Wozzeck
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, 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 succès de scandale 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 Literaturoper Wozzeck from 1914 to 1922, stalled by World War I. He had first pursued a literary career, writing lyrical and dramatic juvenilia, 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, which caused the 1913 Skandalkonzert. He told Berg to write a suite of character pieces before trying a planned vocal symphony after Gustav Mahler, but affirmed Berg's operatic interest in the chamber plays of August Strindberg.Then Berg twice attended the May 1914 Vienna premiere of Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck at the. He recalled seeing Albert Steinrück as Wozzeck among visitors from the Munich Residenz Theatre and said he "immediately" decided to make it an opera. Berg wrote his own libretto, which is indebted partly to writer Karl Emil Franzos. Franzos's version, titled Wozzeck by a misreading of poorly legible papers shared by Büchner's brother, physician Ludwig Büchner, first appeared in a Neue Freie Presse serial and in his "critical, complete" Büchner edition.
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, 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, 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 ." 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.
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 "freier Vernunftgebrauch" and "Willensfreiheit" 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''
Berg came from the same expressionist milieu, rooted in Symbolism with its exaltation of outcast artists, as novelist Franz Kafka, painters Oskar Kokoschka and Emil Nolde, and poets Gottfried Benn, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Franz Werfel. In expressionist German opera, Wozzeck followed Richard Strauss's Elektra and Schoenberg's Die glückliche Hand. Schoenberg's Erwartung and Strauss's Salome had explored the grotesque in particular, and Berg saw operatic potential in Büchner's mad murderer and dark social criticism.Berg grew up playing a broad opera repertoire piano four hands with his sister Smaragda, and his taste was wider than Schoenberg's or Webern's. A frequent opera-goer, he attended multiple rehearsals of the 1908 Vienna premiere of Paul Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-bleue and studied the score and its "thousands of splendid passages". At forums like the Café Museum, Berg met innovative, popular figures across styles, including the successful composer Erich Korngold and operetta composers Franz Lehár and Oscar Straus, through Viennese coffee house culture.
Berg may have learned from Schreker's Der ferne Klang, having prepared its piano-vocal score in 1911. He knew Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande as a model of modernist Literaturoper, a direction he had explored in drafting a libretto from Franz Grillparzer's play . As in Pelléas, Berg linked Wozzeck
1914–1922: History of composition process
1914–1916: Genesis amid war
On frugal Sommerfrischen, 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 Karl 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. "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 . 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 Jakob brottas. Berg used musicodramatic ideas from Nacht , like snoring, in Wozzeck.
As of February 1916, Berg was still sketching Wozzeck's outline, in four acts and 23 scenes. He wrote Helene of Austrian prisoners of war "imprisoned and starving in unheated stalls" under the Allies and was himself first assigned 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: Berg never saw combat and served as a one-year volunteer officer, including at the Imperial War Ministry—more likely via his brother Karl, also posted there, than Helene's possible nonmarital father Franz Joseph I of Austria. 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:In summer 1918, on six weeks' regiment leave at Trahütten, Berg revised the libretto as he finished two scenes. That June, he wrote Schoenberg that he had been "degraded to the point of self-loathing" during the war. "There's a bit of me in ", 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 , exploited and tormented by all the world... 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, Erwartung-inspired scenes. He gave the Captain and Doctor more Sprechgesang roles, as in melodrama, later shifted to conventional singing ones.
File:Egon Schiele - Kauerndes Menschenpaar - 4277 - Österreichische Galerie Belvedere.jpg|thumb|In The Family, 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 and business failure. Writer Stefan Zweig recalled "starving and freezing millions crowd", 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.