Wozzeck

It is difficult to overstate the impact of Berg’s first opera, Wozzeck, at its Berlin premiere in 1925. Reactions, both from the press and from the audience, were mixed, but soon the opera was being performed all over the Western world. Almost overnight, the previously little-known composer was being fêted (and condemned) as the leading exponent of musical Expressionism. The action, based on a fragmentary play by the German playwright Georg Büchner, tells of a hapless soldier, ground down by military and societal pressure, whose sanity finally cracks, resulting in the murder of his lover Marie and his own suicide. There is very little hope, and despite occasional isolated moments of tenderness, the largely atonal music is, in Berg’s own words, "abrupt and sometimes brutal”, underlining the play’s "stark, if haunted realism". It is, however, a remarkably disciplined score, with each of its short scenes cast (sometimes ironically) in traditional classical forms. This partly explains the opera’s gripping dramatic coherence. But for many listeners, something else comes across powerfully: compassion. Even more than Büchner, Berg makes us care about these people, especially Wozzeck and Marie, and the tiny final scene, in which their now-orphaned child is seen playing alone, is one of the most devastating things in all opera.