The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alban Berg · an opera in three acts, Op. 7, to Berg’s own German text drawn from Georg Büchner’s unfinished play Woyzeck · fifteen scenes, five to an act, joined by orchestral interludes, in the standard performing version, the full score as Universal Edition publishes it · about an hour and a half in performance
Mode
Opera of the poor in three acts; through-composed music drama in which every scene is cast in a closed instrumental form, with speech, Sprechstimme and song graded
Mythos
Everyman under a Passion: the poor man mocked by authority, tested by the learned, betrayed in love, drowned trying to wash off blood; the adulteress and Mary Magdalene read over a child; a red moon
Phase
Fifteen scenes in a garrison town, contracting act by act toward a murder at a pond and a child left riding; the one tonal key withheld until the interlude before the last scene
Presentation
Concert music; an opera in three acts of five scenes each, setting Berg’s German after Büchner, each act played without a break, scored as one work, words and music together
Register
From the Captain’s grotesque patter and a tavern’s out-of-tune piano to a lullaby, a Bible read aloud and a lament for full orchestra in D minor
Scale
One soldier, one woman, one child, their tormentors; one garrison town, a field, a barracks, a tavern, a pond; about an hour and a half
Governing Proposition
A poor soldier shaves his captain, cuts sticks in a field where he sees the sky burn, and is paid by a doctor to eat peas for science; the woman he lives with, the mother of his child, is taken by a drum major, and he is mocked, shamed in a fight, and at a pond at night kills her, then drowns there trying to wash off the blood. The wager of the work is that poverty is not the backdrop to a man’s moral life but its matter, and that forms built for the concert hall, closed and fixed, can be made to act on a man from outside as the world above him does.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The opera begins with a man shaving another. The Captain sits, and Wozzeck works the razor while the officer lectures him on morals and on virtue. Berg cast the scene as a suite, the first of Act I’s five character pieces, a string of closed pieces for a man who cannot stop talking. The man with the razor in his hand is the man being judged. Wozzeck’s answer is the work’s disclosure stated once: “Wir arme Leut” (“We poor people”). Virtue is for those who can afford it, and he cannot.
The Captain is not a villain. He is a voice from above, comfortable and absurd, and the music gives him a grotesque patter that the drama never lets the listener take seriously and never lets Wozzeck escape. That is the first of the work’s fixed patterns. Every tormentor in the opera has his own sound, a leitmotif that fixes him, and each will press on Wozzeck in turn. The text is Berg’s own, drawn from Büchner’s fragments, and the singers move between speech, Sprechstimme and full song, so that how far a line is sung measures how far its singer is in command of himself.
The second scene is a rhapsody, out in an open field at evening. Wozzeck and Andres are cutting sticks, which is work, and Andres sings a hunting song. Beside him Wozzeck sees the sky burn. The orchestra makes the vision real: what the play can only report, the opera lets the listener hear from inside the man’s mind. It is the first height of the evening, and its height is dread. The two men stand in the same field and live in two worlds, one singing and one watching the end of the world.
Movement II
Marie is at her window with the child, and the Drum Major passes in the street. The scene is a military march and a lullaby: two forms for two powers over her, the parade outside, all display, and the room within, where the music softens to the only tenderness Act I allows. The march will become the Drum Major’s sound, fixed to him as the patter is fixed to the Captain. The lullaby belongs to the mother and the child, the two people below Wozzeck in the order of the world, and the ones the opera will reach last.
The fourth scene is the Doctor’s study, and it is a passacaglia: a ground on a twelve-note row, repeated under variation after variation. The Doctor pays Wozzeck to eat peas for science; the poor man is an object of research, his body a wage. A ground that cannot change is the right form for a man who has a theory. It presses under everything that happens above it, as the experiment presses on the body it is paid to use, and it can be heard without being named: the obsession is audible as obsession.
The act closes in the street with Marie and the Drum Major, an andante affettuoso, quasi rondo, and he takes her. Five scenes, five forms, each a closed piece of concert music, and the drama runs through them at the pace of speech. Act I is the longest of the three, about two fifths of the evening, and it has set the trap: the Captain’s morality, the Doctor’s diet, the Drum Major’s body, each pressing on the one man in the field who sees the sky on fire.
Movement III
Act II is a symphony, because it is the act of evidence developed. It opens with a sonata movement on Marie’s earrings. Wozzeck sees them, and the earrings betray her. Exposition, development and return carry a concealment and its discovery; the form that develops themes here develops suspicion.
The second movement is a fantasia and fugue in the street, where the Captain and the Doctor meet and turn on Wozzeck as he passes, taunting him. The satire repeats what Act I has shown and is the act’s slackest stretch. Then the Largo, scored for a chamber orchestra: Wozzeck confronts Marie. The whole symphony, in this one movement, is played by a handful of players, and the intimacy of the sound is the closeness of the quarrel, two people in a room with nowhere else to go.
The scherzo is the tavern garden, with a vulgar Ländler in the band and drunken apprentices preaching a mock sermon, a set piece from Büchner that the action could spare; here the form is nearer a container than an instrument. The last movement is a rondo con introduzione in the barracks at night. It opens with a wordless chorus of snoring soldiers, the sound of sleeping men in rows. Then comes the fight with the Drum Major, and it humiliates Wozzeck. The act ends with the evidence complete. Act II has taken about a third of the evening, and the scenes are shortening.
Movement IV
Act III is six inventions, and inventions here are obsessions. The first is on a theme, variations and a fugue: Marie, at night, reads the Bible over her child, of the adulteress and of Mary Magdalene. The old forms of the church musician turn her into a penitent. It is the one scene in the work given wholly to her, and its beauty is the measure of what the next scene destroys.
The second is on a note. Wozzeck and Marie are at the pond at night, and he kills her. The note is B, and the orchestra will not let it go. After the murder it swells twice on that single note, two orchestral crescendos, among the most terrifying minutes in the theatre, and the second carries a bass-drum rhythm straight into the next invention, on a rhythm: a tavern, and a polka on an out-of-tune upright piano. The coarse dance is the world’s pattern at its most mindless, played on an instrument as broken as the man who hears it.
The fourth invention is on a six-note chord. Wozzeck is back at the pond, among voices in the water, and drowns trying to wash off the blood, while the orchestra’s chromatic slides rise and the moon rises red. The Captain and the Doctor walk past. The tormentors who began the opera are there at the end of the life it followed, and they go on walking. The act’s scenes average little more than four minutes; the chain that ran loosely through Act II is now pulled tight.
Movement V
Then the interlude, an invention on a key: D minor. It is the one passage in the opera set in a tonal key, and the whole orchestra mourns in the key it has refused all evening. No character sings. The trap of forms opens for the length of a lament, and what speaks through it is not a character but the composer, outside the drama, grieving for the man the drama has destroyed. It can be heard as a break in the work’s law; the work places it as the one thing the law withholds.
The last invention is on a regular quaver movement. Children play in the street, and the news of the mother comes among them. Marie’s child rides his hobby horse, “Hopp, hopp”: the child’s last words. The orchestra does not close. The music could begin again, and the next of the poor would take the place of the last; fate passes on, and the child rides into it. The work ends unresolved, because nothing in its world has been resolved.
Büchner died in 1837 and left Woyzeck unfinished and unordered in manuscript; Karl Emil Franzos first published it in 1879 under the misread title “Wozzeck”, and the play reached the stage in 1913. Berg saw it in Vienna in May 1914 and began the opera soon after. He printed the vocal score at his own expense with help from Alma Mahler, to whom it is dedicated, and Universal Edition later took it up. Erich Kleiber conducted the first performance at the Berlin State Opera on 14 December 1925; Prague followed in 1926, Leningrad in 1927, and Stokowski gave the American premiere in Philadelphia in 1931. In 1933 Germany banned it as degenerate. After 1945 it entered the repertory of the major houses, and it has not left: 101 years on, the poverty it shows has not become history.
Act III · The Twelve
Out of Büchner’s loose, unordered fragments Berg chose fifteen scenes and cut the rest, and every scene that remains does a job in one chain. The Captain’s mockery and the Doctor’s experiment wear Wozzeck down, the Drum Major takes Marie, the earrings betray her, the fight humiliates him, the knife follows, then the pond. The acts contract, from scenes of about seven and a half minutes in Act I to about four and a half in Act III. The subtractive test finds give in two places: the drunken apprentices’ mock sermon in the Act II tavern, a set piece the action could spare, and the Act II street scene, whose satire repeats Act I.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: poverty is not a backdrop to a man’s moral life but its matter. Wozzeck cannot afford virtue, “Wir arme Leut” (“We poor people”), is paid to eat peas for science, and is ruled by every voice above him until the only act left him is to destroy the one person below him. The opera adds what music alone can: the inside of the man’s mind, the fire over the field, the voices in the water, and the composer’s grief spoken outside the drama in D minor. Held below the top because the social condition is largely Büchner’s, and because Marie’s and the child’s conditions are disclosed less sharply than his.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Height reaches near the ceiling and recurs, mostly as dread: the open field in Act I, where Wozzeck sees the sky burn; the two crescendos on B after the murder; the drowning, with the orchestra’s rising chromatic slides as the moon rises red. Beauty comes in Marie’s lullaby, in her Bible scene, and in the D minor interlude, where the whole orchestra mourns in the key it has refused for most of the evening. The ending is elevation by withdrawal. Held below the top on frequency: the Captain’s and the Doctor’s scenes are grotesque satire, and the tavern scenes are deliberately coarse. Terror counts as height; caricature does not.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Myth built, not cited: the poor man of no account becomes Everyman under a Passion: mocked by the authorities, tested by the learned, betrayed in love, and drowned in a pond trying to wash off blood. Marie reads the Bible over her child, of the adulteress and of Mary Magdalene, and variations and fugue turn her into a penitent. Apocalyptic signs rise in the field, the red moon, the blood in the water. The circle is built into the form: the child rides on, and the music could begin again. Held below Tristan by the realism of the particulars: Büchner’s figures resist becoming icons, and the Passion is a pattern the opera invites rather than states.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is Wagner’s through-composed music drama and the opera of the poor. The departures: a full-length opera without a tonal centre, the first to hold a theatre for an evening; each scene cast in an absolute instrumental form, suite, passacaglia, sonata, fugue, inventions; Sprechstimme and graded speech brought into the opera house; a hero who is a poor soldier, an object of science and a murderer, with no aria of self-justification. The stake was real: Berg was little known, the theatres thought the score unperformable, and he printed it himself. Held below the top because the language was Schoenberg’s, Erwartung having made atonal music drama possible in 1909, and the play had been on the stage since 1913.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that a man can be trapped inside fixed patterns acting on him from outside. The forms are the trap. The Doctor’s idée fixe is a passacaglia on a twelve-note row, a ground that cannot change; Act II is a symphony because it develops evidence; Act III’s inventions are obsessions, and the murder is one note, B, held. The interlude breaks into D minor because the composer’s compassion stands outside the trap. Held below the top because Berg said the forms were not meant to be heard as such and part of what they know reaches the score-reader more than the listener, and the tavern scherzo’s form is nearer a container.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence, not promise: a century of return, from Berg’s own lecture of 1929; Adorno’s writing on his teacher; George Perle’s The Operas of Alban Berg, its first volume in 1980; Douglas Jarman’s studies. The questions stay open: whether Wozzeck is mad or made mad; whether the absolute forms are structure or private scaffolding; what the D minor interlude does to the atonal law around it; how far the work’s compassion is Büchner’s materialism or a Christian reading laid over it. Performance is unsettled too: how much to sing in the Sprechstimme, how much grotesque to allow the tormentors. Held below Tristan by span: a century of argument, intense and specialist, is narrower than two.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work showed that a post-tonal language could sustain an evening of music drama and hold a general audience, and that absolute forms could carry dramatic time. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the model for serious modern opera. Peter Grimes is often set beside it; Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten, the operas of Henze and Reimann and much of the century’s literary opera run from it, as does Berg’s own Lulu. Reach was delayed by the Nazi ban and by the general resistance to atonality, and much of the field after 1950 left opera altogether. In its field, the opera of the 1920s, it stands first.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The form is whole: the score Berg finished is the performing version, and the text is not in doubt. Presence runs 101 years from the premiere, continuous in the major houses since 1945 and in the recorded tradition, but broken in Germany from 1933 to 1945 by the ban, and narrower than the core repertory, given in the largest houses, seldom in smaller ones, for its forces and its rehearsal. Its surface is less fixed to its moment than most of its decade: no technology or topical satire dates it, and the poverty it shows has not become historical. Held at the usual figure for its age, not above it, for the twelve years’ ban and the rationed presence.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The orchestra runs from full forces to the chamber orchestra of the Largo in Act II, with stage bands, the tavern’s out-of-tune upright piano and a snoring chorus. The absolute forms are carried out in full while the drama moves at the pace of speech. The vocal writing grades speech, Sprechstimme and song, so that the degree of singing measures the character’s state. The interludes carry the drama between scenes, the two crescendos on B above all and a web of leitmotifs binds fifteen short scenes. Held off the top by the second tavern scene, where the deliberate crudity of the material leaves the writing thinner than elsewhere, and by the demands the score makes, which few houses can meet in full.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the tavern’s vulgar Ländler and polka, and the D minor interlude’s lament. One law governs both. The opera’s world is fixed patterns pressing on the poor, and the dances are those patterns at their most mindless, as the passacaglia is the Doctor’s and the march is the Drum Major’s. The interlude is the one place outside the law, and the law places it: the key is withheld until the composer speaks. The strain is the interlude itself, which can be heard as breaking the work’s physics by stepping into a tonal rhetoric the rest refuses; and the two tavern scenes stretch the law’s range more than they prove it.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The orders held, and integrated: consciousness, in Wozzeck’s visions; the family, in Marie, her child and their room; labour, in the shaving, the cutting of sticks, the pay for the experiment; the state, in the army and its barracks; science, in the Doctor; sex and possession, in the Drum Major; the sacred, in Marie’s Bible and the field’s apocalypse; the natural order, in the field, the moon and the pond; class binds them. They are held in one chain of cause: the Captain’s morality and the Doctor’s diet press on the man who cannot keep his woman. What holds the axis here is scale: an hour and a half, one garrison town, one family, history and society seen only from the bottom.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.6, The Swerve at 9.4 and The Living Form at 9.3. An orchestra, a vocal writing and a set of closed concert forms commanded at once while the drama moves at the pace of speech; a full-length opera without a tonal centre, its scenes carried by suite, passacaglia, sonata, fugue and invention, made by a little-known composer who printed it himself; and a form in which the forms are the trap, a ground for the Doctor, a single note for the murder, and one key kept back for the composer’s grief.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.4: consciousness, the family, labour, the state, science, the sacred and the natural order are held in one chain of cause, but in an hour and a half, one garrison town and one family, with history and the wider society seen only from the bottom. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8: the Passion is built at the Bible scene and in the circular close, but Büchner’s figures stay particular and the opera never names its hero as a type.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.6, The Living Form at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.4, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the last of them by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.8, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · the score of Wozzeck, Op. 7, with Berg’s German text after Büchner’s Woyzeck, which is part of the unit, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, libretto or recording was in hand, and data/texts holds nothing for this work or for Büchner. The work is scored in its standard performing version, the opera in three acts and fifteen scenes in the full score as Universal Edition publishes it; no single production or recording is the unit. Words and music are scored together, as one work, on Berg’s German as he set it; Büchner’s play is evidence, not the object. The forms named for each scene are Berg’s own published scheme. German is quoted only where the desk is certain of the words, in fragments of four words or fewer; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and none is taken from a published translation. The act shares, the average scene lengths and the spans of years were computed by script; the running time and the shares are approximate, across the recorded tradition. Figures that could not be verified, among them bar counts, the number of variations in the passacaglia, the size of the chamber orchestra, the year the score was finished, the number of rehearsals before the premiere and the landmarks of the recorded tradition, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.