Leut" motif

Leitmotifs are assigned to the Captain, Doctor, and Drum Major, whose music recurs when Marie muses on him. Wozzeck has two: one as he hurriedly enters and exits, and one languidly expressing his misery and helplessness. Marie's motifs convey sensuality, as when she accepts a pair of earrings from the Drum Major. In act 1, scene 1, Wozzeck sings "wir arme Leut" (poor folk like us), tracing a minor chord with an added major seventh, sometimes called the "anguish" motif.

Berg regularly combines all of these elements musicodramatically. For example, when Wozzeck confronts Marie in act 2, scene 1, fragments of the Drum Major's motifs sound over a repeated G–A bass figure adapted from Wozzeck's misery motif, and Marie's replies recall the rowdy march scene over a G–D–A pedal.^[162]

Altered idioms

Altered idioms and Expressionist music convey Wozzeck's (and others') emotions and thought processes, especially his madness and alienation. Folk song and popular dance idioms appear in the field and tavern scenes. Berg transforms a polka into a danse macabre in the later tavern episode (act 3, scene 3). Its opening rhythm is a retrograde of a tango, alluding to Kraus's play Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1915–22; The Last Days of Mankind), drafts of which appeared in Die Fackel [de] by 1916.^[164] Marie's orphan plays among children singing "Ringel, Ringel, Rosenkranz, Ringelreih'n" (like "Ring a Ring o' Roses") in the epilogue.

Berg's sketches for Wozzeck (and for the march from Three Pieces for Orchestra) included notes on his military service.^[165] Drafts include Austrian army bugle calls rendered atonal in the final score (act 1, scene 2).^[166] His war experience of sleeping in barracks informed his chorus of snoring soldiers (act 2, scene 5), with their "polyphonic breathing, gasping, and groaning ... the most peculiar chorus I've ever heard ... like some primeval music that wells up from the abysses of the soul", he recalled.^[68]

Berg also adapted tonal juvenilia for Wozzeck. In Marie's Bible scene, he reworked a sonata fragment in F minor that has been called Schumannesque in its melancholy.^[167] The final interlude is perhaps from a 1909 piano piece for Helene or a planned 1912 symphony on Honoré de Balzac's 1834 novel Séraphîta.^[168]

Act 1

There is no overture, only a brief symbolic introduction (mm. 1–3). The opening D-minor tone cluster crescendos softly in the strings, collapsing in glissandi to a more compact A♭-minor cluster, the verticalized leitmotif associated with Wozzeck's hurried entrances and exits.^[o] The whole chromatic is completed, with the eleventh pitch in the oboe and the twelfth in the bassoon. A wind quintet melodically suggests shifting, ambiguous harmonies as the curtain rises (m. 4).^[172]

Scene 1 (Suite) unfolds in episodes of obbligato part-writing. In the suite's prelude,^[172] Wozzeck shaves the Captain, assenting in monotone to orders to go "slowly! One thing after the other!"^[174] In the suite's stately pavane, the Captain ruminates on eternity in analogy to a mill wheel, painted with eight descending fourths (or the circle of fifths).^[175] In the viola cadenza, he rhythmically mocks Wozzeck's assents like a verbal taunt,^[176] calling Wozzeck a "good man". But to the contrabassoon cadenza, he adds that Wozzeck has "no sense of morality"^[177] and scorns Wozzeck's nonmarital son in falsetto as winds mimic a church pipe organ.^[176]

In the suite's double, Wozzeck quotes Mark 10:14. In the suite's air, over expressive diminished seventh chords spanning the whole chromatic, he makes a universal claim: morality is hard for "poor folk like us", who, like the Captain, are only "flesh and blood".^[178][p] If they reached Heaven, he cries to accented triads that pop and crack across the whole chromatic, "we'd all have to manufacture thunder!"^[183] Unnerved, the Captain again calls Wozzeck a "good man", adding that he "think[s] too much!" and dismissing him with another "go slowly", set to the prelude in reverse.^[184] In a brief interlude, this material is transformed, building to climax as the curtain rises again.^[185]

Rhapsody chords gravitate to C.^[186]

Scene 2 (Rhapsody and Hunting Song): In a rhapsody on three chords evoking tonic, dominant, and subdominant,^[187] Wozzeck and fellow soldier Andres gather firewood at sunset.^[188] "This place is accursed!" says Wozzeck repeatedly,^[189] fearing its toadstools (poisonous mushrooms)^[190] and recounting a tale of someone who died three days and nights after finding a severed head there.^[191] As a foil,^[192] this alternates with strophes of Andres's rustic Jagdlied  [de] (hunting song) in ⁶
₈, sung on the first two chords as if in G major (increasingly off-key as he becomes uneasy).^[193]

Unassuaged, Wozzeck describes a hollow Earth, a firestorm, and a "crashing noise coming down, like trumpets".^[194] "Are you mad?", Andres finally asks. All is still, as if the world were dead, Wozzeck murmurs, as drums are heard and bugles signal from town. Andres urges they leave before dark.^[195] The music segues as the scene changes. Clarinets mimic distant bugles.^[190] A funeral march begins as they retreat,^[195] descending in a lament bass from C to F^[196] as the curtain falls.^[190] This march is transformed when a military band nears as the curtain rises.^[195]

Scene 3 (March and Lullaby): This rowdy band marches toward Marie's window,^[197] and she joins in song (an altered melody from Mahler's "Revelge").^[198] Across the street, her neighbor Margret teases her about her wandering eye for the soldiers. Marie slams the window shut, quieting the march.^[199]

Her music of open fourths and fifths begins: she sings a self-soothing lullaby to her son. Entranced, she waits for Wozzeck, set to an ostinato (her "waiting" music). It ends on B–F as he knocks on her window. He arrives and shares his visions of the heavens, set to a reprise (mm. 435–6) of scene 2's sunset music (mm. 289–93).^[199] As he leaves in a hurry, Marie reminds him to look at their boy. She laments their poverty. He runs to the doctor. The segue develops Marie's motif, the rhapsody chords, and a reminiscence motif from the rowdy military music into a twelve-tone figure.^[200]

Scene 4 (Passacaglia): This figure is the passacaglia theme, with 21 variations in three sections. It is a golden afternoon.^[200] Wozzeck calls the Doctor "Herr Coffin Nail",^[201] and the Doctor scolds him for breaking the paid experimental diet and urine-collection protocol (Wozzeck cannot resist the urge to urinate). Angered, the Doctor medically reassures himself by taking his own pulse, set to music at a somatic ♩= 60.^[202] Wozzeck mentions Marie and shares his field visions with the Doctor, including the toadstool constellations (the "lines and circles" mirrored musically).

The Doctor, set to his motif and a waltz melody, is thrilled. As an ironic comment on obsessions, horn music from the Captain's ruminations accompanies the Doctor's diagnosis of Wozzeck's mental illness ("aberatio mentalis partialis zweite Spezies"). His exclamation about the eternal truth of his scientific theories is marked by the verticalized quartal eternity motif. Finally, he demands to physically examine Wozzeck.^[202] As a brief interlude, the passacaglia theme fragments and yields to music from the rowdy march.^[203]

Scene 5 (Rondo): It is evening outside Marie's house.^[203] She admires the Drum Major from her doorway. The military music continues. They flirt. He makes advances. She briefly struggles to resist him physically, then yields to his seduction and lets him in as the curtain falls with two oscillating chords.^[163]

Act 2

Scene 1 (Sonata-Allegro): The curtain rises with two oscillating chords. In her room the next morning, set to a motif as the exposition's first subject, Marie wears the Drum Major's gift of earrings, admiring herself in a broken piece of mirror. In the transition, her son stirs awake on her lap. She grimly transforms the lullaby as the second subject, singing of "gypsies" taking children who will not sleep. He hides his face in the coda. In the repeat, Marie returns to the mirror until he stirs again, and she uses shadowgraphy to threaten him with the Sandman. This time in the coda, Wozzeck enters unseen, startling Marie, who tries to hide her earrings in the development. He doubts she found a matching pair, as she claims.^[204]

A plain C-major triad briefly drones for his affectionate gift of money,^[205] and he leaves.^[206] She is wracked with guilt in the recapitulation. The music continues without voices, serving as an interlude, before the curtain falls with a C-major glissando.^[207]

Scene 2 (Fantasia and Fugue on Three Themes): The curtain rises on a new day with a C-major scale on harp. On the street, as the opening oboe theme returns, the Captain tries to speak with the Doctor, who says he "must hurry" to the obsession motif. "A good man takes his time", says the Captain.^[208] Breathlessly chasing, he receives a medical assessment by turns mocking ("bloated, fat") and dire (risk of "apoplexia cerebria", or stroke) to the waltz. In the triple fugue, their leitmotifs (Captain, then Doctor) join a version of Wozzeck's coda music as it dawns on him that they are hinting at the love triangle. A slow chamber-orchestra interlude hints at the next scene's music.^[125]

Scene 3 (Largo): It is overcast. Wozzeck arrives to confront Marie at her door to music scored like Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1. She halfheartedly denies it amid rowdy military music. Enraged, he nearly strikes her. "Don't touch me", she cries to music echoing her struggle with the Drum Major. "Better a knife in my heart", she moralizes to a chromatic wedge symbolizing the knife, "than dare to lay a hand on me". Struck by the suggestion, Wozzeck flees. The prior interlude's undulating music reverses into the next scene's slow Ländler.^[209]

Scene 4 (Scherzo with two trios): Two novices sing drunken solos for patrons at a Heuriger (Viennese garden tavern). Rowdy seduction music recurs in her waltz with the Drum Major as Wozzeck watches. A hunter's chorus sung by soldiers, another song from Andres, and a drunken sermon interrupt. The band resumes, but an Idiot walks into Wozzeck, slurring, "Everyone is happy, but it stinks of blood". Wozzeck dissociates. Erratic dance music accelerates past the curtain fall, halting as a men's chorus is heard in a faint vocalise of the rhapsody chords.^[210]

Scene 5 (Introduction and rondo): This strange chorus, the curtain slowly reveals, is soldiers snoring in a guardhouse barracks. Wozzeck tosses and turns, haunted by thoughts of Marie and the Drum Major dancing. He seems to hear the tavern songs outside as music from the hollow Earth recurs. After seeing the knife in a vision, he prays, set to the field scene music. But the drunken Drum Major comes boasting and fights him to music from Marie's struggle. Wozzeck falls as oscillating music fades to a final low B on harp.^[210]

Act 3

Scene 1 (Invention on a theme): Wracked with guilt, Marie reads the Bible by candlelight, including the pericope of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery, set to a theme and variations. Her son clings to her as she tells him a grim fairy tale. Then, searching for a passage on Mary Magdalene, she reads about the sinful woman and begs for mercy, set to a double fugue on the bisected theme. In the interlude, the theme is developed before fading to a chilling harp-and-celesta arpeggio over the fateful pitch B.^[211]

Scene 2 (Invention on a single note, B): Wozzeck and Marie talk uneasily at a forest pond. A red moon rises. He pulls his knife to a crescendo on B and cuts her throat, letting her fall dead to music amassing her motifs. In the interlude, a twofold crescendo, divided by the hexachord and a jangling rhythm, blasts on B until the curtain rises.^[212]

Scene 3 (Invention on a rhythm): Everyone revels drunkenly as Wozzeck and Margret dance to a polka on an out-of-tune tavern piano. He pulls her onto his lap, insults her, and demands that she sing. Others see blood on him and raise alarm. He runs. In the interlude, the rhythm repeats against itself, followed by a half-climax that breaks off on an altered chord (m. 219).^[213]

D minor is prepared at length^[214]

Scene 4 (Invention on a hexachord, m. 220): Wozzeck tosses his knife into the pond. The music mimics croaking toads. Clouds unveil red moonlight, cast like blood on Wozzeck and the water. Intending to bury the knife deeper and to wash clean, he drowns, perhaps by suicide. The hexachord is transposed down (m. 302). The Captain and Doctor, walking slowly nearby, are disturbed by the sound of drowning, which the music mimics. They return to town. The music shifts into tonality.^[215]

Interlude (Invention on a tonality): A musical catharsis opens forcefully in D minor with whole tones (m. 320). It modulates to F major, followed by a section amassing Wozzeck's motifs. At the climax (m. 364), a fully chromatic dominant sonority, built from three superimposed 3-cycles, crescendos into the "wir arme Leut" motif as the harmony resolves in D minor (m. 370).^[216]

Scene 5 (Invention on an eighth-note moto perpetuo, quasi toccata): Children play and sing in the sunny street outside Marie's door the next morning. News of her death spreads. They run to see her corpse. Marie's son appears unaffected as it is shouted at him. Her music recurs in and across continuous eighth notes, evoking a simple, childlike world.^[217] He tags along blankly, now an orphan. The music trails off in a loop, framing a cycle of suffering.^[218]

Premieres

1921–25: Promotion, publication, and world premiere

Schoenberg saw Wozzeck's Particell (short score) in 1921 and urged Universal Edition's Emil Hertzka to publish the imminent piano–vocal score by Berg's pupils (mostly Fritz Heinrich Klein but also Gottfried Kassowitz): "This is an opera! Genuine theater music! Everything is flawlessly done, as though Berg had never composed anything but theater music!"^[239] With funds from dedicatee Alma Mahler and a loan from May Keller, with whom his sister Smaragda had a long-term lesbian relationship,^[s] Berg paid Universal Edition to print private piano–vocal score copies in 1922. He sold few but sent many to critics, conductors, and theaters in early 1923.^[242]

That April, Die Musik published the lullaby with Ernst Viebig [de]'s rapt review: "It is in the form of the piece that the composer opens up new paths", "perhaps" to a "truly 'musical opera'"^[244] (Wozzeck was not a "conventional 'music drama'", Klein wrote in Anbruch, but had a "new kind of structure" with "all the forms of absolute music" and a "formal musical development").^[243][t] Then, in exchange for Wozzeck, Universal Edition published Three Pieces for Orchestra.^[246] Webern debuted two (Präludium and Reigen) at Heinrich Jalowetz's and Paul Pella [de]'s "Austrian Music Week" that summer in Berlin, drawing more press.^[247]

Also that summer, when Gustav Havemann's Quartet performed Berg's String Quartet at the Salzburg International Society for Contemporary Music festival, conductor Hermann Scherchen requested a Wozzeck suite. Berg used the march, lullaby, and Bible scene to create Three Fragments^[u] for Voice and Orchestra from the Opera "Wozzeck".^[248]

In late 1923, Berg had composer Ernst Bachrich play piano excerpts from Wozzeck for conductor Erich Kleiber, who was visiting Vienna, and Kleiber agreed to stage it at the Berlin State Opera. Universal Edition deemed this the best premiere offer. Scherchen subsequently premiered the Fragments, originally intended for Berlin, to acclaim at Frankfurt's 1924 Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (ADMV) festival.^[248] Adorno attended and was inspired to study composition with Berg.^[249]

Berg helped with staging and rehearsals in Berlin.^[250] There were at least 137,^[251] and Berlin State Opera manager Max von Schillings quit over a possibly related funding clash.^[250] Wozzeck was regarded as the first full-scale atonal opera.^[252] Many music writers, including Vienna's Paul Stefan and Prague's Erich Steinhard [de], and composers, including Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Adorno, and Stefan Wolpe, attended the dress rehearsal.^[250] The 14 December 1925 premiere was a succès de scandale with some disruptions.^[253]

Wozzeck achieved sustained expressive coherence despite a post-tonal musical language^[227] and was covered internationally and at length.^[254] In January 1927, Oslo's Berlin-based Dagbladet critic (and Francophile composer) Pauline Hall hailed it as "a new stage in German musical development, ... for the first time since Wagner". It showed independence from Schoenberg and was equal to Debussy's Pelléas, she added.^[255]

Gurlitt's Wozzeck

The Vienna premiere of Büchner's play also inspired Manfred Gurlitt.^[256] Premiered four months after Berg's opera^[257] and also published by Universal Edition, Gurlitt's opera Wozzeck discomfited Berg.^[256] They worked without any knowledge of each other.^[257] Examining Gurlitt's piano–vocal score, Berg found it "not bad or unoriginal" but a weak "broth ... even for arme Leut [poor folks]".^[258] Gurlitt's leaner musical textures and polystylism align with Hindemith and Weill, with frequent, socially oriented use of the chorus. His opera may be closer to Büchner's original conception.^[256] It has remained in the shadow of Berg's.^[259][v]

1926–34: Subsequent premieres

1926: Vojcek

After composer–conductor Alexander Zemlinsky's May 1925 performance of the Fragments with the Czech Philharmonic,^[260] writer Jiří Mařánek [cs] translated Berg's libretto,^[261] and in 1926 conductor Otakar Ostrčil led Wozzeck's Czech-language premiere as Vojcek at Prague's National Theatre,^[254] staged by dramatist Ferdinand Pujman [cs].^[261] In the German-language Prager Presse on the day of the first performance (12 November), music and theater critic Oskar Baum wrote that criticism of the Schoenberg circle's work as abstract or "'dogmatic' ... evaporates [upon] contact with the music". Berg, reportedly in "high spirits" at the dress rehearsal, was quoted at length:^[262]

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

During the third performance,^[261] as Berg wrote Adorno, some "Czech Nationalists (virtually Nazis)" and "clerical lobbies" staged "purely political!" disruptions: "To them I am the Berlin Jew Alban (Aaron?) Berg. Ostrčil bribed by the Russian Bolsheviks, the whole thing arranged by the 'Elders of Zion' etc."^[263] Antonín Šilhan [ru] wrote as much in Národní listy, and Emanuel Žak [cs] tied the opera's degeneracy to Jewish Bolshevism in Čech [cs], while Zdeněk Nejedlý mocked them, praising Wozzeck in Rudé právo.^[264][w] The city government quickly banned it.^[261] Ostrčil connected the affair to "a reactionary movement that has been asserted in our life".^[266]

In a 1927 interview, Berg attributed the protests to "political issues ... supposedly connected to my artistic outlook".^[267] In an interview printed in 1928, composer Leoš Janáček said that "wrong was seriously done to Berg", calling him a "dramatist of astonishing consequence, of deep truth".^[268] In the 1930 interview with Jancke, Berg remembered the deceased Janáček among those who backed him, saying that Prague's top circles and critics fought the ban. Czech nationalists, he recalled, had opposed him as an Austrian^[x] and for his work's supposed defeatism.^[271]

1927: Leningrad

In 1927, the Association for Contemporary Music, spearheaded by Nikolai Roslavets, staged Wozzeck at Leningrad's Mariinsky Theatre with Boris Asafyev's assistance,^[272] Vladimir Dranishnikov [ru] conducting. Berg rode trains for about three days to attend the first performances and wrote journalist Soma Morgenstern that he was "celebrated [as] never ... before".^[273] Here Wozzeck was, he continued, "a sensation ... in purely artistic, not political, terms".^[273] He wired Helene "huge, tumultuous success", but reviews were mixed.^[274] Dmitri Shostakovich attended all eight or nine performances.^[275]

1929–30: Arrangement and lectures for regional cities

Oldenburgisches Staatstheater conductor Johannes Schüler proved that Wozzeck could succeed in a small-town theater with few rehearsals.^[273] Berg and Erwin Stein cut sections from four to three musicians, yielding an orchestra of about 60.^[276] Berg first gave his "Lecture on Wozzeck" before this premiere, then in eleven or more cities:^[277] in the 1930 interview with Jancke, he said that after ten stagings here and eight in Essen, about ten other theaters planned it, including Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hagen, Lübeck, Stuttgart, Weimar, and Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, as the ADMV festival opera). When interviewed, Berg was in Aachen for Wozzeck rehearsals, following a performance of his Lyric Suite (alongside Schoenberg's music) there. Composer Béla Bartók, Jancke noted, had said Wozzeck showed contemporary art music's potential in regional cities.^[278]

1930: Viennese premiere and polemic

For Wozzeck's 1930 Austrian premiere, led by Vienna's Clemens Krauss, Berg gave tickets to friends, family, and his nonmarital daughter, Albine Wittula. While on better terms with Kleiber, Berg was pleased with Krauss's performance and touched by his opera's hometown success.^[279] Webern said he was "shaken to his depths", though he criticized the production as "insufficient". Some called it "art for art's sake" and "unsocial".^[280] Neue Freie Presse critic Julius Korngold wrote a polemical review:^[279]

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

Berg replied by defending the Second Viennese School's tradition-based harmonic innovation.^[281] Following Schoenberg, he rejected the label "atonal" as denoting loss, and he argued that music predating the common practice period entailed the possibility of new music after that period. At the same time, he saw his and Schoenberg's music as preserving continuity with old forms, motivic development, the centrality of melody, and loosely triadic elements historically grounded in a long line of chromaticism, from Max Reger and Brahms to Franz Schubert and Mozart.^[282]

1930–31: Philadelphia and New York

Kleiber gave the Wozzeck Fragments their 1930 U.S. premiere at the New York Philharmonic, priming opera-goers. "Like Debussy in his Pelléas, Berg sought ... to probe the depths of consciousness", Lawrence Gilman wrote in the New York Herald Tribune.^[279]

In 1931, the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company, working with the Curtis Institute of Music and Philadelphia Orchestra, staged the U.S. premiere of Wozzeck at Philadelphia's Metropolitan Opera House under Leopold Stokowski. Composer George Gershwin rode a special Wozzeck train from New York: he had met Berg in 1928 via pianist Josefa Rosanska (Josephine Rosensweet, Rudolf Kolisch's soon-to-be wife) when they went to Berg's home to hear the Kolisch Quartet play Berg's Lyric Suite.^[284]

Calling the audience "brilliant", The New York Times's conservative critic Olin Downes wrote of an "astonishing" success and hailed Berg's word painting:^[285]

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

Gilman agreed:^[285]

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

Later that year, Stokowski's Philadelphia team staged Wozzeck's second U.S. premiere at New York's Metropolitan Opera, prompting another Downes review:^[285]

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

1932–34: British broadcasts

In 1932, Henry Wood led the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a studio performance of the Wozzeck Fragments broadcast by Schoenberg pupil Edward Clark.^[286] In 1934, Adrian Boult conducted Wozzeck in a Queen's Hall concert performance also broadcast by Clark.^[287][288]

Effect on Berg

Unlike Schoenberg or Webern, Berg was able to live on royalty payments for his music,^[236] mostly from Wozzeck performances in Central Europe.^[289] He traveled not only to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Russia, and England, but also to Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, France, and Italy for performances of and talks about the opera.^[289] Busy attending to his success and enjoying independence, he declined vacations with Schoenberg and Schreker's offers of a Berlin Musikhochschule appointment.^[227] He benefited from new relationships with Kleiber, Karl Böhm, and Gian Francesco Malipiero, and was appointed to the ADMV jury.^[290]

1934–49: Decline and suppression

Performances of Wozzeck waned amid rising support for fascism and were suppressed under it. Inflation further harmed Berg's finances. Webern's engagement to conduct the Fragments in Florence was canceled in 1934.^[291] Soon after immigrating to the United States that year, Schoenberg helped Berg obtain funds to complete Lulu by persuading the Library of Congress to buy the holograph score of Wozzeck.^[292] As a tribute following Berg's 1935 death, Webern almost conducted the Fragments and Berg's Violin Concerto (at its 1936 world premiere in Barcelona) but was overwhelmed in the event.^[293]

Tullio Serafin conducted Wozzeck's 1942 Italian premiere before leaving the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma.^[294] In general, Fascist Italy was less hostile to modernist music and less willing than Nazi Germany to ban it.^[295]

1949–2008: Revivals and later premieres

Europe, Russia, and Australia

Naples's Teatro di San Carlo staged Wozzeck in their 1949–50 season,^[296] and in 1952, the Royal Opera House gave Wozzeck its first British staging.^[253] The Vienna State Opera first revived it in the 1955–56 season, their first after World War II, led by Karl Böhm.^[297] The Berlin State Opera reinstated Wozzeck,^[298] and it gradually appeared across Germany at the Staatstheater Augsburg,^[299] the Staatstheater Braunschweig,^[300] the Theater Dortmund (managed by P. Walter Jacob [de]),^[301] the Theater Gießen,^[302] the Staatsoper Hannover,^[303] the Staatstheater Mainz (with László Anderkó as Wozzeck),^[304] the Staatstheater Nürnberg,^[305] the Theater Regensburg,^[306] the Mainfranken Theater Würzburg,^[307] and the Prinzregententheater (led by Ferenc Fricsay).^[308] The Finnish National Opera and Ballet staged it after their 1956 reorganization.^[309]

In 1962, Paris's Théâtre des Champs-Élysées gave Wozzeck its first French staging.^[311] The De Nederlandse Operastichting mounted it in their first season (1965–66), stage directed by Maurice Huisman.^[312] In his debut that year, Herbert Graf stage directed Wozzeck's local premiere at the Grand Théâtre de Genève.^[313] In Italy, Gian Carlo Menotti hired Günter Krämer [de] to stage it at Spoleto's Festival dei Due Mondi,^[314] and Parma's Teatro di Verdura [it] staged it in 1965,^[315] followed by the Teatro Comunale di Bologna in 1969^[316] and Genoa's Teatro Carlo Felice in 1970 (after fascist suppression there).^[317] The Nederlandse Reisopera added it to their repertoire in the 1970s,^[318] as did Opera Australia after the Sydney Opera House opened.^[319]

In the 1980s, Gerard Mortier stage directed both revivals at Brussels' La Monnaie,^[320] and Parma's Teatro Regio mounted it in 1989.^[321] In the 1990s, Paris's Théâtre du Châtelet,^[322] the Opéra national de Montpellier,^[323] the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino,^[324] and Trieste's Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi^[325] presented Wozzeck, and Pierre Audi mounted it twice through the Dutch National Opera.^[326] Menotti revived it at Spoleto's Teatro Caio Melisso in 1994,^[327] Bologna revived it to poor attendance in 1995,^[328] and Theater Saarbrücken produced it for Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg's 1995–96 season.^[329] Wozzeck was restaged in Russia only in 2008^[330] after decades of Stalinism and turbulent Germany–Russia relations.^[272]

Krenek

Berg and Krenek were acquainted at the salons of Alma Mahler,^[332] who was a close friend of the Bergs^[333] (and the wife or lover of Gustav Mahler, Kokoschka, and Werfel). Krenek studied Wozzeck's piano–vocal score and wrote Berg with praise and questions about vocal writing while working with Kokoschka on Orpheus und Eurydike in 1923.^[332] Berg replied with examples from Wagner, Mozart, and Bach, stressing music adapted to singers' limits and his varied use of voice ("the supreme instrument") for dramatic effect.^[334] Krenek denied modeling Orpheus on Wozzeck, but Berg likely influenced him. Hans Hartleb saw parallels in the operas' violence and music of "fatalism, melancholy, and sensuality" for Eurydike and Marie^[332] (whose role, he wrote, such music elevated).^[335]

Shostakovich

The second scene of Shostakovich's opera The Nose (1927) likely parodies Wozzeck. Shaken to find a nose he fears he severed, Shostakovich's barber galops through friendly townsfolk by a river, set to melodic motifs recalling Berg's tavern polka, during which Wozzeck feigns friendliness with townsfolk after murdering Marie. The barber tosses the nose into the water, as Wozzeck does his knife into a pond. Rising and falling lines evoke its sinking, as they depict Wozzeck's drowning. A policeman sees. He interrogates in hysterical falsetto, with a high climax, laughter, and final deflation, as the Captain does in Wozzeck's first scene. The barber replies in a clipped, spoken manner, echoing Wozzeck's monotonous assents.^[336]

Others

Wozzeck was among Gershwin's influences and perhaps his model in writing the opera Porgy and Bess, which he reportedly "wanted to write like ... an American Wozzeck".^[337] It also influenced Luigi Dallapiccola,^[338] who used the same tetrachord as Wozzeck's "wir arme Leut" motif in the climactic betrayal scene of the opera Il prigioniero (1944–1948).^[339] The one-act opera C’est la guerre  [hu] (1960–1961) by Emil Petrovics [hu] shows Wozzeck's influence in its taut Expressionism and ironic use of popular tunes.^[340]

In later German opera, Wozzeck influenced the style of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten and Wolfgang Rihm's Jakob Lenz.^[341]

In concert music, Luciano Berio quotes the rising orchestral chords Berg uses in the word painting of Wozzeck's drowning alongside other musical depictions of water in Sinfonia (1968–1969).^[342] Luigi Nono's concert fragments from his opera Al gran sole carico d'amore may follow the model of Berg's Wozzeck Fragments (and Lulu Symphony).^[343]

Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, in creating the 1979 musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, drew on Berg's portrayal of an antihero and tightly structured integration of music and drama.^[344]