Word: berge
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Good Fool. Berg, who died at 50 in 1935, got the idea for Wozzeck in a "drama fragment" by the gifted but short-lived German playwright, Georg Büchner (1813-37). In the stormy aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and in a period of liberal revolutions, Büchner had written the tragedy of a clodlike Prussian soldier named Franz Wozzeck...
...master, the captain, represents authority and unfeeling philistinism; the doctor, materialism and skepticism; the drum major, aggression and sexual cruelty; Wozzeck himself is the good-man-pure-fool of medieval literature. Another composer might have tried to dress such a story in conventional musical clothes, but not Alban Berg...
Tilted & Contorted. A prize pupil of Twelve-Tonalist Arnold SchÖnberg, Berg set his opera in the tilted frame of atonality, or better, non-tonality-with no fixed key as a point of reference, or familiar chordal relationships. In his huge (110 pieces), often brassy orchestration, he painted warmly and painstakingly, missing no musical detail that would illuminate a character or a scene...
...Berg developed his own unique "song-speech," with notes at definite pitches which are neither exactly sung nor spoken. But he could write beautiful melody too, most notably the lovely lullaby Marie sings to her child. Overall, Wozzeck has a sardonic, contorted quality, but one that is clearly the work of a controlled and powerful hand...
...York Philharmonic (Sun. 1 p.m., CBS). Alban Berg's Wozzeck (see Music...