Alban Berg’s Wozzeck — which opened last week at the Metropolitan Opera — is grand opera through the back door. The characters are unlovely, the costumes plain, the arias atonal, and the plot bare. But Berg’s twelve-tone tale of a soldier’s love, murder, and suicide was instantly hailed as a masterpiece at its first performance at the Berlin State Opera House in 1925. And this new production in New York confirms the place of Wozzeck in the canon of great opera.
In 1821, Johann Christian Woyzeck, an itinerant wigmaker, barber, illuminator of copper engravings, and sometime soldier, murdered his mistress in a jealous rage. He was immediately arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. On appeal, however, his lawyers mounted an insanity defense (a novelty for the time, especially when applied to a lower-class drifter). Witnesses came forward to attest to Woyzeck’s derangement, and a detailed medical examination into the murderer’s state of mind was conducted. Found to be suffering from hallucinations and voices but otherwise healthy, Woyzeck was beheaded in the Leipzig public square before a curious crowd. Professional debate about the medical examiner’s judgment continued well into the 1830s. Some said the murderer was mentally disturbed. Others described his symptoms as “moral decrepitude.”
Georg Buchner, a German medical student and writer who died of typhus in 1837 at the age of twenty-three, followed this curious case in the professional journals and left among his literary remains sketches for a play incorporating Woyzeck’s accounts of his visions and the medical testimony. Buchner’s unfinished text moldered forgotten in a trunk until Karl Emil Franzos, a prolific Jewish novelist, published what Buchner called his “swinish” play in a Viennese newspaper in 1875.
Buchner’s drama finally reached the stage in 1913, in Munich, as Wozzeck. (The name change derived from the illegibility of the original manuscript.) Alban Berg — who, with Anton Webern, was one of Arnold Schoenberg’s great disciples in the emancipation of dissonance and devotion to serial composition — attended the Viennese premiere in 1914, and, according to a man who sat in the row in front of him, the composer left the theater visibly moved. “Someone,” Berg said, “must set this to music.”
Although he set about the task directly, Berg was famous for his slow work. (He stopped assigning opus numbers to his compositions because, he said, he felt ashamed at how few works he had composed over the years.) For Wozzeck, however, he had an excuse. Called up for military service between 1915 and 1917, Berg had an opportunity to taste the military life of a private first-hand. In a letter he asked, “Have you ever heard a lot of people all snoring at the same time? The polyphonic breathing, gasping and groaning makes the strangest chorus I have ever heard. It is like a music of the primeval sounds that rises from the abysses of these people’s souls.”
After his military discharge, Berg returned to work, taking as his libretto the text of the production he’d seen before the war. As he composed, the work grew into an opera in three acts of five scenes, each scene a discrete piece of music in classical form.
The five scenes of Act 1 establish Wozzeck’s living conditions and hallucinations (as reported in the trial literature) and introduce his captain and regimental doctor, his yearning mistress Marie, and his rival, the drum major. Act 2 reveals Marie’s betrayal of Wozzeck, his humiliation at the hands of his captain and doctor, and the drum major’s flaunting of his conquest at the beer garden and in the barracks. Act 3 plays out the tragedy. Marie reads the story of Mary Magdalene. Wozzeck takes her for a walk and stabs her. He returns to the tavern with blood on his hands and flees. Ignoring the capture of the real Woyzeck, Berg has his operatic Wozzeck drown himself near Marie’s corpse. Following an orchestral epilogue, a group of children tell Marie’s child that his mother is dead.
The concentration of mood in Wozzeck is accomplished entirely through the music, which endows Buchner’s fragment with coherence and which imparts a measure of fate to the senseless and the overwhelming (especially in the long orchestral meditation that precedes the opera’s brief final scene).
The current Met production by Mark Lamos premiered in 1997 and completely redoes the sets and staging that served Berg’s opera for over forty years. Franz Grundheber sings the lead, the plain soldier Franz Wozzeck; Hildegard Behrens plays Marie, the unpitied Magdalene whom he loves and murders. Dressed in military drab and cotton dowdy, they play out their tragedy against a slate-colored backdrop designed by Robert Israel. James Levine conducts the Metropolitan orchestra on this harrowing journey from oppression through degradation to extinction unredeemed by science or social purpose or spiritual transformation, in three acts without intermission.
There is some comic relief early in the opera, when Wozzeck trims his captain’s hair and, again, when the doctor orders him, as a medical experiment, to eat only peas. But the opera is mostly music for the wounded heart. Wozzeck’s voices and visions in the open field — “It’s the Freemasons!” and “A fire! A fire rising from earth to heaven” — come directly from the historical sources. Episodes set in a beer garden and tavern present dancing couples so drunk or exhausted that they lumber across the floor leaning against each other for support. Their hunting and drinking songs are atonal versions of beer hall melodies — high-art versions of tunes sung by characters who can’t sing on pitch. The waltzes to which they stumble refer to Strauss and Viennese gaiety, but are skewed, artless, and burdened. When the guilty Marie sings a lullaby to her child by Wozzeck, it’s about gypsies coming to steal the boy’s mother away.
Act 3, Scene 2, where Wozzeck stabs Marie to death, is entitled “Invention on a Single Note (B).” That note, which concludes the scene, grows so loud and is held so long that it becomes unendurable. Why would anyone pay good money to witness something like this? For the same reason we go to Macbeth or Tosca: because no matter how harrowing the experience of tragedy, it proves that there is another world beside the ordinary one; because it can make everyday life feel like a refuge.
