Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” is a hysterical opera, quite literally. The composer, like many of his contemporaries in the Second Viennese School, was swept up by theatrics of the First World War. Eager to join the front, Berg spent a month in training camp before suffering a breakdown, leaving him confined and unable to compose. In the notepads he kept during his stay at the military hospital, where a superior reportedly tormented him, appear the first sketches of what would become “Wozzeck.”
Based on Georg Büchner’s unfinished play, “Wozzeck” will return to the Metropolitan Opera beginning March 6, conducted by James Levine, a “longtime champion” of the work, with Thomas Hampson singing the title role and Deborah Voigt playing Marie.
Büchner, who tragically died at the age of 23, based his play on the true story of Johann Christian Woyzeck (Berg changed the “y” to a “z” to make the title more pronounceable), a former soldier who killed his mistress and was deemed fit to stand trial despite signs of mental instability. New Yorker critic Alex Ross notes in his book, “The Rest is Noise,” that Büchner used transcripts of Woyzeck’s psychological examinations as source material, and that “no writer had ever given such a matter-of-fact report on a murderer’s mind.”
Berg first saw Büchner’s play in 1914 and, according to reports, “immediately muttered aloud that someone had to make an opera out of it.” That someone, of course, would be him; Berg, somewhat disturbingly, personally identified with the play. “There is a bit of me in [Wozzeck’s] character,” he wrote to his wife a few years later, according to Ross’s book, “since I have been spending these war years just as dependent on people I hate, have been in chains, sick, captive, resigned, in fact humiliated.”
Berg’s opera is considered one of the finest examples of atonality. “The music scrapes like a razor,” writes Ross, and is indebted to the work of Berg’s former teacher, composer Arnold Schoenberg, “who pronounced the subject matter inappropriate” and felt Berg should be working on something more worthwhile: a biography of Arnold Schoenberg.
Büchner’s play, and Berg’s operatic version, have inspired many interpretations over the years, most notably the 1979 film version directed by Werner Herzog and starring Klaus Kinski, and Robert Wilson’s musical featuring songs by the gravelly-voiced singer Tom Waits.
