Alban Berg and Wozzeck

An extraordinary amount of cultural and scientific development occurred during Alban Berg’s (1885-1935) youth in Vienna. By the time he was in his late teens at the turn of the century, names like Klimt, Wittgenstein, Mahler and Freud were among the artists and thinkers who were beginning to shape a new Viennese sensibility. The deceptive façade of the glittering, old-world Hapsburg Empire symbolized by the operettas of Lehár and Strauss was beginning to crumble. It was soon to be replaced by cultural premonitions of a great world conflict. Berg was intimately involved in the Viennese cultural scene. He counted artists like Klimt and Kokoschka as friends, along with the poet and dramatist Stefan Zweig. These were relationships that he kept and nurtured throughout his entire life. In turn, this artistic circle found him to be a deeply sensitive, eloquent companion, a humble man who always deferred to the needs of his friends.

Berg was attracted to rich literary sources for inspiration, something that set him apart from his colleagues Schoenberg and Webern. His earliest songs were composed when he was only a teenager, and they were settings of poems by writers such as Goethe, Nikolaus Lenau and Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s not surprising then that he turned to Georg Büchner and Frank Wedekind when he set about the task of writing opera.

At the suggestion of his brother in 1904 he applied to study composition with Arnold Schoenberg who had just opened a studio in Vienna. Even though Berg was completely self-taught, Schoenberg accepted him as a pupil and put him through a rigorous course of study. Berg’s early works are products of their time, Romantic pieces full of lyrical expression. It wasn’t until he began studying composition with Schoenberg that he began to explore his true compositional voice.  Berg had a complicated relationship with Schoenberg. The older composer was at once a father, brother, teacher and friend to the young Berg. Both he and fellow pupil Anton Webern were among Schoenberg’s first students of composition and they studied with him at a time of radical change in his own musical style. Berg and Webern closely followed his attempts to break down the traditional understanding of tonality. As a result the three composers successfully created a kind of ‘trinity of atonality’ by supporting, challenging and encouraging each other’s work.

Berg saw a production of Büchner’s play Woyzeck in May, 1914 at a theatre in Vienna. It so moved him that he decided then and there to set it as an opera. But work on the opera was interrupted by his military service during the First World War. It wasn’t until 1917 that he was able to take up composition of the score in earnest. Around this time Berg wrote to his wife: “There is a bit of me in his character, since I have been spending these war years just as dependent on people I hate, have been in chains, sick, captive, resigned, in fact, humiliated. Without this military service I should be as healthy as before…Still, perhaps but for this, the musical expression (for Wozzeck) would not have occurred to me.”  In the same letter, he called the conflict a “filthy war. Sometimes I wonder despairingly: what has all that got to do with me?  And then I wonder why the world doesn’t wonder the same thing!  Three years stolen from the best years of my life, totally, irretrievably lost, and every moment of freedom dearly paid for.”

When Berg chose to set Wozzeck as an opera, Schoenberg was taken aback. Reflecting on it a few years later he said, “I was greatly surprised when this soft-hearted, timid young man had the courage to engage in a venture which seemed to invite misfortune: to compose Wozzeck,a drama of such extraordinary tragedy that seemed forbidding to music.  And even more: it contained scenes of everyday life which were contrary to the concept of opera which still lives on stylized costumes and conventionalized characters.” It was after the First World War that Berg entered the most intense period of the composition of Wozzeck. During this time he kept himself alive as a music copyist, by managing some of his family’s properties, and by arranging rehearsals and performances of Schoenberg’s “Society for Private Musical Performances”. In working for his teacher in this capacity he was intimately involved in the premieres of some of the most important works to come out of the Second Viennese School.

Berg finished Wozzeck in 1921, and he put great effort into trying to get it performed. The conductor Hermann Scherchen requested a suite of excerpts fora concert in Frankfurt in 1924. This performance stimulated interest in the opera from a growing audience of enthusiasts for music by Berg, his mentor Arnold Schönberg and fellow pupil Anton Webern. The interest intensified after the piano/vocal score was published -- thanks to a donation by Alma Mahler, widow of the composer Gustav Mahler.

It was German conductor Erich Kleiber who introduced the opera Wozzeck to the public at the Berlin Opera in December of 1925. At the time of the premiere he said, “Wozzeck is written with a man’s whole heart and soul. Music like that has just got to be performed.” Kleiber was so convinced that the opera was a masterpiece he decided he’d dedicate all of his company’s resources to perform it, even if it cost him his job. It very nearly did. Fifteen rehearsals were required for that first production, an extraordinary commitment for any opera company. That first production of Wozzeck had seven performances which were well received by the Berlin audience. The critical reaction, however, was quite negative. The critic of the Deutsche Zeitung had this to say: “As I was leaving the State Opera, I had the sensation of having been not in a public theater but in an insane asylum. On the stage, in the orchestra, in the stalls—plain madmen…For all these mass attacks and instrumental assaults have nothing to do with European music and musical evolution.

Following the successful Berlin premiere, the opera was produced in Prague, Leningrad and numerous smaller houses in Germany. It was finally produced at the Vienna State Opera in 1930 and first heard in the United States in 1931 in Philadelphia under the baton of Leopold Stokowski.