The Collins Guide To Opera And Operetta

FIRST PERFORMANCE: Berlin, 14 December 1925

Principal Characters

Wozzek, a soldier

Baritone

Marie, his common-law wife

Soprano

Andres, Wozzek’s friend

Tenor

Drum-Major

Tenor

Doctor

Bass

Captain

Tenor

An Idiot

Tenor

Synopsis of the Plot

Setting: Outside a garrison town; around 1820

ACT I While Wozzeck is shaving him, the Captain amuses himself by teasing the soldier who agrees with everything the officer says until the Captain suggests that Wozzeck, with a mistress and a child, has no principles. Wozzeck’s response to this is that only the rich can afford principles. Later, Wozzeck and Andres are cutting sticks in a field when Wozzeck suddenly hallucinates, seeing the whole world as if on fire and hearing noises underground. Meanwhile, Marie is at their home, observing the soldiers marching by her window and, in particular, the Drum-Major. Wozzeck bursts in and tries to tell her of his experience in the field, but he frightens her and she rushes out. The next day Wozzeck relates his story to the Doctor, for whom he is acting as a paid ‘guinea pig’ for the Doctor’s bizarre nutritional experiments. The Doctor is delighted at what he sees as the result of his experiments and foresees great fame and fortune for himself. Marie, in the meantime, has succumbed to the blandishments of the Drum-Major.

ACT II The Doctor and the Captain taunt Wozzeck with Marie’s infidelity and he rushes home to confront her, threatening her with a knife, which he does not use. Wozzeck follows Marie to a crowded inn garden where he sees her dancing with the Drum-Major. Again, he is about to attack them, but the dancing stops before he can act. Alone and tormented, Wozzeck is joined by an Idiot, who tells Wozzeck that the scene before them, although apparently a happy one, is in fact reeking with blood. In his disturbed state of mind Wozzeck begins to be obsessed by the image of blood. Later, in the barracks, he and the Drum-Major fight and Wozzeck is knocked to the ground.

ACT III Marie, overwhelmed by guilt, walks with Wozzeck in the country. A blood-red moon rises over the scene as Wozzeck draws his knife and stabs her to death. He returns to the inn, where his bloodstained hands are noticed and, as a crowd gathers, he stumbles back to the murder scene to search for the knife. In his tormented mental state he imagines himself to be covered in blood and walks into the pond to clean himself, going deeper and deeper until he drowns. At their home, Wozzeck and Marie’s child unconcernedly plays with his hobby-horse before, finding himself alone, he goes in search of his friends.

Music and Background

Easier on the ear than the later Lulu, Wozzeck is a dissonant score that manages to be lyrically seductive and betray little of the complex formal structures by which everything is governed. Act II is designated, rather clinically, a ‘Symphony in Five Moments’ and Act III a set of ‘Six Inventions’, but the writing is vivid, passionate, sympathetic in its treatment of the anti-hero, and disturbing in its sardonic incorporation of popular street music (a device Berg borrowed from Mahler’s symphonies and song cycles).

Highlights

The entire score aches with a sense of gathering catastrophe, but Act III, Scene 2, in which Wozzeck kills Marie as the moon rises, is an especially chilling moment; the Act III, Scene 4 interlude after Wozzeck’s own death is the climax of the piece; and the vignette of Wozzeck’s child murmuring ‘hopp hopp, hopp hopp’ as he goes on playing is as unsettling an end as that of any opera.

Did You Know?

The plot of Wozzeck is based on a real murder which took place in 1824; a German critic at the first (incomplete) performance ‘had the sensation of having been not in a public theatre but in an insane asylum. On the stage, in the orchestra, in the stalls – plain madmen.’

The opening night was preceded by no fewer than one hundred rehearsals.

Recommended Recording

Eberhard Waechter, Anja Silja, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Christoph von Dohnanyi. Decca 417 348-2. A striking performance from the then husband-and-wife team Dohnanyi and Silja, with Schoenberg’s Erwartung as a bonus filler.

Hector Berlioz (#ulink_f712ca2c-d636-568b-a140-e46eb34ff7af)

(1803–69)

Les Francs-Juges (1826)

Benvenuto Cellini (1828)

Les Troyens (1858)

Béatrice et Bénédict (1862)

Berlioz was a dreamer of dreams in the grand Romantic tradition. The son of a French country doctor, he originally studied medicine but abandoned it for music – largely under the spell of Beethoven, who ranked alongside Shakespeare, Virgil and Goethe as the composer’s creative idol. Other idols included Harriet Smithson, a Shakespearian actress who became the governing inspiration for Berlioz’s vividly (some might say unhealthily) imagined Symphonie Fantastique in 1830, his first enduringly great work. Symphonic and choral scores followed – Harold in Italy, the Requiem, Roméo et Juliette, the Te Deum – and they became the basis of his fame, which originated abroad rather than in France. But his chief interest was always the stage, and the tragedy of his creative life was that his operas failed to find support. Les Francs-Juges was never performed, Benvenuto Cellini was taken off after four nights and only the last two Acts of Les Troyens reached the stage. Béatrice et Bénédict, which was welcomed in Germany, had no Paris production until well after Berlioz’s death. La Damnation de Faust (1846) is sometimes staged as an opera, but was written as a concert work and is probably best left as such.

Béatrice et Bénédict (#ulink_6ea8451d-2003-5430-b95e-4d73266b199a)

(Béatrice and Benedick)

FORM: Opera in two acts; in French

COMPOSER: Hector Berlioz (1803–69)

LIBRETTO: Hector Berlioz; after Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing

FIRST PERFORMANCE: Baden-Baden, 9 August 1862

Principal Characters

Don Pedro, a general Bass

Béatrice, Don Pedro’s niece

Mezzo-soprano

Héro, Don Pedro’s daughter

Soprano

Bénédict, an officer