Word: wozzeck
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...festival music directors, Gottfried von Einem and Bernhard Paumgartner, suggested last fall that it was high time for a look at the atonalist's operatic masterpiece, Wozzeck (TIME, April 23)-and the battle was on. Claimed the Bergophobes: Wozzeck uses unsuitable language (e.g., whore); it is "dark and depressing"; its 15 scene changes would make the production unwieldy and expensive. But the Bergophiles won out, and the phobes sat back to watch the project fail...
Failure seemed sure at first: tickets sold like cold cakes. But after the general rehearsal (paid admissions), word went around that Wozzeck was something...
...full of wrenched, tortured and distinctly unconventional effects. Baritone Josef Herrmann sang the title role with pathos, but no mawkishness. Christl Goltz, currently one of Germany's most popular sopranos, was forceful as the wanton mistress. For Stage Director Oscar Fritz Schuh and Conductor Karl Boehm, who produced Wozzeck in the early '30s, it was like old times. When it was over, Wozzeck got an ovation...
...result hurt people's ears. "Just dissonance," they said, or, more simply, "Just noise." Schoenberg stuck to his guns, demanded the "emancipation of dissonance." Discords can become new harmonies, he said. He found a few disciples. The best known: Alban Berg, composer of the twelve-tone opera Wozzeck (TIME, April 23). New music, Schoenberg insisted, "must be music which, though it is still music, differs in all essentials from previously composed music...
Berg: Sonata, Op. 1 (Benjamin Tupas, pianist; Lyrichord, 1 side LP). This early work, composed a dozen years before Wozzeck, is full of powerful expressiveness without the contorted effects that came later. Well played by a young Filipino pianist. Recording: good...