Three Fragments from Wozzeck

When Wozzeck was first published – in 1922, at the composer’s own expense – the chances of an early performance seemed slim. Any Austrian or German theatre hoping for a popular success to equal that of, say, Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, the latest operatic sensation, would have realised immediately that its difficult musical language and its drab subject matter disqualified it from consideration in that context. Which is why Hermnn Scherchen suggested to Berg that he should make some kind of concert suite from the opera to demonstrate the outstandingly exceptional quality of the score. This the composer duly did, choosing three extracts, each with a solo soprano part (but with spoken dialogue omittted), for Scherchen to conduct at a concert in Frankfurt in 1924. By then, however, Erich Kleiber, a musician of rare vision and integrity, had accepted the opera for production at the Berlin Staatsoper, where he conducted the first performance in December 1925. Wozzeck was not seen in Vienna until 1930.

Wozzeck – the central figure of Berg’s own libretto based on a play by Georg Büchner – is a humble, uneducated and pathetically vulnerable private soldier, a batman, who is abused in different ways by his Captain, the Army Doctor and his mistress Marie. The worst offence against him occurs at the end of the first of the three acts, where Marie succombs to the strutting military glamour of the Drum Major. In a fit of jealousy, when walking with Marie on a path by a pond, he fatally stabs her and throws the knife into the water. In the last-but-one scene of the third act he returns to the pond, to make a better job of concealing the murder weapon, and drowns. Although it is a grim story told in the atonal language of Viennese expresssionism – Berg had started on the work as early as 1914 – Wozzeck lacks neither harmonic nor melodic compassion. At the same time its structure is based, unnecessarily but reassuringly, on classical instrumental forms, like the five-movement symphony that underlies the five scenes of the second act.

The first of the three extracts consists of the interlude following the second scene of Act I, where Wozzeck has had a distressingly hallucinatory experience while working in the fields, and the first part of the third scene, set in Marie’s room. A masterpiece of transition, the interlude prolongs the eerie atmosphere of the previous scene in the slowmoving chromatic lines on muted strings while introducing the horn and trumpet calls heralding the military march that approaches as the curtain rises on Marie’s room. Extravagantly scored wind and percussion sounds burst in as the soldiers, the Drum Major among them, pass her open window. Carried away, she sings along with the band but then slams the window shut, cutting off the march in mid-phrase, before she sings her little boy to sleep.

At the beginning of Act III Marie is in her room again but now consumed by guilt as she reads aloud the story of the woman taken in adultery. It is an extraordinary episode, not so much because of the Sprechgesang (speech-song) with which Marie utters the words from the Bible as because of the form it takes – a theme and seven short variations leading to a fugue in which she prays for divine forgiveness.

The third extract begins at the point where Wozzeck drowns in the pond, a chromatic scale rising through the orchestra in ever longer note values as the water engulfs him. The only other sound to be heard (in this version) is the croaking of frogs on clarinets. The interlude between this scene and the last, however, contains the most expressive and most powerfully emotional music in the whole opera, clearly harmonised in D minor. As the curtain rises again, Marie’s little boy is playing on his hobby-horse in the street and (although it is not clear in this version) is told by other children that his mother is dead. Not understanding the implications, he follows them, still on his hobby-horse, to view the spectacle on the path by the pond.