Berg: Lulu & Wozzeck

Alban Berg only wrote two operas, but they turned the genre upside down, leaving a searing, unignorable legacy to his 20th-century successors. Wozzeck is the tragedy of a simple soldier broken and brutalized by an all-too-believable world. Lulu was left unfinished at Berg’s death in 1935, but its story of a woman living—and dying—through her own sensuality continues to grip and provoke. The German conductor Karl Böhm knew Berg, and these historic stereo recordings have a force and an authenticity that feels like he has a hotline to the composer’s subconscious. The singers, too, are exceptional, with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau at the peak of his career and soprano Evelyn Lear as Lulu, a role that she created just eight years before this incomplete (but still shattering) recording.