Wozzeck
Opera by Alban Berg
👁 Image Poster from the 1974 Oldenburgisches Staatstheater production
Librettist	Berg
Language	German
Based on	Woyzeck by Georg Büchner
Premiere	14 December 1925 (1925-12-14) Berlin State Opera

Wozzeck (German pronunciation: [ˈvɔtsɛk]) 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 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.

Berg created the Literaturoper (literary opera) Wozzeck from 1914 to 1922, stalled by World War I.^[1][2] He had first pursued a literary career, with juvenilia in lyric poetry and drama, including after Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts.^[3] But in 1904, he diaried that music was "a higher form of revelation".^[4] Berg's mentor Arnold Schoenberg advised, "let poetry lead you ... to music".^[5]

Schoenberg premiered some of Berg's aphoristic Altenberg Lieder (1911–1912), which caused the 1913 Skandalkonzert. 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.^[6]

In May 1914, Berg twice attended the Vienna premiere of Georg Büchner's 1836 play Woyzeck, then mistitled Wozzeck, at the Residenzbühne [de]. He recalled seeing Albert Steinrück as Wozzeck among visitors from the Munich Residenz Theatre and said he "immediately" decided to make it an opera.^[7] 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).^[8]

Trained in biology and medicine,^[9] Georg Büchner taught comparative anatomy at the University of Zurich.^[10] A Romantic in science like his patron Lorenz Oken,^[11] he treated taboo topics like sex, religion, and politics in literature^[12] and stressed characterization over narrative.^[9][13] He had proto-Marxian^[14] 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 [...]."^[15][16]

His work expresses a unity of opposites, or complements, from Hegel and Spinoza.^[17] 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]."^[18][19] 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).^[20][21]

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In Woyzeck, Büchner mixed the grotesque with tragicomedy.^[22] He used case reports of romantic femicide, mainly physician Johann Christian August Clarus's on Johann Christian Woyzeck, a barber and military veteran,^[23] published in a medical journal to which Büchner's brother contributed.^[24] At the competency evaluation, Clarus reported that his patient had "freier Vernunftgebrauch" (free use of reason) and "Willensfreiheit" (free will) despite a medical history that included recurrent episodes of psychosis, leading to Woyzeck's 1821 conviction and 1824 beheading.^[25] Büchner died of typhus in 1837, leaving an untitled, fragmentary script with shifting character names,^[23] perhaps as an open drama [de].^[26]

Berg came from the same expressionist milieu, rooted in Symbolism with its exaltation of outcast artists,^[a] as novelist Franz Kafka, painters Oskar Kokoschka^[b] and Emil Nolde, and poets Gottfried Benn, Rainer Maria Rilke,^[c] and Franz Werfel.^[38] In expressionist German opera, Wozzeck followed Richard Strauss's Elektra and Schoenberg's Die glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand).^[39] Schoenberg's Erwartung (Expectation) and Strauss's Salome had explored the grotesque in particular, and Berg saw operatic potential in Büchner's mad murderer and dark social criticism.^[40]

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.^[41] 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".^[42] 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.^[43]

Berg may have learned from Schreker's Der ferne Klang, having prepared its piano-vocal score in 1911^[44] (though he disliked Schreker's next opera, Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin).^[45] He knew Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande as a model of modernist Literaturoper, a direction he had explored in drafting a libretto (without music) from Franz Grillparzer's play Die Ahnfrau [de]. As in Pelléas, Berg linked Wozzeck's scenes with short interludes^[46] while keeping Büchner's jagged brutality and eerie realism.^[47]

Berg worked mainly from writer Paul Landau [de]'s Wozzeck–Lenz: Zwei Fragmente (Wozzeck and Lenz: Two Fragments; 1909, reprinted 1913; Insel–Verlag [de]), which mostly just resequenced Franzos's 26 scenes.^[48] Theater director Arthur Rundt [de], whose scene cuts Berg mostly followed, had used it in 1914.^[49] That year, scholar Hugo Bieber [de] tied the play to Clarus's Woyzeck.^[50] In 1919, scholar Georg Witkowski issued a critical edition claiming Franzos's omissions, edits, and additions ruined Büchner's play.^[51] Berg mostly chose Franzos's freer, livelier text, which polarized grotesque and tragic aspects, over Witkowski's. Franzos's publisher lost the rights, so Berg retained his title.^[52]

Berg's staging and lighting synced time and action as Franzos's sequential flow suggested ("The drama ... must go forward ... breathlessly", Berg replied to writer Hanns Heinz Ewers's 1925 offer to collaborate).^[52] 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 his wife, Helene [de], once loved.^[53][d] Berg's epilogue was not Franzos's or Landau's final scene,^[55] but it was more Franzos's invention than Büchner's.^[56]

On frugal Sommerfrischen (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.^[57] Then war erupted, and his patriotism was cooled by Karl Kraus's attack on "the cash register of world history".^[58]

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Long fearing death from severe asthma, then a possibly allergy-related somatic symptom disorder, Berg was first deemed unfit by the Austro-Hungarian Army.^[59] 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.^[60] "[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.^[61] In mid-1915, Berg was conscripted anyway and bought the play while finishing Three Pieces for Orchestra.^[62]

That winter, he began another opera with the working title Nacht (Nokturn) (Night/Nocturne; 1915–1917, unfinished).^[e] 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^[f] 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 (Jacob Wrestles).^[65] Berg used musicodramatic ideas from Nacht (Nokturn), like snoring, in Wozzeck.^[66]

As of February 1916, Berg was still sketching Wozzeck's outline, in four acts and 23 scenes.^[67] He wrote Helene of Austrian prisoners of war "imprisoned and starving in unheated stalls" under the Allies^[68] and was himself first assigned 30-hour guard-duty shifts in Vienna.^[69] 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:^[70]

Their arms are crossed and tied behind ... then hoisted up on a tree so that the prisoner can only stand on his toes. When he can do that no more, he hangs until he faints from the pain. The barracks are atop a remote hill ... an hour up a path through a sea of dust and excrement. It is surrounded by pickets and barbed wire, and we can leave only on Sundays. The barracks outdo any description. Completely lice-ridden. [...] I'll have to tell you [more] in person.

Berg never saw combat^[71] and served as a one-year volunteer (Einjährig-Freiwillige) officer, including 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 of Austria.^[72] In August, he wrote Helene: "For months I haven't done any work on Wozzeck. Everything suffocated, buried!".^[73]

In early 1917, Berg wrote playwright Erhard Buschbeck [de] that his two opera ideas were "equally old".^[74] 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.^[75] He marked 1917 as the symbolic year he committed to Wozzeck in a letter to Schoenberg that August.^[76] Likely from his war service,^[77] which in the same letter he called "slavery" that might go on "for years",^[78] 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:^[79]

There was probably some natural relationship between me and this poem.^[g] ... Wozzeck is no simple "we-poor-people" play. What happened to Wozzeck can happen to any poor person, regardless of what type of clothing he wears. It can happen to anyone who is subjugated by others and cannot defend himself.

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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).^[81] 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).^[69] "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."^[82] Days later, he wrote his friend and colleague Anton Webern, "the fate of this poor man [Wozzeck], exploited and tormented by all the world ... touches me", praising the drama's "unheard-of intensity of mood".^[83] 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 Sprechstimme (half-singing, half-speaking) roles, as in melodrama, later shifted to conventional singing ones.^[84]

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That year, Schoenberg hired him at the Society for Private Musical Performances to help with administration, rehearsals, music arrangements, and writing.^[86] The Bergs caught Spanish flu that fall, and the pandemic worsened labor shortages and hunger,^[h] both of which were prevalent amid the war and its aftermath.^[88] His family's farm and country estate at Lake Ossiach, the Berghof,^[89] faced nearby food riots (in Villach)^[90] and business failure.^[91] 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.^[92] That November, Berg's military service ended with several armistices and Austro-Hungarian defeat. "I am again a person!", he told Buschbeck.^[93]

In July 1919, Berg set the final, symmetrical order of Wozzeck's 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^[94] and hoped to premiere the orchestra pieces there and in Dresden through the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.^[95] In concert advertisements he sent to Berg for these "Progress Concerts", he tied the revolutions of 1917–1923 to a spiritual "revolution in art".^[96]

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.^[97] The government had instituted production quotas and resorted to confiscation for food rationing.^[98] "[D]espite ... freezing and having nothing to live on", Berg emphasized that he was "happy", recalling war "years of suffering and humiliation at a low rank, not composing a single note" to Schulhoff in November 1919.^[99]

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,^[100] writing Schulhoff that a nation like Germany^[i] might "deserve" its defeat for how it "treats its greatest".^{[101][102][j]} He blamed the war and its aftermath on capitalism, militarism, the press, and, uncharacteristically, Jews,^[104] calling himself an "antimilitarist" like Kraus,^[105] who polemically examined journalism and German–Jewish assimilation.^[106] 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.^[107]

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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 Musikblätter des Anbruch [de], the music journal of Universal Edition, though he might have even less time to compose.^[110] That April, Johanna sold the landed property as he wished and as another family member had advised.^[111] 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.^[112]

In 1921, nearing the Austrian hyperinflation, the Society closed,^[113] and Johanna kept planning her family's future.^[114] She had disparaged Helene's passive income from financial assets (in Austrian kronen) as miserly and unreliable^[115] and worried that Berg might "live in penury" by componiererei (fooling around composing).^[116] With dollars from her late son Herman's Florida estate, she funded New York trusts managed by Geo. Borgfeldt & Co. [de], a firm long tied to the family,^[117] 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.^[118] While polishing and orchestrating Wozzeck, Berg recalled that Schoenberg had "tried to take away all my pleasure in [the opera]".^[119] In June 1922, he wrote Schoenberg that it was done.^[120]

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).^[121]

Roles, voice types, premiere cast

Role	Voice type	Premiere cast, 14 December 1925 Conductor: Erich Kleiber
Wozzeck	baritone	Leo Schützendorf
Marie, his common-law wife	soprano	Sigrid Johanson
Marie's son	treble	Ruth Iris Witting
Captain	buffo tenor	Waldemar Henke
Doctor	buffo bass	Martin Abendroth
Drum Major	heldentenor	Fritz Soot
Andres, Wozzeck's friend	lyric tenor	Gerhard Witting
Margret, Marie's neighbor	contralto	Jessika Koettrik
First Apprentice	deep bass	Ernst Osterkamp
Second Apprentice	high baritone	Alfred Borchardt
Madman	high tenor	Marcel Noé
A Soldier	baritone	Leonhard Kern
Soldiers, apprentices, women, children

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The pit orchestra is large. The woodwind section has 4 flutes (all double piccolo), 4 oboes (4th doubles cor anglais), 4 clarinets in B♭ (1st doubles clarinet in A, 3rd and 4th double clarinet in E♭), bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, and contrabassoon. The brass section has 4 horns in F, 4 trumpets in F, 4 trombones (1 alto, 2 tenor, 1 bass), and tuba. The percussion section has 4 timpani, 2 bass drums (1 with rute), several cymbals (1 suspended, 1 attached to bass drum), snare drum, 2 tam-tams (1 small), triangle, and xylophone. There is a celesta, a harp, and a standard string section.

The military band has three sections. Woodwinds include piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets in E♭, and 2 bassoons. Brass includes 2 horns in F, 2 trumpets in F, 3 trombones, and tuba. Percussion includes bass drum with cymbals, snare drum, and triangle. Berg marks when these musicians may be taken from the pit in a footnote near the end of act 1, scene 2.

The chamber orchestra matches Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1. It has many wind instruments: flute (doubles piccolo), oboe and cor anglais, 2 clarinets (in E♭ and A) and bass clarinet, and bassoon and contrabassoon, plus 2 horns. It also has a string quintet plus double bass.

The tavern band has a clarinet in C, a bombardon in F (or muted tuba as substitute), an accordion, a guitar, and 2 fiddles.

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As in much of his work, Berg navigates dialectics of convention and innovation, form and content, and structure and function in Wozzeck, often integrating and dissolving musical material cyclically.^{[123][124][k]} Small,^[128] fluid, sometimes purely rhythmic motifs recur in new contexts and undergo intricate transformations, helping to shape organic unity.^[129] 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.^[130] Frequent tempo gradations and contrasts accrue formal and dramatic significance.^[131]

Like earlier composers, Berg innovated on operatic tradition. Not wanting Wozzeck and his œuvre to seem Romantic or passé,^[132] he said he preferred strict musical form to "the Wagnerian recipe of 'through-composing'",^[133][l] though the opera is Wagnerian in many respects (e.g., complexity, unmoored emotionality).^[135] 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.^[136]

Büchner's text repeats phrases as motifs, like "ein guter Mensch" (a good person), "wir arme Leut" (we poor folk), and "eins nach dem andern" (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:^[137] 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).^[138] 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.^[137]

Berg adopted Franzos's overall dramatic structure (exposition, development, catastrophe),^[52] which Fritz Mahler summarizes:^[139]

Drama		Music
Expositions	Act 1	Five character pieces
Wozzeck and the Captain	Scene 1	Suite
Wozzeck and Andres	Scene 2	Rhapsody
Wozzeck and Marie	Scene 3	Military march and Lullaby
Wozzeck and the Doctor	Scene 4	Passacaglia
Marie and the Drum Major	Scene 5	Andante affettuoso (quasi Rondo)
Dramatic development	Act 2	Symphony in five movements
Marie and her son, then Wozzeck	Scene 1	Sonata movement
The Captain and the Doctor, then Wozzeck	Scene 2	Fantasia and Fugue
Marie and Wozzeck	Scene 3	Largo
Garden of a tavern	Scene 4	Scherzo
Guard room in the barracks	Scene 5	Rondo con introduzione
Catastrophe and epilogue	Act 3	Six inventions
Marie and her son	Scene 1	Invention on a theme
Wozzeck kills Marie	Scene 2	Invention on a single note
Tavern	Scene 3	Invention on a rhythm
Wozzeck drowns	Scene 4	Invention on a hexachord
Interlude	Invention on a tonality
Children playing	Scene 5	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.^[140]

But in Wozzeck, unlike in the athematic (motivic) Clarinet Pieces (1913), Berg integrates harmony with thematic material to articulate larger structures and convey expression.^[142][m] 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.^[145] 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.^[146]

At the same time, Berg uses such focal pitches and often register for frame of reference^[147] and added meaning.^[148] For example, the single pitch B symbolizes the murder^[149] and dominates that scene.^[150] Soft at the end of act 2, when Wozzeck, beaten, whispers "einer nach dem andern" (one after the other),^[151] B crescendos repeatedly^[150] and expands from unison B₃ into octaves:^[152] Marie's last cry ("Hilfe!", or "Help!") spans two, from B₅ to B₃.^[153] (As B is here, so is F a pedal in Wozzeck's death scene.)^[154]

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.^[155]

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 danse macabre 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 Die Fackel [de] by 1916.^[156] Marie's orphan plays among children singing "Ringel, Ringel, Rosenkranz, Ringelreih'n" (like "Ring a Ring o' Roses") in the epilogue.

Berg's notes and sketches for Wozzeck (and for the march from Three Pieces for Orchestra) mingled with fragments of military papers. 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".^[157]

Berg 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.^[158] 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.^[159]

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 Lied "Der verlorene Haufen" (referring to forlorn hope) or the popular soldiers' Volkslied "Morgenrot".^[160][n]

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".^[162]

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.^[o] The whole chromatic is completed, with the eleventh pitch in the oboe and the twelfth in the bassoon.^[164]

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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:^[166] Wozzeck shaves the Captain, assenting in monotone to orders to go "slowly! One thing after the other!"^[167] 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).^[168] He begins to rhythmically mock Wozzeck's assents in the manner of a verbal taunt to the viola cadenza.^[169]

Wozzeck is a "good man" but has "no sense of morality", the Captain sings to the contrabassoon cadenza.^[170] As winds imitate a church pipe organ, he scorns Wozzeck's nonmarital son in falsetto.^[169] 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".^[171][p] If they reached Heaven, he cries, "we'd all have to manufacture thunder!" to accented triads that also span the whole chromatic.^[174]

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.^[175] In a brief interlude, this material is transformed, building to climax as the curtain rises again.^[176]

Scene 2 (Rhapsody and Hunting Song)

In the rhapsody on three chords evoking tonic, dominant, and subdominant,^[178] Wozzeck and fellow soldier Andres gather firewood at sunset.^[179] "This place is accursed!" says Wozzeck repeatedly,^[180] fearing its toadstools (poisonous mushrooms)^[181] and recounting a tale of someone who died three days and nights after finding a severed head there.^[182] As a foil,^[183] this alternates with strophes of Andres's rustic Jagdlied  [de] (hunting song) in ⁶
₈, sung on the first two chords as if in G major (increasingly off-key as he becomes uneasy).^[184][185]

Unassuaged, Wozzeck goes on to describe a hollow Earth, a firestorm, and a "crashing noise coming down, like trumpets".^[186] "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.^[187]

The music segues as the scene changes: clarinets imitate distant bugles, the curtain falls,^[181] and a funeral march begins as they retreat,^[187] descending in a lament bass from C to F.^[188] This march is transformed when a military band nears as the curtain rises.^[187]

Scene 3 (March and Lullaby)

This rowdy band marches toward Marie's window,^[189] and she joins in song (an altered melody from Mahler's "Revelge").^[190] 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.^[191]

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).^[191]

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.^[192]

Scene 4 (Passacaglia)

This figure is the passacaglia theme, with 21 variations in three sections. It is a golden afternoon.^[192] Wozzeck calls the Doctor "Herr Coffin Nail",^[193] 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.^[194]

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 ("aberatio mentalis partialis zweite Spezies") 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.^[194]

As a brief interlude, the passacaglia theme fragments and yields to music from the rowdy march.^[195]

Scene 5 (Rondo)

It is evening outside Marie's house.^[195] 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.^[196]

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.^[196]

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This time in the coda, Wozzeck enters unseen,^[196] startling Marie, who tries to hide her earrings in the development. He doubts she found a matching pair, as she claims.^[197] A plain C-major triad marks his affectionate gift of money,^[198] and he leaves.^[199]

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.^[200]

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.^[201] 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.^[202]

A slow chamber-orchestra interlude hints at the next scene's music.^[202]

Scene 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.^[203]

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The prior interlude's undulating music reverses into the next scene's slow Ländler.^[204]

Scene 4 (Scherzo with two trios)

Two novices sing drunken solos for patrons at a Heuriger (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.^[205]

Erratic dance music accelerates past the curtain fall, halting as a men's chorus is heard in a faint vocalise of the rhapsody chords.^[205]

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.^[205]

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.^[206]

This theme develops and fades to a chilling harp and celesta arpeggio reintroducing the fateful pitch B.^[206]

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.

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Scene 3 (Invention on a rhythm)

Wozzeck and Margret dance in the tavern among others as he celebrates doom and the Devil's arrival.^[207] 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.^[208]

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^[209] as the harmony resolves into tonal closure back in D minor (m. 370).^[208]

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.

Wozzeck is among the most renowned 20th-century modernist operas, holding a position like that of Tristan und Isolde in the 19th century.^[210] John Deathridge called it "one of the undisputed masterpieces of modern opera".^[211] Audiences have long responded to its emotional force and elements of post-romanticism,^[212] and it has captivated musicians as a work that rewards musical analysis.^[213][q] Its dissonant, psychological idiom recalls Schoenberg's Erwartung,^[214] and its tormented, outcast antihero^[215] 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.^[216][r] Its hybrid form has been compared to that of Paul Hindemith's Cardillac, Ferruccio Busoni's Doktor Faust,^[218] and Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos.^[219]

Berg's critical engagement with militarism and war receded as Wozzeck became a repertoire standard apart from its original context, not unlike Maurice Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin.^[220] Publicly, he mostly focused on the music. Though he backed Alexander Landau's 1926 socialist analysis (arguing that Wozzeck's suffering is collective and calls for action, not blame),^[221] the opera's social topicality may always have been somewhat contextual, allowing it to function critically in a manner immanent to its reception.^[222] Like Kraus, Strindberg, and Otto Weininger, he studied his dramatic figures as archetypes (as in Lulu),^[223] backing Otto Brües [de]'s 1929 reading of Wozzeck as Job^[224] and even considering an unrealized operatic trilogy: Wozzeck, the servant; Vincent (van Gogh), the friend (of Gauguin); and Wolfgang (Amadeus Mozart), the master.^[225]

Wozzeck, through Berg's promotional and musicodramatic strategies, made him famous.^[226] After its 1925 premiere,^[227] which took place within a year of Cardillac, Kurt Weill's Protagonist, and Ernst Krenek's Zwingburg and Der Sprung über den Schatten,^[228] it was produced 27 times,^[227] especially in Germany and Austria,^[229] until January 1933.^[227] Then Nazi Germany suppressed "degenerate music".^[229]

Schoenberg saw Wozzeck's Particell (short score) in 1921 and urged Universal Edition's Emil Hertzka to publish the imminent piano–vocal score by Berg's pupils (mostly Fritz Heinrich Klein but also Gottfried Kassowitz): "This is an opera! Genuine theater music! Everything is flawlessly done, as though Berg had never composed anything but theater music!"^[230] With funds from dedicatee Alma Mahler and a loan from May Keller, with whom his sister Smaragda then had a lesbian relationship,^[s] Berg paid Universal Edition to print private piano–vocal score copies in 1922. He sold few but sent many to critics, conductors, and theaters in early 1923.^[233]

That April, Die Musik published the lullaby with Ernst Viebig [de]'s rapt review: "It is in the form of the piece that the composer opens up new paths", "perhaps" to a "truly 'musical opera'"^[234] (Wozzeck was not a "conventional 'music drama'", Klein wrote in Anbruch, but had a "new kind of structure" with "all the forms of absolute music" and a "formal musical development".^[235][t]) Then, in exchange for Wozzeck, Universal Edition published Three Pieces for Orchestra.^[237] Webern debuted two (Präludium and Reigen) at Heinrich Jalowetz's and Paul Pella [de]'s "Austrian Music Week" that summer in Berlin, drawing more press.^[238][239]

Also that summer, when Gustav Havemann's Quartet played Berg's String Quartet at the Salzburg International Society for Contemporary Music festival, Hermann Scherchen asked for a Wozzeck suite. Berg gave him the march, lullaby, and Bible scene as Three Fragments^[u] for Voice and Orchestra from the Opera "Wozzeck". In late 1923, Berg had pianist Ernst Bachrich play Wozzeck excerpts for conductor Erich Kleiber, who was visiting Vienna. Kleiber agreed to stage it at the Berlin State Opera. Universal Edition deemed this the best premiere offer. Scherchen premiered the Fragments, intended for Berlin, to acclaim at Frankfurt's 1924 Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (ADMV) festival,^[240] inspiring Adorno to study composition with Berg.^[241]

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Berg helped with staging and rehearsals in Berlin.^[242] There were at least 137,^[243] and Berlin State Opera manager Max von Schillings quit over a possibly related funding clash.^[242] Wozzeck was regarded as the first full-scale atonal opera.^[244] Many music writers, including Vienna's Paul Stefan and Prague's Erich Steinhard [de], and composers, including Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Adorno, and Stefan Wolpe, attended the dress rehearsal.^[242] The 14 December 1925 premiere was a succès de scandale with some disruptions.^[229]

Wozzeck achieved sustained expressive coherence despite a post-tonal musical language^[218] and was covered internationally and at length.^[245] 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.^[246]

The Vienna premiere of Büchner's play also inspired Manfred Gurlitt.^[247] Premiered four months after Berg's opera^[248] and also published by Universal Edition, Gurlitt's opera Wozzeck discomfited Berg.^[247] They worked without any knowledge of each other.^[248] Examining Gurlitt's piano–vocal score, Berg found it "not bad or unoriginal" but a weak "broth ... even for arme Leut [poor folks]".^[249] 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.^[247] It has remained in the shadow of Berg's.^[250][v]

Writer Jiří Mařánek [cs] translated Berg's Wozzeck,^[251] and in 1926 conductor Otakar Ostrčil led its Czech-language premiere as Vojcek at Prague's National Theatre,^[245] staged by dramatist Ferdinand Pujman [cs].^[251] 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:^[252]

[T]he translation ... comes so close to the original; it is more the ... spirited presentation ... as though the work in this language has found a more natural ... expression. In ... the soul of the folk, the essential sameness of the human soul in all its national varieties becomes most apparent. [T]he living archetype that Büchner's play evokes ... was most likely a Slavic type. More important ... is the ... musical conduct of this performance, ... which I ... admir[e].

During the third performance,^[251] as Berg wrote Adorno, some "Czech Nationalists (virtually Nazis)" and "clerical lobbies" staged "purely political!" 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."^[253] Antonín Šilhan wrote as much in Národní listy, and Emanuel Žak [cs] tied the opera's degeneracy to Jewish Bolshevism in Čech [cs], while Zdeněk Nejedlý mocked them, praising Wozzeck in Rudé právo.^{[254][255][w]} The city government quickly banned it.^[251] Ostrčil connected the affair to "a reactionary movement that has been asserted in our life".^[256]

In a 1927 interview, Berg attributed the protests to "political issues ... supposedly connected to my artistic outlook".^[257] In an interview printed in 1928, composer Leoš Janáček said that "wrong was seriously done to Berg", calling him a "dramatist of astonishing consequence, of deep truth".^[258] In the 1930 interview with Jancke, Berg remembered the deceased Janáček among those who backed him, saying that Prague's top circles and critics fought the ban. Czech nationalists, he recalled, had opposed him as an Austrian^[x] and for his work's supposed defeatism.^[261]

In 1927, the Association for Contemporary Music, spearheaded by Nikolai Roslavets, staged Wozzeck at Leningrad's Mariinsky Theatre with Boris Asafyev's assistance,^[262] Vladimir Dranishnikov [ru] conducting. Berg rode trains for about three days to attend the first performances and wrote journalist Soma Morgenstern that he was "celebrated [as] never ... before".^[263] Here Wozzeck was, he continued, "a sensation ... in purely artistic, not political, terms".^[263] He wired Helene "huge, tumultuous success", but reviews were mixed.^[264] Dmitri Shostakovich attended all eight or nine performances.^[265][266]

Oldenburgisches Staatstheater conductor Johannes Schüler proved that Wozzeck could succeed in a small-town theater with few rehearsals.^[263] Berg and Erwin Stein cut sections from four to three musicians, yielding an orchestra of about 60.^[267][268] Berg first gave his "Lecture on Wozzeck" before this premiere, then in 11 more cities:^[263] in the 1930 interview with Jancke, he said that after ten stagings here and eight in Essen, about ten other theaters planned it, including Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hagen, Lübeck, Stuttgart, Weimar, and Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, as the ADMV festival opera). When interviewed, Berg was in Aachen for Wozzeck rehearsals, following a performance of his Lyric Suite (alongside Schoenberg's music) there. Composer Béla Bartók, Jancke noted, had said Wozzeck showed contemporary art music's potential in regional cities.^[269]

For Wozzeck's 1930 Austrian premiere, led by Vienna's Clemens Krauss, Berg gave tickets to friends, family, and his nonmarital daughter, Albine Wittula. While on better terms with Kleiber, Berg was pleased with Krauss's performance and touched by his opera's hometown success.^[270] Webern said he was "shaken to his depths", though he criticized the production as "insufficient". Some called it "art for art's sake" and "unsocial".^[271] Neue Freie Presse critic Julius Korngold wrote a polemical review:^[270]

If there is ... "atonal" music, it is ... a music that cannot be ... deduced given its fanatic attachment to chromaticism—in both vertical [harmonic] and horizontal [melodic] dimensions. ... [W]e have here "negative composing" ... with its conscious dethronement of the evolving tonal system and rejection of tonal relationships and a tonal center.

In reply, Berg framed atonality as tradition-based harmonic innovation in a revised "Lecture on Wozzeck" ("The 'Atonal Opera'") he delivered at the Kulturbund (cultural association) and in a scripted Radio Wien talk "What Is Atonal?" with critic Julius Bistron.^[270] Following Schoenberg, he argued that music predating the common practice period entailed post-tonal possibilities, rejecting the label "atonal" as denoting loss rather than innovation. He saw his and Schoenberg's music as historically grounded in a long line of chromaticism, from Max Reger and Johannes Brahms to Franz Schubert and Mozart, preserving continuity with old forms, motivic development, loosely triadic elements, and the centrality of melody.^[272]

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Kleiber gave the Wozzeck Fragments their 1930 U.S. premiere at the New York Philharmonic, priming opera-goers. "Like Debussy in his Pelléas, Berg sought ... to probe the depths of consciousness", wrote Lawrence Gilman in the New York Herald Tribune.^[270]

In 1931, the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company, working with the Curtis Institute of Music and Philadelphia Orchestra, staged the U.S. premiere of Wozzeck at Philadelphia's Metropolitan Opera House under Leopold Stokowski. Composer George Gershwin rode a special Wozzeck train from New York: he had met Berg in 1928 via pianist Josefa Rosanska (Josephine Rosensweet, Rudolf Kolisch's soon-to-be wife) when they went to Berg's home to hear the Kolisch Quartet play Berg's Lyric Suite.^[274]

Calling the audience "brilliant", The New York Times's conservative critic Olin Downes wrote of an "astonishing" success and hailed Berg's word painting:^[275]

You may hear the military band approaching, the crackling and cutting of the wood for the captain's fire, feel the approach of darkness and find reflected in the instruments the sulphurous sky of the field scene, and the setting of the sun. Or you will feel the blinding, insane thought of murder in Wozzeck's brain, and may be conscious, with weird distinctness and psychology of effect, of bubbles rising into the pool into which Wozzeck's body has sunk. All ... synthesized and reflected as in a transparent mirror [...]. ... [T]his score ... is beautiful.

Gilman agreed:^[275]

The layman, if he can accustom himself ... will find ... bitter and piercing loveliness, ... intensity, a compassionate wisdom [and] suffusing tenderness ... reveal[ing] Berg [as a] poet ... a pitiful humanitarian, even (let us whisper it!) a shameless romanticist—a social and spiritual rebel, no less than an aesthetic one.

Later that year, Stokowski's Philadelphia team staged Wozzeck's second U.S. premiere at New York's Metropolitan Opera, prompting another Downes review:^[275]

[Berg] is Wozzeck himself, and we ... know Wozzeck's terrors of the strange things ... his premonitions which he cannot explain, of the evil that dogs him, his hallucinations, his murderous revolt. This is the psychological and emotional quality of the music.

In 1932, Henry Wood led the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a studio performance of the Wozzeck Fragments broadcast by Schoenberg pupil Edward Clark.^[276] In 1934, Adrian Boult conducted Wozzeck in a Queen's Hall concert performance also broadcast by Clark.^[277][278]

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Unlike Schoenberg or Webern, Berg was able to live on royalty payments for his music,^[279] mostly from Wozzeck performances in Central Europe.^[280] He traveled not only to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Russia, and England, but also to Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, France, and Italy for performances of and talks about the opera.^[280] Busy attending to his success and enjoying independence, he declined vacations with Schoenberg and Schreker's offers of a Berlin Musikhochschule appointment.^[218] He benefited from new relationships with Kleiber, Karl Böhm, and Gian Francesco Malipiero, and was appointed to the ADMV jury.^[281]

Performances of Wozzeck declined amid rising support for fascism and were suppressed under it. Inflation further harmed Berg's finances. Webern's engagement to conduct the Fragments in Florence was canceled in 1934.^[282] Soon after immigrating to the United States that year, Schoenberg helped Berg obtain funds to complete Lulu by persuading the Library of Congress to buy the holograph score of Wozzeck.^[283] As a tribute following Berg's 1935 death, Webern almost conducted the Fragments and Berg's Violin Concerto (at its 1936 world premiere in Barcelona) but was overwhelmed in the event.^[284]

Conductor Tullio Serafin led Wozzeck's 1942 Italian premiere before leaving the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma.^[285]

Naples's Teatro di San Carlo staged Wozzeck in the 1949–50 season,^[286] and in 1952, the Royal Opera House gave Wozzeck its first British staging.^[229] The Vienna State Opera first revived it in the 1955–56 season, their first after World War II, led by Karl Böhm.^[287] The Berlin State Opera reinstated Wozzeck,^[288] and it gradually appeared across Germany: at the Staatstheater Augsburg,^[289] the Staatstheater Braunschweig,^[290] the Theater Dortmund (managed by P. Walter Jacob [de]),^[291] the Theater Gießen,^[292] the Staatsoper Hannover,^[293] the Staatstheater Mainz (with László Anderkó as Wozzeck),^[294] the Staatstheater Nürnberg,^[295] the Theater Regensburg,^[296] the Mainfranken Theater Würzburg,^[297] and at Munich's Prinzregententheater (led by Ferenc Fricsay).^[298] The Finnish National Opera and Ballet staged it after their 1956 reorganization.^[299]

In 1962, Paris's Théâtre des Champs-Élysées gave Wozzeck its first French staging.^[300] The De Nederlandse Operastichting mounted it in their first season (1965–66), stage directed by Maurice Huisman.^[301] In his debut that year, Herbert Graf stage directed Wozzeck's local premiere at the Grand Théâtre de Genève.^[302] In Italy, Gian Carlo Menotti hired Günter Krämer [de] to stage it at Spoleto's Festival dei Due Mondi,^[303] and Parma's Teatro di Verdura [it] staged it in 1965,^[304] followed by the Teatro Comunale di Bologna in 1969^[305] and Genoa's Teatro Carlo Felice in 1970 (after fascist suppression there).^[306] The Nederlandse Reisopera added it to their repertoire in the 1970s,^[307] as did Opera Australia after the Sydney Opera House opened.^[308]

In the 1980s, Gerard Mortier stage directed both revivals at Brussels' La Monnaie,^[309] and Parma's Teatro Regio mounted it in 1989.^[310] In the 1990s, Paris's Théâtre du Châtelet,^[311] the Opéra national de Montpellier,^[312] the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino,^[313] and Trieste's Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi^[314] presented Wozzeck, and Pierre Audi mounted it twice through the Dutch National Opera.^[315] Menotti revived it at Spoleto's Teatro Caio Melisso in 1994,^[316] Bologna revived it to poor attendance in 1995,^[317] and Theater Saarbrücken produced it for Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg's 1995–96 season.^[318] Wozzeck was restaged in Russia only in 2008^[319] after decades of Stalinism and turbulent Germany–Russia relations.^[262]

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Berg and Krenek were acquainted at the salons of Alma Mahler,^[321] who was a close friend of the Bergs^[322] (and the wife or lover of Gustav Mahler, Kokoschka, and Werfel). Krenek studied Wozzeck's piano–vocal score and wrote Berg with praise and questions about vocal writing while working with Kokoschka on Orpheus und Eurydike in 1923.^[321] Berg replied with examples from Wagner, Mozart, and Bach, stressing music adapted to singers' limits and his varied use of voice ("the supreme instrument") for dramatic effect.^[323] Krenek denied modeling Orpheus on Wozzeck, but Berg likely influenced him. Hans Hartleb saw parallels in the operas' violence and music of "fatalism, melancholy, and sensuality" for Eurydike and Marie^[321] (whose role, he wrote, such music elevated).^[324]

The second scene of Shostakovich's opera The Nose (1927) likely parodies Wozzeck. Shaken to find a nose he fears he severed, Shostakovich's barber galops through friendly townsfolk by a river, set to melodic motifs recalling Berg's tavern polka, during which Wozzeck feigns friendliness with townsfolk after murdering Marie. The barber tosses the nose into the water, as Wozzeck does his knife into a pond. Rising and falling lines evoke its sinking, as they depict Wozzeck's drowning. A policeman sees. He interrogates in hysterical falsetto, with a high climax, laughter, and final deflation, as the Captain does in Wozzeck's first scene. The barber replies in a clipped, spoken manner, echoing Wozzeck's monotonous assents.^[325]

Wozzeck was among Gershwin's influences and perhaps his model in writing the opera Porgy and Bess, which he reportedly "wanted to write like ... an American Wozzeck".^[326] It also influenced Luigi Dallapiccola,^[327] who used the same tetrachord as Wozzeck's "wir arme Leut" motif in the climactic betrayal scene of the opera Il prigioniero (1944–1948).^[328] The one-act opera C’est la guerre  [hu] (1960–1961) by Emil Petrovics [hu] shows Wozzeck's influence in its taut Expressionism and ironic use of popular tunes.^[329][330]

In later German opera, Wozzeck influenced the style of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten and Wolfgang Rihm's Jakob Lenz.^[331]

In concert music, Luciano Berio quotes the rising orchestral chords Berg uses in the word painting of Wozzeck's drowning alongside other musical depictions of water in Sinfonia (1968–1969).^[332] Luigi Nono's concert fragments from his opera Al gran sole carico d'amore may follow the model of Berg's Wozzeck Fragments (and Lulu Symphony).^[333]

Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, in creating the 1979 musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, drew on Berg's portrayal of an antihero and tightly structured integration of music and drama.^[334]

Besides Stein's arrangement,^[267] John Rea's arrangement is for 22 singers and 21 instrumental parts.^[121]

Year	Wozzeck	Marie	Doktor	Hauptmann	Andres	Margret	Tambourmajor	Chorus and Orchestra	Conductor	Label / Notes
1949	Heinrich Nillius	Suzanne Danco	Otakar Kraus	Parry Jones	Frank Vroons	Mary Jarred	Walter Widdop	BBC Chorus and Symphony Orchestra	Adrian Boult	SOMM Ariadne (radio broadcast, Royal Albert Hall, issued 2023)
1951	Mack Harrell	Eileen Farrell	Ralph Herbert	Joseph Mordino (Soldat, Idiot)	David Lloyd	Edwina Eustis	Frederick Jagel	New York Philharmonic	Dimitri Mitropoulos	Columbia (FCX 157–158)
1955	Tito Gobbi	Dorothy Dow	Italo Tajo	Hugues Cuénod	Petre Munteanu	Maria Teresa Mandalari	Mirto Picchi	RAI Chorus and Symphony Orchestra of Rome	Nino Sanzogno	RAI / Myto (sung in Italian)
1965	Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau	Evelyn Lear	Karl-Christian Kohn	Gerhard Stolze	Fritz Wunderlich	Alice Oelke	Helmut Melchert	Chorus and Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin	Karl Böhm	Deutsche Grammophon – 1966 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording
1966	Walter Berry	Isabel Strauss	Karl Dönch	Albert Weikenmeier	Richard van Vrooman	Ingeborg Lasser	Fritz Uhl	Chorus and Orchestra of the Paris Opera	Pierre Boulez	Columbia – 1968 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording[y]
1970	Toni Blankenheim	Sena Jurinac	Hans Sotin	Gerhard Unger	Peter Haage	Elisabeth Steiner	Richard Cassilly	Chorus of the Hamburg State Opera; Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra	Bruno Maderna	Arthaus Musik (directed by Rolf Liebermann)
1979	Eberhard Waechter	Anja Silja	Alexander Malta	Heinz Zednik	Horst Laubenthal	Gertrude Jahn	Hermann Winkler	Wiener Staatsopernchor; Vienna Philharmonic	Christoph von Dohnányi	Decca
1987	Franz Grundheber	Hildegard Behrens	Aage Haugland	Heinz Zednik	Philip Langridge	Anna Gonda	Walter Raffeiner [de]	Wiener Staatsopernchor; Vienna Philharmonic	Claudio Abbado	Deutsche Grammophon
1994	Franz Grundheber	Waltraud Meier	Günter von Kannen	Graham Clark	Endrik Wottrich	Dalia Schaechter	Mark Baker	Chorus and Children's Choir of the Deutsche Oper Berlin; Staatskapelle Berlin	Daniel Barenboim	Teldec
2003	Andrew Shore	Josephine Barstow	Clive Bayley	Stuart Kale	Peter Bronder	Jean Rigby	Alan Woodrow	Philharmonia Orchestra	Paul Daniel	Chandos (Chan 3094; sung in English)
2006	Franz Hawlata	Angela Denoke	Johann Tilli	Hubert Delamboye	Robert McPherson	Vivian Tierney	Reiner Goldberg	Vivaldi Chorus; IPSI; Petits Cantors de Catalunya; Orchestra & Chorus of the Gran Teatre del Liceu	Sebastian Weigle	Opus Arte (directed by Calixto Bieito)
2017	Roman Trekel	Anne Schwanewilms	Nathan Berg	Marc Molomot	Robert McPherson	Katherine Ciesinski	Gordon Gietz	Houston Grand Opera Children's Chorus; Shepherd School of Music; Houston Symphony	Hans Graf	Naxos

The Hamburg State Opera's 1970 production was filmed at a deserted castle for director Joachim Hess [de]'s 1972 TV film Wozzeck, broadcast on Norddeutscher Rundfunk.^[335]

• Hungarian-Austrian writer Andreas Latzko's 1917 novella Heimkehr (Homecoming)—from Menschen im Krieg [de] (People in War)—depicts a humiliated veteran, unable to marry and driven to murder.^[336]
• Structural vulnerability is the risk of harm arising from unequal social, economic, and political structures.

• Bailey Puffett, Kathryn. 1997. "Berg's aphoristic pieces". The Cambridge Companion to Berg, ed. Anthony Pople, 83–110. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-82807-9.
• Bonds, Mark Edward (June 2020). "'Wozzeck's Worst Hours': Alban Berg's Presentation Copy of Wozzeck to Eduard Steuermann". Notes, 76(4), 527–534. JSTOR 27079692
• Deák, István. 1992. Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-504506-2.
• Judson, Pieter M. 1996. Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-10740-7.
• Mulej, Oskar. 2024. Liberalism after the Habsburg Monarchy, 1918–1935: National Liberal Heirs in the Czech Lands, Austria, and Slovenia. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 978-3-031-64478-8.
• Ross, Alex (2008). The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (1st ed.). New York: Picador. ISBN 978-0-312-42771-9.
• "No Wives for Soldiers: Marriage Forbidden Under Proposed Austrian Law." The New York Times, p. 10, 22 January 1920.

• 👁 Wikimedia Commons logo
  Media related to Wozzeck at Wikimedia Commons
• Wozzeck: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project
• How does Berg use Sprechgesang in Wozzeck? (The Royal Opera) on YouTube
• Photos of the Berg family, including at the Berghof
• Portrait of the opera in the online opera guide opera-inside.com

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