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.