Alban Berg (1885-1935)
‘Slowly, Wozzeck, slowly’ are the first words, sung by the Captain, in Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck, and as far as Australia is concerned, they richly suggest the lack of haste of our opera companies to let audiences experience one of the major operas of the century, indeed of all time (the good news is that the national company is doing it, and within the century, too!). There is irony here, because Wozzeck established itself remarkably quickly as a repertoire piece in Europe. After the premiere at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, under Erich Kleiber, on December 14 1925 (more than three years after Berg completed the opera), Wozzeck temporarily gained the reputation of being very difficult to produce. It was supposed that the amount of rehearsal required was likely to put a stop to all other activities in that theatre, for a long period preceding the performance. In 1929, however, the conductor Johannes Schüler mounted a production in the German town of Oldenburg which was completely satisfactory artistically, and he documented precisely the amount of rehearsal required, proving that Wozzeck could be put on without interfering with the theatre’s normal work.
Wozzeck, in the years preceding the Nazi takeover, was presented in many German theatres, as well as in Vienna, Liège, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Philadelphia, New York, Brussels, Brno, Leningrad, and London. Wozzeck was a work whose time had come, in more ways than one. The particular kind of modernity it embodied made it almost fashionable in the late 1920s, and this had at least as much to do with the drama as with the music. To take the latter first, it is hard to conceive of there being an operatic Woyzeck before the works of Strauss and Schoenberg. This is a point to which we will return, but to understand it we must look at the dramatic text which Berg had chosen.
In 1914 Berg attended the first performance in Vienna of Büchner’s ‘play’, and immediately began work on adapting it for an opera. The ‘play’ was given in a version based on the edition of Karl Emil Franzos, which appeared in 1879. Because of a misreading of the very difficult handwriting of Büchner’s manuscript, the play was given under the title Wozzeck, which became the name of Berg’s opera. Wozzeck had been performed for the first time only the year before Berg saw it in Vienna, yet its author had died, aged 23, leaving it unfinished, as long ago as 1837. Büchner never heard a word of his spoken on the stage. It is a safe bet that if any of his plays had been staged during his lifetime, they would have been received as not only scandalous, but incomprehensible as well.
Woyzeck, as Büchner left it, is a set of approximately 27 scenes, which seemed to be mere fragments to anyone whose dramaturgy was shaped by the idea of the well-made play. The shortest of these fragments can stand for the rest:
XIII Open country
Woyzeck
On and on, on and on. Scrape and squeak – that’s the fiddles and flutes. On and on. – Sh. Music. Who’s speaking down there? [Stretches himself full length on the ground.] What’s that you say? Louder, louder. Stab the she-wolf dead. Stab. The. She-Wolf. Dead. Must I? Do I hear it up there too? Is that the wind saying it? I keep on hearing it, on and on. Stab her dead. Dead.
Büchner based his drama on the case of an ex-soldier, Johann Christian Woyzeck, who had killed his mistress, and had been executed in Leipzig in 1824. An account of the murderer’s background had appeared in a medical journal in 1825, to which Büchner’s doctor father subscribed. Woyzeck has been described by one of its translators as the first working-class tragedy, the first play rooted in the people. Woyzeck is a victim of fate, of material need, in thrall to the ‘voices’ he hears, expressions of anxiety and terror of the mysteriousness of nature.
Büchner’s attraction to the subject chimed in with his tragic view of life, which remains ruthlessly intellectually honest and puzzled: ‘What is it in us that lies, murders, steals?’. The author of Woyzeck studied science, while reading voraciously, especially Shakespeare, Homer, Goethe and folksongs. He was a political radical in the repressive German atmosphere of the post-Napoleonic years, and while studying medicine in Strasbourg, began to publish in his native state of Hesse. His polemical tract The Hessian Courier began ‘PEACE TO COTTAGES! WAR TO PALACES!’, and went on ‘The life of the rich is one long Sunday…the peasant’s life is one long working day. Strangers devour the fruit of his fields before his very eyes. His whole body is a sore; his sweat is the salt on the rich man’s table…’.
A marked man, Büchner lived in semi-hiding while writing his first play, Danton’s Death, which far from romanticizing the French revolutionary, portrays him as a toy of fate afflicted by a Hamlet-like refusal to do anything. It contains scenes of a sexual explicitness which still seems extreme. The unfinished prose narrative Lenz explores the developing madness of the 18th century Sturm und Drang poet J.M.R.Lenz, in a clinical observation of a mental crisis which was partly Büchner’s own. He has Lenz say ‘God Almighty made the world as it ought to be, and we can’t cobble up anything better; out sole endeavour should be to try and do something in the same line. In everything I demand life, the possibility of existence; then it’s all right. We don’t need to ask whether it’s beautiful or ugly’.
The reality, raw and unadorned, that Lenz advocates is what Büchner presents in Woyzeck. The result is impossible to classify: Büchner has been claimed as a forerunner of naturalism, slice-of-life realism, theatre of the absurd, existentialist theatre, and larger-than-life expressionism, and indeed it would be difficult to explore the sources of these kinds of drama without referring to Büchner – he appears to us retrospectively as the most revolutionary and seminal dramatist of the 19th century. Bertolt Brecht was said to consider Woyzeck the beginning of modern theatre. When it was rediscovered, as Paul Henry Lang has written, it untied the tongues not only of the expressionist playwrights, but of the musicians, too.
In a sense Büchner’s Woyzeck fragments are a quarry, and anyone who wishes to take material from it must impose on it some order which is not Büchner’s. This Berg did – but music makes possible a dimension of the inexplicit, the unconscious even, which may preserve and enhance the strangeness of the material, as it is difficult to do in the spoken theatre. During the long wait since the only previous production of Wozzeck in Australia, at the Adelaide Festival in 1976 (the only other Australian performance was in concert, Melbourne 1989, with the Malvern Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Warwick Stengards), one of the most interesting grapples with the challenge of Woyzeck here was part of the early history of Opera Factory. In 1975, influenced by the visit to Australia of the Polish stage director Jerzy Grotowski, David Freeman, who has since become an internationally celebrated opera producer, working with a cast of youthful actors, devised an evening in the theatre called Play Woyzeck, where the first part of the title acknowledged the model of Grotowski’s enlisting of children’s games for ‘making’ the drama from the ground up, out of the living experience and interaction of the actors, who gradually become the characters of the drama out of their own feelings. The games and folk-songs – lullabies, drinking songs, and the like - were part of Büchner’s heritage and help to make his drama richly suggestive.
Büchner’s Woyzeck fragments suit themselves peculiarly well to the process David Freeman developed with his actors, because they are ‘modular’ and their author hadn’t finalised an order for them – perhaps never intended to. The challenge of becoming Wozzeck and Marie, in Berg’s opera, must in a similar way have faced the first actors/singers of the roles, in the Berlin production of 1925, on top of the unprecedented demands of the music. These were theatrical types for which there was no complete stage or operatic precedent. Part of the problem, particularly in the rôle of Wozzeck himself, is that the musical and dramatic intelligence needed to master the part is difficult to combine with the sense of Wozzeck as ‘a man beaten and badgered almost out of his senses by life’: hallucinating, trying to understand life, mentally ambitious, but with a reach exceeding his grasp.
‘One damn thing after another’, a motto which runs through Büchner’s Woyzeck, is partly an expression of the main character’s sense of life, but it also reflects the way in which the ‘play’ doesn’t seem to go anywhere. The characters inhabit an uncertain world, and this uncertainty extends even to the order in which the scenes should be played – there is no plot or structure in the conventional sense. It has often been pointed out that musical language had to be freed in order to deal with dramatic material of this kind, and that in particular the emancipation from tonality brought by Schoenberg and his followers was necessary so that the lack of rhetorical expansion, and the sense of ‘hollows’ behind the words, in expressionist drama, could be matched in music. In this sense, Schoenberg’s monodrama Erwartung (1909), which enters the mind of a woman wandering in a forest and stumbling on the dead body of her lover (whom she may have killed), is the immediate forerunner of Wozzeck, and Berg acknowledged this. The text of Erwartung is actually based on a psychoanalytical case study.
The precedent for both Schoenberg and Berg in music which can respond to constantly shifting, simultaneous events, perceived from different angles, is in Richard Strauss’ Salome and Elektra, but Berg went much further than Strauss towards representing momentary effects, differentiation of orchestral textures, and a singing line which took on many of the features of speech. Yet – and this is the great paradox of Wozzeck – Berg achieved a convincing music drama by marrying Büchner’s drama with some of the most highly structured music ever devised for an opera.
His procedure and the reason for it is explained in his own words. It was far from his conscious intention to ‘reform’ opera: ‘Apart from my desire to make good music, to fulfill, musically, the spiritual content of Büchner’s immortal drama, to transpose his poetic language into a musical one…I had nothing else in mind… than to shape the music in such a way that it is aware in every moment of its duty to serve the drama…That this was done by calling in musical forms that are more or less old…was a decision that made itself’. Berg explained that he had to make a selection from Büchner’s scenes, avoiding repetitions which could not be the subject of musical variation, ‘and further I had to pull these scenes together and string them along, and collect them in groups for the different acts of the opera. This task could only be solved by recourse to the laws of musical architecture’.
Berg felt that if each scene was through-composed in the Wagnerian manner of ‘continuous melody’, interspersed with orchestral entr’actes, the result would have been a monotonous sameness. So each of the scenes and the entr’actes needed to have its own distinctive unmistakable profile, and at the same time be well-rounded and complete in itself. The musical structure of each scene is tied to its dramatic function.
In the scheme Berg devised in his shaping of libretto and music, the first act of Wozzeck is an exposition in five scenes, presenting each of the characters in turn: the Captain (Suite); Andres (Rhapsody); Marie (March/Lullaby); the Doctor (Passacaglia); the Drum-Major (Rondo). Act II is more tightly organised, as a ‘symphony’ in five movements (Sonata movement; Fantasy and Fugue; Largo; Scherzo; Rondo finale). It forms the dramatic development of the opera. Act III (Catastrophe and Epilogue) is a sequence of six Inventions on single musical ideas: on a theme; on one note; on a rhythm; on a chord and on a triplet figure, preceded by an orchestral interlude which is an invention on a key. The musical language of the opera is further tied together by the interval stated in the Captain’s very first words ‘Langsam, Wozzeck, langsam’, a tritone interval (B-F) which occurs throughout.
Berg wrote a lecture on Wozzeck which he gave to introduce many of the opera’s early performances, illustrating it with musical examples. Then he would emphasize that the listener should forget about the technicalities of analysis: ‘However much one may know about the musical forms to be found in this opera – how strictly and logically it is all “worked out”, how ingeniously planned in all its details…from the moment when the curtain rises until it descends for the last time, there must not be anyone in the audience who notices anything of these various fugues and inventions, suite movements and sonata movements, variations and passacaglias. Nobody must be filled with anything else except the idea of the opera – which goes far beyond the individual fate of Wozzeck. And that – so I believe – I have achieved!’.
It was no accident that Berg’s composition of Wozzeck took place during the period of his World War I military service, where he had experiences so physically distressing and personally demeaning that they helped him empathise with the hallucinatory nightmare in which Wozzeck becomes a kind of tortured and doomed Everyman. For all its high organisation, the music of Wozzeck succeeds in breaking down music into a multifarious differentiation of sounds and musical gestures: what a critic in 1925 called a completely unheard-of multi-vocal quality. In the microcosm Wozzeck is a set of Expressionist miniatures which recall - and are unthinkable without – Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire of 1912, based on poems of Albert Giraud, which pioneered the alienation of the singing voice from the musical accompaniment.
That Berg’s methods - the detailed expression and the firm overall musical structure – succeed, few have doubted, and he has found a way of making Büchner’s Woyzeck work as musical theatre which enhances its effect, by a mystery of creative identification. Pierre Jouve suggests that in this opera the connection between the lyric drama and the absolute music is cryptic, and the listener, as Berg has said, doesn’t realise this: ‘he feels himself conveyed by an imperious force, though one which is secret and internal’. This is how Berg recreates musically the special quality of Büchner’s play, the sense of an impersonal and imperious force that destroys Wozzeck. As Gary Schmidgall summarises the result in his Literature as Opera ‘The miracle of the opera is that Berg was able to remain faithful to Büchner’s terse, unexpansive play while providing a kind of interlinear version of the text based upon absolute musical forms (like the fugue) whose very essence is expansion of musical ideas’.
For most audiences outside German-speaking countries Berg’s opera Wozzeck is their only encounter with Büchner’s tragedy, and part of the opera’s powerful impact is due to that. It matters little that Berg imposed an order on the fragments which may not be Büchner’s – he had to make some compromises with conventional ideas of drama, and the ‘forward thrust’ discerned by one critic in the opera overcomes the sense of inertia in Büchner’s fragments, as does the cinematic ‘dissolve’ technique which many have found in Berg’s scene-changing orchestral interludes (this method was to be consciously adopted in Berg’s other, later opera Lulu).
Wozzeck’s entry into the standard repertoire in spite of its challenging dramatic content and atonal musical language also calls for comment. Some camp-followers of the avant-garde have been known to sneer at Berg as ‘the twelve-tone Puccini’, an unintentional compliment, given Puccini’s mastery of stage effect by musical means. But it implies also a degree of sentimentality in a treatment of a mercilessly unsentimental play, and it is true that Berg’s opera puts the focus on Wozzeck more than does Büchner, and that Berg’s identification with the character leads him to give Wozzeck as a singing character a musical expression which is moving. Rather than seeking a parallel in Puccini, we would do well to realize that Wozzeck stretched –without breaking them – links with Wagner, with Debussy, with Strauss, and that helped make the opera intelligible to audiences even in the 1920s. That Berg set Woyzeck to music in the 1920s fixed it artistically in time, and perhaps there can be other, stranger experiences to be had from Büchner’s fragments. But Wozzeck is a masterpiece, for the power of its dramatic expression, the aptness of its musical realisation, the compassion for suffering humanity it conveys. We have waited too long to see it again.
First published in Opera~Opera, 1999