3. ‘Wozzeck’.

By the time he was working on the ‘Marsch’ of op.6 Berg had already decided on his next work. On 5 May 1914 he had seen Wozzeck and immediately determined to write an opera on the play. An acquaintance, who had sat a few rows in front of Berg at the performance, later remembered how, at the end of the play: ‘Indescribably excited and enthusiastic I stood amidst wild applause and met Alban Berg a few steps behind me. He was deadly pale and perspiring profusely. “What do you say?” he gasped, beside himself, “Isn't it fantastic, incredible?” then already taking his leave, “Someone must set it to music”.’ Though he began making preliminary sketches for the opera almost at once (some of the earliest appear on the same sheets of manuscript paper as material for the ‘Marsch’), work had to be laid aside when, following the outbreak of World War I, Berg was called into the Austrian army in June 1915 (fig.2). After spending a month training at the army camp at Bruck an der Leitha his health gave way, and he was transferred to guard duty and eventually to an office job in the War Ministry, where he served until 1918.

While not as overtly political as many of his acquaintainces, Berg was undoubtedly attracted to Wozzeck because of its socio-political message, which coincided with his own views (described by Adorno as ‘socialist in so far as in the 20s it behoved an orthodox reader of the Fackel’). He also, perhaps, saw in the play other features with which he identified. ‘There is something of me in this Wozzeck’, he observed in a letter to his wife Helene, a remark that on one level refers to the similarity between the situation of Wozzeck, the poor downtrodden army batman terrorized by his superior officer and the butt of absurd dietary experiments by the sadistic army doctor, and his own during his spell at the army training camp. Writing to his pupil Gottfried Kassowitz on various occasions during his stay as a reserve at Bruck an der Leitha, Berg commented on the sound made by a room full of sleeping men and complained of the injustices of the system, the inefficiency of the camp doctor and the disgusting mutton that was served every week – remarks echoed in the libretto of Wozzeck. At the same time, it is unlikely that Berg would not also have recognized the similarity between Wozzeck, as the father of an illegitimate child to a woman called Marie, and himself. From Wozzeck onwards all his works have autobiographical connotations.

In his 1928 article ‘Das “Opernproblem”’ (Reich, 1937, p.175), Berg observed:

Never in my wildest dreams would I have wished to reform the art-form of opera with the composition of Wozzeck. … Apart from my desire to make good music, to fulfil musically the spiritual content of Büchner's immortal drama, to transpose his poetic language into a musical one – apart from these things I had nothing else in mind when I decided to write an opera … than to return to the theatre what is the theatre's.

Despite the modesty with which Berg disclaimed any seeking after originality, Wozzeck was an epoch-making work that broke new ground musically, emotionally and dramatically. If Büchner's play was discovered and first performed at a time when its techniques and concerns seemed strikingly contemporary, it also appeared at a moment when its extreme states were peculiarly suited to Berg’s musical language – an atonal language that, constantly hovering on the edge of tonal confirmation, becomes a perfect musical metaphor for the emotional and mental state of the opera's chief protagonist. The world that the opera presents is a projection of the tortured mind of Wozzeck himself: a world without normality or humanity and peopled by grotesques, a haunted world of strange, hallucinatory voices and visions and of natural phenomena indifferent to the human tragedy being played out. Only at the very end of the opera is this viewpoint abandoned, when, after Wozzeck's death, the music of the final cathartic orchestral interlude achieves D minor and, with the theatre curtain down, steps outside the drama to reflect on the significance of what has happened.

Every critic and commentator on Wozzeck has discussed the formal structure of the opera; indeed, it is the aspect of which Berg himself was most proud and to which he drew attention in his pre-performance lectures. As one might expect in an opera written by an Austrian composer in the first quarter of the 20th century, the most immediately audible formal and unifying device in the work is a system of recurring leitmotifs (and, on a larger scale, of recurring sections), the reappearance of which underlines dramatic associations and parallels within the opera. Less immediately audible are the strict formal designs within which these leitmotifs operate. The opera is conceived as a single closed formal entity, with each act, and each scene within each act, forming a self-contained structural unit. Act 1, which is the exposition of the drama, consists of five character pieces – a suite (scene i), a rhapsody (scene ii), a military march and lullaby (scene iii), a passacaglia (scene iv) and a rondo (scene v) – each of which introduces one of the main characters and delineates his or her relationship to Wozzeck. The second act is designed as a five-movement symphony, consisting of a sonata form (scene i), a fantasia and fugue (scene ii), a largo slow movement (scene iii), a scherzo with two trios (scene iv) and a rondo (scene v). Act 3 consists of five ‘inventions’ each based on a single musical element: a theme (scene i), a single note (scene ii), a rhythmic pattern (scene iii), a six-note chord (scene iv) and a single note-value (scene v). The final orchestral interlude, which sums up the main motivic material of the opera and also, as the only orchestral interlude to have its own distinctive thematic material, stands as a self-sufficient musical structure, forms a sixth invention, an ‘invention on a key’.

The choice of formal designs for the different scenes is determined by dramatic considerations. In some cases the musical material or form is of a sort traditionally associated with the kind of activity depicted on stage – a ländler and a waltz for the tavern scene, Act 2 scene iv, for example, or a military march and lullaby in Act 1 scene iii. In other scenes Berg arranged his libretto so that the text defines a dramatic structure corresponding to an accepted musical form. In the sonata movement or the fantasia and fugue of Act 2, for example, the appearances and recurrences of musical ideas correspond exactly to the appearances and recurrences of verbal and dramatic ideas. Elsewhere, musical form symbolizes the psychological kernel of the scene. This is true of Act 1 scene iv, where the constantly repeated passacaglia theme stands as a symbol of the Doctor's manic obsession – his hopes of achieving immortality through the absurd and sadistic scientific experiments to which he submits Wozzeck – and becomes general in the final act, where the domination of each scene by a single musical element represents the obsessions dominating Wozzeck’s thoughts. Thus the single note B, present throughout the murder scene, Act 3 scene ii, moves up and down the score, receding into or emerging out of the orchestral texture as the idea of murder grows or diminishes in intensity in Wozzeck's mind. The orchestral interlude that follows this scene consists of two crescendos also on B (fig.3), separated by a fortissimo drum statement of the rhythm that will form the basis of the next scene, in which the constant presence of this single rhythmic pattern stands as a symbol of Wozzeck's memory of the crime, while the individual statements of the rhythm, adapting themselves to the moment-to-moment contingencies of the text, mirror Wozzeck's hesitations and unpredictable outbursts and the increasingly insistent accusations of Margret and the chorus. The unceasing quaver movement of the final scene suggests the indifference of the children, intrigued but unmoved by the discovery of Marie's body and the revelation of what has occurred. It is difficult to exaggerate Berg's achievement in this extraordinary work. In his first opera he not only reconciled but fused the demands of the dramatic and musical structures, and in so perfect and so personal a way that he himself was the only composer able to go further, in Lulu. He completed Wozzeck in short score in the middle of October 1921. The full score was finished in April 1922, and the vocal score, made under his supervision by his pupil Fritz Heinrich Klein, in June of the same year. Without a publisher, and unable to bear the expense himself (he had earlier managed to pay for the printing of his opp.1 and 2 only by selling some family furniture), he was forced to borrow money from a friend of his sister Smaragda in order to finance the publication of the vocal score; the loan was later repaid thanks to the efforts of Alma Mahler, to whom he dedicated the score as a token of gratitude. He then set about creating interest in the opera by advertising its publication and sending copies to opera companies and critics. Although these efforts resulted in a number of press articles, no company expressed more than a passing interest in the work. Indeed, it would have been surprising had any established opera house been willing to stage so difficult and complex an opera by a composer then little known even in his native city, let alone beyond.

Now in his mid-30s Berg was still eking out a precarious livelihood teaching, managing the family property (including acting as steward of the Berghof, which was finally sold in May 1920) and acting, from its inception in late 1918 until March 1921, as one of the performance directors of the Verein für Musikalische Privataufführungen. The Verein, which took up an enormous amount of his time, had been founded by Schoenberg with the intention of promoting interest in contemporary music through closed performances (critics were banned) of carefully rehearsed pieces. Berg himself was represented on the programmes by his opp.1–3 and 5, but these performances did little to promote public recognition of his music. The turning-point came rather in 1923, when two of the op.6 pieces were performed in Berlin and the String Quartet was played, to great acclaim, at the ISCM Festival in Salzburg. Among the Salzburg audience was Hermann Scherchen, who suggested that Berg make a concert suite from the music of Wozzeck. The resulting Drei Bruchstücke aus ‘Wozzeck’ were performed under Scherchen in June 1924 and were, as Berg reported to Webern, ‘a great triumph with the public, the musicians and the press’. By this time, however, Erich Kleiber, the new music director of the Berlin Staatsoper, had already declared his intention of staging Wozzeck. Kleiber, a passionate admirer of the Büchner play, had already seen a vocal score, and during the autumn of 1923 made his interest in the piece known to a number of Berg's acquaintances. In 1924, when in Vienna for a few days, he requested that the entire opera be performed for him by the pianist Ernst Bachrich; Berg, who was not an accomplished pianist, helped out in the more difficult parts of the score. By the time the first two scenes had been played to him Kleiber had already decided to mount the work in Berlin – even, he joked, if it cost him his job. Wozzeck duly received its première in Berlin on 14 December 1925, and the conductor's little joke almost proved prophetic.

The Berlin Staatsoper was at that time passing through a particularly turbulent period in its history. The position of the general administrator, Max von Schillings, had been insecure for some time, and became increasingly so as his relations with the Minister of Culture grew progressively worse during the spring and summer of 1925. When Schillings was finally dismissed in November 1925 ideological groups on right and left, the press, the staff of the opera house and almost every interested party became involved in a bitter political dispute at the centre of which was Wozzeck, whose first performance had taken place on the very day the Schillings affair had come to a head with a heated debate in the Landstag. But in spite of the extended press campaign waged against the opera by Kleiber's enemies (in which, among other things, it was falsely suggested that the piece had required 137 rehearsals and that the open dress rehearsal had led to riots in the opera house), the first night of Wozzeck was a critical success (fig.4). The piece received ten performances in Berlin, with Leo Schützendorf in the title role, and then made its way slowly into the world, only fully establishing itself on its fourth production, at Oldenburg in 1929. Coming after a production in Prague which had to be cancelled after two performances because of political protests by Czech nationalists, and a successful but little-noticed production in Leningrad, the Oldenburg staging showed it was possible for a small provincial opera house to mount this ‘unplayable’ work with only 32 rehearsals. What Johannes Schüler, the conductor of the Oldenburg Wozzeck, called ‘the myth of the insurmountable difficulty of the opera’ was disproved and, as Josef Lex, who sang the title role, observed, the success of the production ‘broke like a hurricane and signified the final victory of the work’. The success of Wozzeck brought Berg not only recognition as a composer of international standing but also a degree of financial stability, and royalties from the opera, along with income from private teaching, enabled him to devote himself to composition.

Berg, Alban