Word: wozzeck
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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...
...opera, as in the original story, Wozzeck is a captain's batman who offers himself to the sardonic and sadistic regimental doctor as a physiological demonstration piece for the doctor's lectures. Wozzeck's purpose is to earn enough money to support his girl, Marie, and their child. But, tormented and ridiculed, Guinea Pig Wozzeck begins to have hallucinations. When his girl is seduced by a strutting drum major, Wozzeck mutters confusedly about "sin"; he stabs Marie, throws the knife into a pond. Then, in fear of discovery, he wades into the pond to recover the shining...
Scholarly admirers of Büchner play regard the characters as clearly symbolic. Wozzeck's 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...
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...