Music: Wozzeck In Manhattan

By the all but universal verdict of the critics who have heard it, Alban Berg’s atonal opera Wozzeck is the finest opera composed in the last 40 years.* Berg, an Austrian, finished Wozzeck in 1921, and it had immediate success in Europe. Oddly enough, in the U.S., it has had only one stage production (in 1931), and only a few doughty conductors have nibbled away at concert excerpts. One reason: its 15 scenes are costly to stage. More important, although Wozzeck is now more than 25 years old, most opera impresarios fear that, musically, it is still 25 years ahead of the times.

In crowded Carnegie Hall last week, Manhattan music lovers heard the next best thing to a stage production of Wozzeck—a brilliant concert version of the whole opera by the New York Philharmonic-Symphony and first-rate soloists under Dimitri Mitropoulos.

The Good Fool. Berg, who died at 50 in 1935, got the idea for Wozzeck in a “drama fragment” by the gifted but short-lived German playwright, Georg Büchner (1813-37). In the stormy aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and in a period of liberal revolutions, Büchner had written the tragedy of a clodlike Prussian soldier named Franz Wozzeck.

In the opera, as in the original story, Wozzeck is a captain’s batman who offers himself to the sardonic and sadistic regimental doctor as a physiological demonstration piece for the doctor’s lectures. Wozzeck’s purpose is to earn enough money to support his girl, Marie, and their child. But, tormented and ridiculed, Guinea Pig Wozzeck begins to have hallucinations. When his girl is seduced by a strutting drum major, Wozzeck mutters confusedly about “sin”; he stabs Marie, throws the knife into a pond. Then, in fear of discovery, he wades into the pond to recover the shining blade, but slips and drowns. In the last scene, Wozzeck’s child is left rocking back & forth on his hobby horse as his playmates run off to see the bodies.

Scholarly admirers of Büchner play regard the characters as clearly symbolic. Wozzeck’s master, the captain, represents authority and unfeeling philistinism; the doctor, materialism and skepticism; the drum major, aggression and sexual cruelty; Wozzeck himself is the good-man-pure-fool of medieval literature. Another composer might have tried to dress such a story in conventional musical clothes, but not Alban Berg.

Tilted & Contorted. A prize pupil of Twelve-Tonalist Arnold SchÖnberg, Berg set his opera in the tilted frame of atonality, or better, non-tonality—with no fixed key as a point of reference, or familiar chordal relationships. In his huge (110 pieces), often brassy orchestration, he painted warmly and painstakingly, missing no musical detail that would illuminate a character or a scene.

Berg developed his own unique “song-speech,” with notes at definite pitches which are neither exactly sung nor spoken. But he could write beautiful melody too, most notably the lovely lullaby Marie sings to her child. Overall, Wozzeck has a sardonic, contorted quality, but one that is clearly the work of a controlled and powerful hand.

In Carnegie Hall, Conductor Mitropoulos made room onstage, between orchestra and podium, for his singers to move around. He also bade them leave their formal clothes at home, dress in simple garb as an aid to realism. With the deft vocal characterization of Berg to help, they made Wozzeck live even in concert version. As Wozzeck, Baritone Mack Harrell was simple and piteous and convincing; Tenor Ralph Herbert was chillingly cold-blooded as the doctor. Soprano Eileen Farrell was superb as the anguished but faithless Marie. When the last scene came to its tragic close, the audience sat as if stunned (Berg gives them no curtain-lowering chord as a signal for applause). Then they brought the house down.

The cheers and bravos brought Conductor Mitropoulos and his soloists out twelve times. Agreed Critics Olin Downes of the New York Times and Virgil Thomson of the Herald Tribune: the whole cast should be moved downstreet for a stage version at the Metropolitan Opera. And the sooner the better.

* I.e., since Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (1911).