I'll Never Ever Forget Wozzeck

            This semester in Music History: Contemporary has been chalk full of a wide variety of music, ranging from symphonies to jazz to movie scores.  I can honestly say that, before this class, I hadn’t heard most of this music.  While much of it was unique and interesting enough to make a lasting impression in my mind, one work really sticks out in my brain.  The composer Alban Berg and his opera Wozzeck was an experience unlike one I had ever had, and I believe I will remember it long after this class is completed and over.

            I think that the main reason this work sticks with me is because of how uncomfortable it made me feel when I watched it.  As I said before, it wasn’t like anything I had encountered before.  I personally like my opera tonal, with beautiful costumes and sets, and making sense.  I could not find any of these characteristics in the opera Wozzeck when I first watched it.  Going back to my blog from the Berg week, I wrote

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.

The costumes were very minimal and simple.  They were clothing that I’ve seen people wear before, and yet there was something disconcerting about them.  The child of Wozzeck and Marie wore a white mask the whole time, which from beginning to end creeped me out.

The set was even more unusual and unconventional.  It felt like the entire stage was a giant box the actors were in.  The ground they walked on was moveable, huge and rolled out as the scene changed.  The set designers used abnormal shapes for things.  Marie’s house was bright red, but only the size of a dog house.  Sometimes a wooden floor hung down from wires and swayed back and forth, with people on it acting out scenes.  One scene, with the doctor, Wozzeck’s employer, and Wozzeck, there is a tower that they can climb up; instead of it just being a tower, however, it’s a giant pyramid.

            The music and plot line were very distressing to me as well.  One scene in particular that I remember is scene 4, when Wozzeck goes to visit the doctor.  It is in this scene that the audience finds out Wozzeck has been part of bizarre medical experiments with outrageous rules, like not being allowed to cough, and a rigid diet that must be followed.  Wozzeck can’t stop coughing though, and this angers the doctor.  Wozzeck goes into what the synopsis of the opera describes as “an outburst of hallucinatory insanity.”  The doctor is very happy about this, and believes that he will become famous with his discoveries with Wozzeck.  The music that coincides this scene sounds sinister and a little fantastical, especially as Wozzeck goes into his outburst.  It is obvious that something bad is happening during this scene just by listening to the music.  The idea of a doctor purposely making his patient go crazy is disturbing, and yet that is what the premise of the opera is.

            Another scene that is unsettling is the last scene of the opera.  This is the morning after Wozzeck kills his wife and then dies himself.  Their child is outside playing with the other children, when another child runs up and says that his mother is dead, but the child doesn’t seem to understand.  He continues to play on his horse as the other children all run away to the pond.  The music during this scene has a childlike quality to it, and yet puts a chill down my spine when I listen to it.  The innocence of the children singing is ruined by the orchestra underneath it, and the overall tone of the final scene is, well, creepy.

            For all of the spine tingling moments of the opera, there was one part of it that I really enjoyed listening to: Marie’s Cradle Song from Act 1.  I thought that this was a beautiful part of a very harsh-sounding opera.  We looked at this particular song a little more in depth in class that week.  There are tonal aspects to the piece that create the softer sounds.  Quartal and quintal harmonies are found in this song, along with simplistic harmony, like a chord in one measure.  Marie is singing a lullaby to her child, and it is a pretty moment in the opera.

            Overall, this opera by Berg is one that will stick with me for a long time.  I didn’t even know that things like this work existed before watching Wozzeck.  While it’s not something I think I would ever want to watch again, it definitely held my attention throughout the entire show, and kept me interested.  While a lot of music we listened to this semester did this, nothing struck a chord in me quite like Berg’s Wozzeck.

Steve Reich Post

A very poignant part of our world’s history is, without question, the Holocaust in Europe during WWII.  A piece of music that is truly inspiring about this time is ‘Different Trains’, composed by Steve Reich.  Reich was born in New York on October 3, 1936 in New York.  When he was just 1 year old, his parents divorced and his mother moved to Los Angeles.  Because they settled on joint custody, Reich spent much of his early childhood with a governess Virginia on a train travelling back and forth between the two.  As an adult looking back on this experience, he realized that, if he were a Jew living in Europe when he was taking these train rides, it would have been different trains and very different destinations.  The structure of this piece is separated into 3 parts.  The first is tape of his governess Virginia reminiscing about the train trips between Los Angeles and New York with Reich.  The second part is tape of 3 Holocaust survivors who had moved to America speaking about their experiences in concentrations camps.  The third is using both tapes together.

Today we will be listening to 3 different moments in the work that are interesting to listen to and think about in context to the subject.  In the first movement, we are listening to Virginia talk, and the music being played is symbolizing the chugging of the train.  She says things like “From Chicago to New York” and “one of the fastest trains.”  At 6:22 of this movement, her words change and are no longer about this trip.  Instead, she starts stating dates, saying “in 1939”, “1939”, “1940”, 1941”, “1941 I guess it must have been.”  As the words change to these dates, the music changes as well.  It speeds up quite dramatically here, and it feels like we’re racing towards a different place than New York or Chicago; we’re moving towards the war.

In the first minute of the 2^nd movement, the mood of the music has become much more scary.  There are sirens going on, and there is more a sense of urgency.  The words are “1940” (Rachella), “on my birthday”, “The Germans walked in”, “walked into Holland”.  At 0:55, however, things change again.  The narration says “Germans invaded Hungary” (Paul) and the music changes with it.  The rhythms slow down a little, and the tone of the siren becomes lower in pitch.  The sense of urgency becomes less as the Germans take over Hungary.  The train feeling of the strings aren’t as fast as the first movement either.  The need to get their passengers to their destination becomes less, because it is no longer paying customers, but Jews.

The last moment of the work we’ll be listening to is in the 3^rd movement.  The last part of the whole work is very interesting.  The music of the strings has a more hopeful feel to it.  At 7:29, the words are “There was one girl, who had a beautiful voice” (Rachella), “and they loved to listen to the singing, the Germans” “and when she stopped singing they said, ‘More, more’ and they applauded.”  The words and the music give an idea of hope, until the words stop and the instruments end.  At the very end of the piece, the strings slow down, fade in and out, and then fade out completely, much like a train does as it stops.  Where has the train stopped?  It is in Los Angeles to see Steve Reich’s mother?  Or is it at the concentration camp that Rachella, Paul, or Rachel lived?  What does it say that Reich is comparing his train trips to those of the concentration camp survivors?  Is it politically correct for him to do so?  In the end, the work creates a lot of questions, and is an excellent piece of work about the Holocaust.