Wozzeck () is the first opera by Austrian composer Alban Berg, created between 1914 and 1922 and premiered on 14 December 1925 at the Berlin State Opera. Based on Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck (1836), it depicts a soldier's tragic slide into madness and murder amid militarism and oppression.
Berg's expressionist musical language and innovative approach to musical form heightened the opera's psychological realism. He used atonality and leitmotifs to show individuals' emotional and existential plight under forces of authority. Drawing on tonal and rhythmic idioms from folk and dance music, he linked psychological and social dimensions and exposed social alienation. He also invoked latent themes and topics of destiny and nature, reflecting an understanding of humanity as shaped by universal forces.
A at its premiere, Wozzeck faced backlash but became a landmark of early 20th-century modernist opera. It helped establish the viability of large-scale atonal drama and exerted wide influence. It remains a cornerstone of the repertoire, celebrated for its narrative power and complex musical structure.
Background
Berg created the (literary opera) Wozzeck from 1914 to 1922, stalled by World War I. He had first pursued a literary career, with juvenilia in lyric poetry and drama, including after Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts. But in 1904, he diaried that music was "a higher form of revelation". Berg's mentor Arnold Schoenberg advised, "let poetry lead you ... to music".
Schoenberg premiered some of Berg's aphoristic Altenberg Lieder (1911–1912), which caused the 1913 . Next Berg planned a vocal symphony after Gustav Mahler, but Schoenberg told him to try a suite of character pieces (the Three Pieces for Orchestra, 1913–1915), while affirming his operatic interest in the chamber plays of August Strindberg.
In May 1914, Berg twice attended the local premiere of Georg Büchner's 1836 play Woyzeck, then mistitled Wozzeck, at Vienna's . Among visitors from the Munich Residenz Theatre, he recalled seeing actor Albert Steinrück as Wozzeck and said he "immediately" decided to make it an opera. He wrote his own libretto, which is much indebted to writer Karl Emil Franzos. From poorly legible papers shared by Büchner's brother, physician Ludwig Büchner, Franzos's version had appeared in a Neue Freie Presse serial (1875) and in his "critical, complete" Büchner edition (1879).
Büchner, Woyzeck, and Berg
Before Berg: Büchner and Woyzeck
Trained in biology and medicine, Georg Büchner taught comparative anatomy at the University of Zurich. A Romantic in science like his patron Lorenz Oken, he treated taboo topics like sex, religion, and politics in literature and stressed characterization over narrative. He had proto-Marxian or similarly radical politics and studied the French Revolution for his first play, Danton's Death (1835), which left him feeling "crushed" by forces he sought to describe in an 1834 letter to his fiancée Minna Jaeglé: "I find in human nature a terrible sameness [...]. Individuals are but froth on the waves, ... a ridiculous struggle against an iron law [...]."
His work expresses a unity of opposites, or complements, from Hegel and Spinoza. Philosopher György Lukács called him a literary realist after the hero of Büchner's Lenz fragment (1835), who calls for artists to "submerge themselves in the life of the ... humblest person and ... reproduce it with all its faint agitations, hints of experience, the subtle ... play of his features [expressions]." German literature scholar John Reddick argued his style expressed paradoxes in mosaics, as in a "shattered whole": "All my being is in this single moment", says Leonce at the climax of Leonce und Lena (1836).
In Woyzeck, Büchner mixed the grotesque with tragicomedy. He used case reports of romantic femicide, mainly physician Johann Christian August Clarus's on Johann Christian Woyzeck, a barber and military veteran, published in a medical journal to which Büchner's brother contributed. At the competency evaluation, Clarus reported that his patient had "" (free use of reason) and "" (free will) despite a medical history that included recurrent episodes of psychosis, leading to Woyzeck's 1821 conviction and 1824 beheading. Büchner died of typhus in 1837, leaving an untitled, fragmentary script with shifting character names, perhaps as an .
Toward Berg's Wozzeck
Expressionist milieu and precedents
Berg came from the same expressionist milieu as novelist Franz Kafka, painters Oskar Kokoschka and Emil Nolde, and poets Gottfried Benn, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Franz Werfel, all shaped by Symbolism's exaltation of cultural outsiders. In expressionist German opera, Wozzeck followed Richard Strauss's Elektra and Schoenberg's Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand), and Schoenberg's Erwartung (Expectation) and Strauss's Salome in particular had explored the grotesque psychology and violence that Berg saw in Büchner's social drama.
Broader milieu and other influences
Berg's tastes were broader than Schoenberg's or Webern's. He shared their love of Mahler, Johannes Brahms, and Richard Wagner, 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 and likely introduced him to writer Karl Kraus and the impressionism of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. His brother Charly, also musical, loved Wagner.
Berg first saw his wife , trained as a Wagnerian singer, at the opera and wooed her with songs. He saw Salome (the Graz premiere, in 1906) and attended many rehearsals for Paul Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Vienna premiere, 1908), studying its "thousands of splendid passages". 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.
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 '. As in Pelléas, he linked Wozzecks scenes with short interludes while keeping Büchner's jagged brutality and eerie realism. He may have also drawn from Schreker's Der ferne Klang, having prepared its piano-vocal score in 1911 (though he disliked Schreker's next opera, Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin).
Source texts and treatment
Berg worked mainly from writer 's Wozzeck–Lenz: Zwei Fragmente (Wozzeck and Lenz: Two Fragments; 1909, reprinted 1913; ), which mostly just resequenced Franzos's 26 scenes. Theater director , whose scene cuts Berg mostly followed, had used it in 1914. That year, scholar tied the play to Clarus's Woyzeck. In 1919, scholar Georg Witkowski issued a critical edition claiming Franzos's omissions, edits, and additions ruined Büchner's play. Berg mostly chose Franzos's freer, livelier text, which polarized grotesque and tragic aspects, over Witkowski's, and kept Franzos's title, as it had entered the public domain.
Berg had a cinematic sense of drama, which he thought "must go forward ... breathlessly". His staging and lighting synced time and action as Franzos's sequential flow suggested. As became habit, Berg added bits of his life: scripted coughs echo his asthma, and the Doctor's salamanders line mocks Paul Kammerer, the scientist–musician Helene once loved. Berg's epilogue was not Franzos's or Landau's final scene, but it was more Franzos's invention than Büchner's.
1914–1922: History of composition process
1914–1916: Genesis amid war
On frugal (summer vacations), often at his wife's family's farm and villa in Trahütten, Berg precomposed Wozzeck from as early as 1914, conceptualizing and sketching perhaps two scenes while continuing to compose Three Pieces for Orchestra. He hesitated when Schoenberg said the play was unsuitable. Then war erupted, and his patriotism was cooled by Kraus's attack on "the cash register of world history".
Long fearing death from severe asthma, then a possibly allergy-related somatic symptom disorder, Berg was first deemed unfit by the Austro-Hungarian Army. His pupil Theodor W. Adorno saw the substance dependence and hypochondriasis of a tortured artist in his self-medication and physician visits, including to Sigmund Freud. "[M]y spirit would ... have broken", Berg wrote Schoenberg, rejecting "a past time and a beloved place" as evoked by a bell to bait "curious Russian heads" from trenches to shoot. In mid-1915, Berg was conscripted anyway and bought the play while finishing Three Pieces for Orchestra.
That winter, he began another opera with the working title Nacht (Nokturn) (Night/Nocturne; 1915–1917, unfinished). In it, a semi-autobiographical "He" falls asleep discussing philosophy with the subconscious "Other". Then a dream sequence by turns nostalgic, erotic, and nightmarish ends with a film showing a dark mountain forest thinning upon the snow line to sky and snow fields at dawn. This echoes monodramas such as Schoenberg's Erwartung and Glückliche Hand, and Strindberg's ' (Jacob Wrestles). Berg used musicodramatic ideas from Nacht (Nokturn), like snoring, in Wozzeck.
thumb|Wozzeck, like Berg, cannot sleep amid a chorus of snoring soldiers (1951, photo )As of February 1916, Berg was still sketching Wozzecks outline, in four acts and 23 scenes. He wrote Helene of Austrian prisoners of war "imprisoned and starving in unheated stalls" under the Allies, while he himself had to work 30-hour guard-duty shifts in Vienna. He wrote that April of seeing fellow soldiers, including deserters, confined and strappadoed at a military base in Bisamberg, where he was then on office duty: He never saw combat, and as a one-year volunteer () officer, he later served at the Imperial War Ministry—more likely via his brother Karl (Charly or Charley), also posted there, than Helene's possible nonmarital father Franz Joseph I. In August, he wrote Helene: "For months I haven't done any work on Wozzeck. Everything suffocated, buried!".
1917–1918: Resolve and state collapse
In early 1917, Berg wrote playwright that his two opera ideas were "equally old". That summer, he worked on Wozzeck while on several weeks' leave at Trahütten, as was his habit, composing at the piano from early morning. In the afternoon, he sketched outside while foraging mushrooms and hiking the mountains, lakes, and springs before reading himself to sleep at night. Helene identified this "love of nature" in his music, including Wozzeck. He marked 1917 as the symbolic year he committed to Wozzeck in a letter to Schoenberg that August. Likely from his war service, which in the same letter he called "slavery" that might go on "for years", he saw more subjugation than poverty in Wozzeck. Asked what "inner point of contact" moved him to adapt the play in a 1930 interview, he said:
thumb|[[Austro-Hungarian strike of January 1918]]
In summer 1918, on six weeks' regiment leave at Trahütten, Berg revised the libretto as he finished two scenes (likely the second scenes of acts 1 and 2). That June, he wrote Schoenberg that he had been "degraded to the point of self-loathing" during the war (in 1924, he drafted a letter to Kraus confiding he had experienced suicidal ideation). "There's a bit of me in [Wozzeck]", he wrote Helene that August, "since I have been spending these war years just as dependent on people I hate ... in chains, sick, captive, resigned, humiliated." Days later, he wrote his friend and colleague Anton Webern, "the fate of this poor man [Wozzeck], exploited and tormented <em>by all the world</em> ... touches me", praising the drama's "unheard-of intensity of mood". He planned to use traditional song forms and variations and to alternate thematic and more fluid (motivic), Erwartung-inspired scenes. He gave the Captain and Doctor more (half-singing, half-speaking) roles, as in melodrama, later shifted to conventional singing ones.
thumb|In [[The Family (Schiele)|The Family (1918), Egon Schiele envisions a family. That year, he died of Spanish flu. He had designed the poster for a 1912 concert featuring Berg's music.]]That year, Schoenberg hired him at the Society for Private Musical Performances to help with administration, rehearsals, music arrangements, and writing. The Bergs caught Spanish flu that fall, and the pandemic worsened labor shortages and hunger, both of which were prevalent amid the war and its aftermath. His family's farm and country estate at Lake Ossiach, the Berghof, faced nearby food riots (in Villach) and business failure. Writer Stefan Zweig recalled "starving and freezing millions crowd[ing Vienna]", where "revolution or ... catastrophe" seemed possible amid unfolding state collapse, including the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and German revolution of 1918–1919. That November, Berg's military service ended with several armistices and Austro-Hungarian defeat. "I am again a person!", he told Buschbeck.
1919–1922: Progress through war's aftermath
In July 1919, Berg set the final, symmetrical order of Wozzecks scenes, finishing act 1 in four weeks before pausing in August to copy parts for Three Pieces for Orchestra. Composer and pianist Erwin Schulhoff, a wounded veteran, played Berg's Piano Sonata in Prague and hoped to premiere the orchestra pieces there and in Dresden through the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. In concert advertisements he sent to Berg for these "Progress Concerts", he tied the revolutions of 1917–1923 to a spiritual "revolution in art".
That fall, Berg and Helene were being drawn into what she called the "Berghof Catastrophe": having enabled his composing with an appanage, his mother Johanna (née Braun) sought their help co-managing the Berghof, with its guest house and tavern. Wartime mismanagement was culminating in bitter disagreement and lasting feuds among the Bergs and their families gathered there partly for food. The government had instituted production quotas and resorted to confiscation for food rationing. "[D]espite ... freezing and having nothing to live on", Berg emphasized that he was <em>"happy"</em>, recalling war "years of suffering and humiliation at a low rank, not composing a single note" to Schulhoff in November 1919.
Schulhoff had also circulated an artists' petition espousing internationalism, and in this November 1919 letter, Berg sympathized while following Schoenberg in prioritizing Austro-German art music, writing Schulhoff that a nation like Germany might "deserve" its defeat for how it "treats its greatest". He blamed the war and its aftermath on capitalism, militarism, the press, and, uncharacteristically, Jews, calling himself an "antimilitarist" like Kraus, who polemically examined journalism and German–Jewish assimilation. Replying to Schulhoff, Berg asked who among the Entente, "outside Russia", had the same "ring of idealism" to their names as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, recently murdered Spartacist uprising leaders.
thumb|A view of the village of St. Andrä, very near or perhaps including the Berghof, on [[Lake Ossiach outside Villach]]
Berg gradually resisted his family's demands at the Berghof, writing Webern in March 1920 that he would need to earn income instead by editing, teaching, and writing, including for ', the music journal of Universal Edition, though he might have even less time to compose. That April, Johanna sold the landed property as he wished and as another family member had advised. In July, he planned three scenes (likely 1, 3, and 5) of act 2 in the shape of four- or five-movement symphony, finishing them by August.
In 1921, nearing the Austrian hyperinflation, the Society closed, and Johanna kept planning her family's future. She had disparaged Helene's passive income from financial assets (in Austrian kronen) as miserly and unreliable and worried that Berg might "live in penury" by componiererei (fooling around composing). With dollars from her late son Herman's Florida estate, she funded New York trusts managed by , a firm long tied to the family, thereby re-enabling Berg's composing career. He finished act 2 in Vienna with Helene at Bad Hofgastein, then act 3 in Trahütten by October. While polishing and orchestrating Wozzeck, Berg recalled that Schoenberg had "tried to take away all my pleasure in [the opera]". In June 1922, he wrote Schoenberg that it was done.
Composition
Scoring
Wozzeck is scored for voices, choirs (men's, women's, and children's), and large orchestra, including onstage musicians four times: a military band (act 1, scene 3), a chamber orchestra (act 2, scene 3), a tavern band (act 2, scene 4), and an out-of-tune, upright tavern piano (act 3, scene 3). Small, fluid, sometimes purely rhythmic motifs recur in new contexts and undergo intricate transformations, helping to shape organic unity. He not only makes symbolic allusions to tonality, but also uses chord progressions freely amid an overall atonality typified by symmetrical interval cycles and sometimes densely layered rhythmic schemes. Frequent tempo gradations and contrasts accrue formal and dramatic significance.
Like earlier composers, Berg innovated on operatic tradition. Not wanting Wozzeck and his œuvre to seem Romantic or passé, he said he preferred strict musical form to "the Wagnerian recipe of 'through-composing, though the opera is Wagnerian in many respects (e.g., complexity, unmoored emotionality). His hybrid approach is an integrated number opera, where each act and scene has an old or abstract (absolute) musical form, yet often as a kind of program music or word painting, like the serious passacaglia for the Doctor's exam, or the prelude and triple fugue as the Doctor and Captain hint at Marie's infidelity.
Büchner's text repeats phrases as motifs, like "" (a good person), "" (we poor folk), and "" (one after the other). He develops some ideas into short, recurring sections, whether from Bible quotes or, as in Wozzeck's visions, from Apocrypha. Berg does something similar throughout the music: for example, variation techniques dominate act 3, focusing on some pitch (B, scene 2), rhythm (scene 3), hexachord (scene 4), tonality (final interlude), or duration (a perpetuum mobile of quavers, scene 5), while in act 1 they focus on a chord progression (scene 2) and a twelve-tone theme (scene 4). He knew few, if any, would hear all these structures, but he used their patterns plus the play's linked scenes and repeated lines to shape musicodramatic repetition.
Berg adopted Franzos's overall dramatic structure (exposition, development, catastrophe), which Fritz Mahler summarizes:
:{| class="wikitable" align="center" style="margin-right: 0;"
|-
! width="190" style="background: Silver" | Drama
! width="65" style="background: Silver" |
! width="215" style="background: Silver" | Music
|-
! align="center" | Expositions
! align="center" | Act 1
! align="center" | Five character pieces
|-
| Wozzeck and the Captain
| align="center" | Scene 1
| align="center" | Suite
|-
| Wozzeck and Andres
| align="center" | Scene 2
| align="center" | Rhapsody
|-
| Wozzeck and Marie
| align="center" | Scene 3
| align="center" | Military march and Lullaby
|-
| Wozzeck and the Doctor
| align="center" | Scene 4
| align="center" | Passacaglia
|-
| Marie and the Drum Major
| align="center" | Scene 5
| align="center" | Andante affettuoso (quasi Rondo)
|-
! align="center" | Dramatic development
! align="center" | Act 2
! align="center" | Symphony in five movements
|-
| Marie and her son, then Wozzeck
| align="center" | Scene 1
| align="center" | Sonata movement
|-
| The Captain and the Doctor, then Wozzeck
| align="center" | Scene 2
| align="center" | Fantasia and Fugue
|-
| Marie and Wozzeck
| align="center" | Scene 3
| align="center" | Largo
|-
| Garden of a tavern
| align="center" | Scene 4
| align="center" | Scherzo
|-
| Guard room in the barracks
| align="center" | Scene 5
| align="center" | Rondo con introduzione
|-
! align="center" | Catastrophe and epilogue
! align="center" | Act 3
! align="center" | Six inventions
|-
| Marie and her son
| align="center" | Scene 1
| align="center" | Invention on a theme
|-
| Wozzeck kills Marie
| align="center" | Scene 2
| align="center" | Invention on a single note
|-
| Tavern
| align="center" | Scene 3
| align="center" | Invention on a rhythm
|-
| Wozzeck drowns
| align="center" | Scene 4
| align="center" | Invention on a hexachord
|-
|
| align="center" | Interlude
| align="center" | Invention on a tonality
|-
| Children playing
| align="center" | Scene 5
| align="center" | Invention on a regular quaver movement
|}
A quasi-cadential gesture closes each act, where it would be "distinctly evident", Berg said, that "the circle of harmony comes full close", realized in an oscillation of blurred sonorities derived from two structural chords. The combined eight-pitch set of these chords, when transposed or inverted, can span the whole chromatic. Many scholars note that Berg seems to draw both harmony and melody from transformations of this set, often forming isomorphic figures built from whole-tone segments varied by semitone placement.
But in Wozzeck, unlike in the athematic (motivic) Clarinet Pieces (1913), Berg integrates harmony with thematic material to articulate larger structures and convey expression. 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. 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.
At the same time, Berg uses such focal pitches and often register for frame of reference and added meaning. For example, the single pitch B symbolizes the murder and dominates that scene. Soft at the end of act 2, when Wozzeck, beaten, whispers "" (one after the other), B crescendos repeatedly and expands from unison B<sub>3</sub> into octaves: Marie's last cry ("!", or "Help!") spans two, from B<sub>5</sub> to B<sub>3</sub>. (As B is here, so is F a pedal in Wozzeck's death scene.)
Leitmotifs are assigned to the Captain, Doctor, and Drum Major, whose music recurs when Marie muses on him. Wozzeck has two: one as he hurriedly enters and exits, and one languidly expressing his misery and helplessness. Marie's motifs convey sensuality, as when she accepts a pair of earrings from the Drum Major. The "anguish" motif, sung by Wozzeck (act 1, scene 1), traces a minor chord with an added major seventh:
Berg regularly combines all of these elements musicodramatically. For example, when Wozzeck confronts Marie in act 2, scene 1, fragments of the Drum Major's motifs sound over a repeated G–A bass figure adapted from Wozzeck's misery motif, and Marie's replies recall the rowdy march scene over a G–D–A pedal.
Altered idioms
thumb|upright=0.7|In Marie's Bible scene, she alters the lullaby she sings to her son, scaring him (Maria Graf as Marie)Altered idioms and Expressionist music convey Wozzeck's (and others') emotions and thought processes, especially his madness and alienation. Folk song and popular dance idioms appear in the field and tavern scenes. Berg transforms a polka into a in the later tavern episode (act 3, scene 3). Its opening rhythm is a retrograde of a tango, alluding to Kraus's play Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1915–1922; The Last Days of Mankind), drafts of which appeared in ' by 1916. Marie's orphan plays among children singing (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. Drafts include Austrian army bugle calls rendered atonal in the final score (act 1, scene 2). His war experience of sleeping in barracks informed his word painting of snoring soldiers (act 2, scene 5), which he called "polyphonic breathing, gasping, and groaning ... the most peculiar chorus I've ever heard ... like some primeval music that wells up from the abysses of the soul".
Berg 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. 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.
Musicodramatic synopsis
The plot depicts the militarism, callousness, social exploitation, and casual sadism of a small town. Transitions between day and night reflect cyclical wartime themes of life and death, as in Schoenberg's "" (referring to forlorn hope) or the popular soldiers' "".
Berg asserted a reciprocal relationship between the music and the drama. In a 1930 interview, Oskar Jancke asked whether "the text ... facilitates the understanding of your music", which he said "the public ... grappl[ing] with ... finds unfamiliar". Berg replied: "Yes, but also the reverse. The music also aids in understanding the poem. Basically I have done nothing more than to produce it on a higher level." The music, he added, "neutralize[s] the fragmentary character".
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. The whole chromatic is completed, with the eleventh pitch in the oboe and the twelfth in the bassoon.
thumb|right|upright|The Captain lectures Wozzeck as wind blows outside (Horst Ruether as Captain, Willy Ferenz as Wozzeck) Scene 1 (Suite) unfolds in episodes of obbligato part-writing. A wind quintet melodically suggests shifting, ambiguous harmonies as the curtain rises (m. 4) and the prelude begins: Wozzeck shaves the Captain, assenting in monotone to orders to go "slowly! One thing after the other!" In the stately pavane, the Captain ruminates on eternity in analogy to a mill wheel, painted with eight descending fourths (or the circle of fifths). He begins to rhythmically mock Wozzeck's assents in the manner of a verbal taunt to the viola cadenza.
Wozzeck is a "good man" but has "no sense of morality", the Captain sings to the contrabassoon cadenza. As winds imitate a church pipe organ, he scorns Wozzeck's nonmarital son in falsetto. Wozzeck quotes Mark 10:14 in double variations. In the air, he sings over expressive diminished seventh chords, which span the whole chromatic to underline his universal claim: morality is hard for "we poor folk", who, like the Captain, are only "flesh and blood". If they reached Heaven, he cries, "we'd all have to manufacture thunder!" to accented triads that also span the whole chromatic.
Unnerved, the Captain again says Wozzeck is a "good man" who "think[s] too much!", dismissing him with another "go slowly", set to the prelude in reverse. In a brief interlude, this material is transformed, building to climax as the curtain rises again.
Scene 2 (Rhapsody and Hunting Song)
In the rhapsody on three chords evoking tonic, dominant, and subdominant, Wozzeck and fellow soldier Andres gather firewood at sunset. "This place is accursed!" says Wozzeck repeatedly, fearing its toadstools (poisonous mushrooms) and recounting a tale of someone who died three days and nights after finding a severed head there. As a foil, this alternates with strophes of Andres's rustic (hunting song) in , sung on the first two chords as if in G major (increasingly off-key as he becomes uneasy).
Unassuaged, Wozzeck goes on to describe a hollow Earth, a firestorm, and a "crashing noise coming down, like trumpets". "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.
The music segues as the scene changes: clarinets imitate distant bugles, the curtain falls, and a funeral march begins as they retreat, descending in a lament bass from C to F. This march is transformed when a military band nears as the curtain rises.
Scene 3 (March and Lullaby)
This rowdy band marches toward Marie's window, and she joins in song (an altered melody from Mahler's "Revelge"). Across the street, her neighbor Margret notices her wandering eye for the soldiers and teases her about it. Marie slams the window shut, quieting the march.
Her music of open fourths and fifths begins: she sings a self-soothing lullaby to her son. Entranced, she waits for Wozzeck, set to an ostinato (her "waiting" music), which ends on B–F as he knocks on her window. He arrives and shares his visions of the heavens, set to a reprise (mm. 435–6) of scene 2's sunset music (mm. 289–93).
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.
thumb|right|upright|Wozzeck's visions wow the Doctor (Hans Hofmann as Doctor)Scene 4 (Passacaglia)
This figure is the passacaglia theme, with 21 variations in three sections. It is a golden afternoon. Wozzeck calls the Doctor "Herr Coffin Nail", 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.
Midway, Wozzeck mentions Marie and shares his field visions with the doctor, including the toadstool constellations mirrored in music. In the last section, the Doctor, set to his motif and a waltz melody, is excited to publish a case report, with his diagnosis of Wozzeck's mental illness ("") set to the horn music from the Captain's ruminations on time, now expanding in an ironic comment on the three's obsessions. The verticalized quartal eternity motif marks the Doctor's concluding exclamation about his own theories. Then he suddenly calms and demands to medically examine Wozzeck.
As a brief interlude, the passacaglia theme fragments and yields to music from the rowdy march.
Scene 5 (Rondo)
It is evening outside Marie's house. She admires the Drum Major from her doorway. The military music continues. He makes advances. She briefly struggles to resist him physically, then yields to his seduction and lets him in as the curtain falls with two oscillating chords.
Act 2
Scene 1 (Sonata-Allegro)
The curtain rises with two oscillating chords. In her room the next morning, Marie wears the Drum Major's gift of earrings to admire herself in a broken piece of mirror, set to a motif as the exposition's first subject. In the transition, her son stirs awake on her lap. She grimly transforms the lullaby as the second subject, singing of "gypsies" taking children who will not sleep. He hides his face in the coda. In the repeat, Marie returns to the mirror until he stirs again, and she uses shadowgraphy to threaten him with the Sandman.
thumb|right|upright|Wozzeck gives Marie moneyThis 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. A plain C-major triad briefly drones for his affectionate gift of money, and he leaves.
In the recapitulation, she is wracked with guilt as she reconsiders the Drum Major and his gift. The music continues without voices, serving as this interlude, before the curtain falls with a C-major glissando.
Scene 2 (Fantasia and Fugue on Three Themes)
The curtain rises on a new day with a C-major scale on harp. On the street, the Captain tries to speak with the Doctor, who says he "must hurry" to the expanding obsession motif. "A good man takes his time", says the Captain as the opening oboe theme returns. Breathlessly chasing, the Captain receives a medical assessment by turns mocking ("bloated, fat") and dire (risk of "apoplexia cerebria", or stroke) to the waltz. In the triple fugue, their leitmotifs (Captain, then Doctor) join a version of Wozzeck's coda music as it dawns on him that they are hinting at the love triangle.
A slow chamber-orchestra interlude hints at the next scene's music.
thumb|right|upright|Wozzeck gazes at Marie and makes a fistScene 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 .
Scene 4 (Scherzo with two trios)
Two novices sing drunken solos for patrons at a (Viennese garden tavern). Rowdy seduction music recurs in her waltz with the Drum Major as Wozzeck watches. A hunter's chorus sung by soldiers, then another song from Andres, and finally a drunken sermon interrupt. The band resumes, but an Idiot walks into Wozzeck, slurring, "Everyone is happy, but it stinks of blood". Wozzeck dissociates.
Erratic dance music accelerates past the curtain fall, halting as a men's chorus is heard in a faint vocalise of the rhapsody chords.
Scene 5 (Introduction and rondo)
This strange chorus, the curtain slowly reveals, is soldiers snoring in a guardhouse barracks. Wozzeck tosses and turns, haunted by thoughts of Marie and the Drum Major dancing. He seems to hear the tavern songs outside, set to music from the hollow Earth. After seeing the knife in a vision, he prays, set to the field scene music. But the drunken Drum Major comes boasting and fights him to music from Marie's struggle. Wozzeck falls as oscillating music fades to a final low B on harp.
Act 3
Scene 1 (Invention on a theme)
Wracked with guilt, Marie reads the Bible by candlelight, including the pericope of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery. Her son clings to her, so she tells him a fairy tale before turning to a passage on Mary Magdalene.
This theme develops and fades to a chilling harp and celesta arpeggio reintroducing the fateful pitch B.
Scene 2 (Invention on a single note (B))
At a forest pond, Wozzeck stabs Marie as she tries to run, declaring that if he cannot have her, no one can. A blood-red moon rises.
thumb|right|upright|Wozzeck gazes at Marie's bodyScene 3 (Invention on a rhythm)
Wozzeck and Margret dance in the tavern among others as he celebrates doom and the Devil's arrival. He pulls her onto his lap, insults her, and demands she sing. Others see blood on him, raising alarm. He runs.
Scene 4 (Invention on a hexachord)
In a mad scene, Wozzeck frantically searches the pond for his knife. Paranoid and psychotic, he speaks to Marie, imagining the blood-red moon exposing him to the world. He drowns (possibly by suicide) in the red, moonlit water, which he sees as blood. The Captain and Doctor, walking slowly nearby, are disturbed by the sound of it and return to town.
D minor has been prepared at length: the altered chord closing the rhythmic invention (m. 219) yielded the hexachord (m. 220), transposed down (m. 302) before shifting into tonality.
Interlude (Invention on a tonality)
The final interlude, a catharsis, opens forcefully in D minor with whole tones (m. 320). It modulates to F major, followed by a section amassing Wozzeck's motifs. At the climax (m. 364), a fully chromatic dominant sonority, built from three superimposed 3-cycles, crescendos into the "anguish" motif as the harmony resolves into tonal closure back in D minor (m. 370).
<score sound="1">
\new PianoStaff <<
\new Staff = "treble" {
\relative c' {
\clef treble \omit Staff.TimeSignature
\override Stem.transparent = ##t
<f a d e>1^\markup { \teeny "m. 219" }
<cis e gis ees' f>1^\markup { \teeny "m. 220" }
<ees f>1^\markup { \teeny "m. 302" }
<d e>1^\markup { \teeny "m. 320" }
<d e>1^\markup { \teeny "m. 370" }
}
}
\new Staff = "bass" {
\relative c' {
\clef bass \omit Staff.TimeSignature
\override Stem.transparent = ##t
<b c>1
<bes>1
<bes, des fes aes>1
<a d f a>1
<d, a' f' a>1
}
}
>>
</score>
Scene 5 (Invention on an eighth-note moto perpetuo, quasi toccata)
In the epilogue, children play and sing in the sunny street outside Marie's door the next morning. News of her death spreads. They run to see her corpse. Wozzeck and Marie's son appears unaffected, even when it is shouted at him. After some delay, he follows, oblivious and now an orphan.
Reception
Wozzeck is among the most renowned 20th-century modernist operas, holding a position like that of Tristan und Isolde in the 19th century. John Deathridge called it "one of the undisputed masterpieces of modern opera". Audiences have long responded to its emotional force and elements of post-romanticism, and it has captivated musicians as a work that rewards musical analysis. Its dissonant, psychological idiom recalls Schoenberg's Erwartung, and its tormented, outcast antihero has prompted comparisons to operas with similar male title roles, such as Giuseppe Verdi's Macbeth and Nabucco, Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, and Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes. Its hybrid form has been compared to that of Paul Hindemith's Cardillac, Ferruccio Busoni's Doktor Faust, and Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos.
thumb|upright|Berg, 1927 (photo [[Georg Fayer)]]Berg's critical engagement with militarism and war receded as Wozzeck became a repertoire standard apart from its original context, not unlike Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin. He backed Alexander Landau's 1926 socialist analysis (arguing that Wozzeck's suffering is collective and calls for action, not blame), though he publicly focused mostly on the music, and though the opera's social topicality may always have been somewhat contextual, allowing it to function critically in a manner immanent to its reception. Like Kraus, Strindberg, and Otto Weininger, Berg studied his dramatic figures as archetypes (as in Lulu), and he later backed 's 1929 reading of Wozzeck as Job. He even considered an unrealized operatic trilogy: Wozzeck, the servant; Vincent (van Gogh), the friend (of Gauguin); and Wolfgang (Amadeus Mozart), the master.
Performance history
Wozzeck, through Berg's promotional and musicodramatic strategies, made him famous. After its 1925 premiere, which took place within a year of Cardillac, Kurt Weill's Protagonist, and Ernst Krenek's Zwingburg and Der Sprung über den Schatten, it was produced 27 times,
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 for Voice and Orchestra from the Opera "Wozzeck".
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 festival. Adorno, in the audience, was inspired to study composition with Berg.thumb|upright|Premiere placard
Berg helped with staging and rehearsals in Berlin. There were at least 137, and Berlin State Opera manager Max von Schillings quit over a possibly related funding clash. Wozzeck was regarded as the first full-scale atonal opera. Many music writers, including Vienna's Paul Stefan and Prague's , and composers, including Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Adorno, and Stefan Wolpe, attended the dress rehearsal. The 14 December 1925 premiere was a succès de scandale with some disruptions.
Wozzeck achieved sustained expressive coherence despite a post-tonal musical language and was covered internationally and at length. In January 1927, Oslo's Berlin-based Dagbladet critic (and Francophile composer) Pauline Hall hailed it as "a new stage in German musical development, ... for the first time since Wagner". It showed independence from Schoenberg and was equal to Debussy's Pelléas, she added.
Gurlitt's Wozzeck
The Vienna premiere of Büchner's play also inspired Manfred Gurlitt. Premiered four months after Berg's opera Examining Gurlitt's piano–vocal score, Berg found it "not bad or unoriginal" but a weak "broth ... even for [poor folks]". Gurlitt's leaner musical textures and polystylism align with Hindemith and Weill, with frequent, socially oriented use of the chorus. His opera may be closer to Büchner's original conception. It has remained in the shadow of Berg's.
1926–1934: Subsequent premieres
1926: Vojcek
thumb|upright|[[National Theatre (Prague)|Prague's National Theater illuminated on the Vltava, 1907]]Writer translated Berg's Wozzeck, and in 1926 conductor Otakar Ostrčil led its Czech-language premiere as Vojcek at Prague's National Theatre, staged by dramatist . In the "Chat with Alban Berg" published in the German-language Prager Presse on the day of the first performance (12 November), music and theater critic Oskar Baum wrote that criticism of the Schoenberg circle's work as abstract or "'dogmatic' ... evaporates [upon] contact with the music". Berg, reportedly in "high spirits" at the dress rehearsal, was quoted at length:
During the third performance, as Berg wrote Adorno, some "Czech Nationalists (virtually Nazis)" and "clerical lobbies" staged <em>"purely political!"</em> 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." wrote as much in Národní listy, and tied the opera's degeneracy to Jewish Bolshevism in ', while Zdeněk Nejedlý mocked them, praising Wozzeck in Rudé právo.