Alban Berg’s »Wozzeck«: a key work of modernism

Alban Berg’s career as a composer took off later on. For a long time, the Austrian had kept his head above water as a teacher and music journalist. His works had been performed almost exclusively in an obscure »Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen«  (Association for Private Musical Performances), founded by his cultishly revered teacher Arnold Schönberg and ridiculed by many as a gathering place for eccentric modern composers.

Twelve-tone music was favoured here – pieces that are not based on conventional melodies and harmonies, but on tone rows that contain all twelve semitones of the European musical system in more or less any order. These works, which are prototypical of so-called »New Music«, are not exactly easy on the ear, which is why Berg’s music was branded »degenerate«  and banned by the National Socialists after his death.

Berg based his second opera, the unfinished »Lulu« (premiere: 1937) on texts by Frank Wedekind, which he set to music largely using the twelve-tone principle. His first opera on the other hand, the three-act »Wozzeck«  based on Georg Büchner’s play, can be seen more as a precursor to this composition technique, and went down in music history as the first full-length atonal work for the stage, i.e. free of any harmonic structures.

»Wozzeck«  – or »Woyzeck« , as Büchner’s fragmentary drama is called – is inspired by the true historical story of the soldier Johann Christian Woyzeck, who was sentenced to death for murdering his lover. The different spelling is based on an early edition of the drama, which was later heavily criticised for its many interventions in the text. When Berg came across a critical edition in 1920, however, he had already done a lot of work on the score, so he stuck to the outdated text.

In Büchner’s (and Berg’s) version, the story reads like this: The soldier Franz Woyzeck lives in humble circumstances with his lover Marie and their illegitimate child. To supplement his meagre pay, he falls into the hands of an unscrupulous doctor who abuses him for scientific experiments. Exploited and publicly humiliated, he also learns that Marie is having an affair with a drum major. Inner voices order him to kill his unfaithful lover, and Woyzeck gets himself a knife and stabs Marie to death on an evening walk.

Although it was written in 1837 – shortly before Büchner’s early death at the age of just 23 – »Woyzeck«  was not premiered until 1913. A year later, Alban Berg attended the first performance in Vienna, which directly inspired him to write his opera. However, the actual composition process dragged on for many years, not least because Berg was serving as a clerk in the Austrian army between 1915 and 1918. He was able to finalise the text in 1917 and began composing during the last two years of the war, but the opera was not completed until 1921. After several excerpts had been performed in advance, the actual premiere finally took place in December 1925 at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin.

From Büchner’s open drama with a rather loose sequence of scenes, the composer created three dramatically condensed acts of five scenes each, which he based on a strict architectural form. The first act consists of five character pieces introducing the main characters, while the second is structured in the manner of a symphony – which of course is a purely instrumental genre. Although it is practically inaudible, these forms serve to give context to the harmonic freedom of the music. Finally, the third act consists of five »inventions« , each of which is based on completely different musical principles. All of this is held together by a highly differentiated network of leitmotifs, previously familiar from Wagner’s music dramas (the musical result of course sounds somewhat different).

Berg’s opera also broke new ground in terms of content, as people from the lowest social class had rarely been seen on the opera stage hitherto. In both musical and social terms, »Wozzeck« is an expressionistically exaggerated work of confession that incorporates the composer’s personal experiences of suffering. »There is also a piece of me in his character, since I’ve spent these war years just as dependent on people I hated, sickly, unfree and resigned, even humiliated. Without military service, I would still be as healthy as I used to be.«

Owing to its complexity and difficulty, »Wozzeck«  was initially considered difficult to perform. Today, however, the opera is considered one of the most important contributions to 20th century music history and a key work of modernism.