Berg's Wozzeck

            The very first time I had ever heard Berg’s Wozzeck was on Monday afternoon when I watched a performance of it in the listening room upstairs in Jensen.  I can only imagine what my face must have looked like throughout the hour and 40 minutes of the opera.  This opera is unlike anything I have ever heard or seen before in my 21 years of life.  Without any background information on the work, I was at a complete loss as to how this positions itself into my musical world.  After a week of studying both Berg and his opera, however, I now see that there are plenty of musical elements from other eras in this opera that I know, and the juxtaposition of these with the new stylistic ideas of the contemporary era make this opera a very interesting work.

            The images from the Wagner train station, the Secessionist building, and Klimt's "The Kiss," are all examples that combine old ideas with new ones.  Berg’s Wozzeck does the same thing.  In Willi Reich’s article in The Musical Quarterly, he created a chart that shows the scheme of the musical forms in the opera.  While Wozzeck is an atonal work, the musical forms Berg used in most of the opera are those most associated with tonal music.  In the first act, Scene 1 is a Suite, Scene 2 a Rhapsody, Scene 3 a Military March and Cradle Song, Scene 4 a Passacaglia, and Scene 5 an Andante Affetuoso.  When listening to the opera, however, the audience doesn’t hear these forms.  Berg commented on this in an interview found at the end of Reich’s article.

 “What I do consider my particular accomplishment is this. No one in the audience, no matter how aware he may be of the musical forms contained in the framework of the opera, of the precision and logic with which it has been worked out, no one, from the moment the curtain parts until it closes for the last time, pays any attention to the various fugues, inventions, suites, sonata movements, variations, and passacaglias about which so much has been written.” 

            I found this to be true when we listened to Marie’s Cradle Song from Act 1.  When just listening to the song, it sounds similar to the rest of the opera: atonal and weird.  However, when analyzing the song, there are tonal sounding aspects to it.  There are quartal and quintal harmonies found in places such as measures 425 and 426.  While this obviously isn’t tonally written, the movements of fourths and fifths create a soft, pretty sound to this lullaby.  In measure 420, there is an actual chord, an FM7.  Little touches like these combine the old ideas with the new that the images from earlier are like as well.

            Overall, between the form of the scenes throughout the opera and the little tonal touches in some of the music, Berg creates in Wozzeck a collaboration of old and new ideas.  Because this isn’t immediately evident when the audience listens to the opera the first time, first impressions can be like mine was: What exactly am I watching?  However, once the opera is looked at closer, it become a piece of work that, despite Berg’s argument that he is a reformer of the opera through such innovations, does actually do this.