Word: chner
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Danton's Death (by George Büchner; produced by the Mercury Theatre). Mars Director Orson Welles having blasted the U. S. into an uproar over the radio, Mercury Director Orson Welles turned last week to the peace & quiet of the French Revolution...
Wozzeck's plot is surprisingly old to be the perfect counterpart of Berg's ultra-modern score. It was written nearly 100 years ago by Georg Büchner, a German poet-scientist who had ideas far ahead of his time. Büchner died at 23 in Zurich where he earned a doctorate with a treatise on the nervous system of fish. He left three plays: Leonce and Lena, written while authorities were hunting him for his revolutionary sympathies; Danton's Tod, given in the U. S. a few seasons ago by Max Reinhardt...
Into Wozzeck, Büchner worked all his tense, young pity for the downtrodden. Wozzeck is a poor bewildered soldier, stationed in a small German city in peacetime. His captain bullies him, a crackbrain doctor experiments on him, his mistress philanders with the drum-major, who has chest like a bull and a beard like a lion." Twenty-six terse, stark scenes tell the tragedy. Wozzeck stabs his mistress, drowns himself. At the end, while the news is gibbered through the streets, their child rides about on his hobbyhorse...
...series of inventions. Like Schönberg he used the combination of song and speech which the Germans call sprechstimme. But behind his strict design and his many novel effects (in one scene he introduces an accordion, harmonica and guitar), there is the same savage pity that Büchner had for his soldier. One European critic has called Wozzeck the greatest opera since Pellèas et Mèlisande. Stokowski must also be impressed, for his avidity for perfection appears to be even greater than usual. He is using his own 100-piece Philadelphia Orchestra, sets by Robert...