The centenary of the premiere in Berlin of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck (December 14^th) is certainly worth remembering on these pages even though it comes a month late. I’ve already written a great deal here about Berg and about Wozzeck [HERE], mostly in recognition of its importance in the history of opera and in the history of the 20th century generally, though I haven’t said much about other aspects: how Wozzeck is still resisted today as crazy modernism, despite the beautiful passages it contains. (A nice example of an augmented sixth chord from Act II can be seen after the break.)Legends about the premiere persist. Berg completed composition of the score in 1922, and published the highly detailed piano score himself, with financial support from Alma Mahler, to whom he gratefully dedicated the entire work. Two years later he played it for Erich Kleiber, director of the Berlin Opera, who said, “I’m going to perform this next year even if it costs me my job!” which, in fact, it almost did. Some later sources mention that 137 rehearsals were necessary for a work lasting only about 100 minutes; 137 was likely an exaggeration, but there probably at least 20 full orchestral rehearsals for a score of more-than-Wagnerian size and unprecedented technical difficulty. Even this might not have been unthinkable only two years after the catastrophic postwar inflation in Germany, in a large city that already took pride in four competitive opera companies. As for the singers, they recognized that the huge score that they grappled with was atonal and notated with unprecedented complexity, and yet thoroughly and expressively singable at every point.

Critical opinion of the production was divided from the start. Paul Zschorlich’s review in the Deitsche Zeitung is still widely cited: “As I was leaving the State Opera, I 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. … Wozzeck might have been the work of a Viennese Chinaman. For all those mass attacks and instrumental assaults have nothing to do with European music and musical evolution.”  I haven’t been able to locate the reviewer who said “If this is great music, my name is Moses Kanalgeruch [sewer stink]” — the reference to “Moses” suggesting an anti-semitic taint, in keeping with Hitler’s brownshirts who soon took up arms against the opera for political reasons. Wozzeck’s proletarian message has been durable ever since, and there were noisy protests in 1926 when a second production followed in Prague, and again in 1927 when it was produced in Leningrad. (Berg was present in Leningrad for that occasion, and we can probably trust Shostakovich’s faked Testimony when we read that he followed Berg with keen interest — Berg had been on a committee that awarded the 19-year-old composer a prize after the premiere of his Symphony no. 1 in 1926.) The human message of Wozzeck was not lost on Lawrence Gilman following the New York premiere in November 1931: “An original and distinguished work of art, extraordinarily moving and sincere, was placed before us in the fullness of its power, its pity, and its truth…”, in which Wozzeck and Marie emerge as the only bravely human figures in a militarized world of brutish madness.

It seems unthinkable that Berg’s opera, one of the finest achievements in all of 20^th-century music, didn’t get a complete recording (Columbia) for 26 years—until the New York performances in 1952 directed by Dimitri Mitropoulos, which are still regarded as magnificent despite a multitude of flaws. The Metropolitan Opera in New York didn’t produce Wozzeck until 1958, in English, and it was successful; there were repeat performances in 1959, but with much diminished attendance, because, as Rudolf Bing himself told me, “people no longer enjoyed going to their New York cocktail parties to say to their friends, ‘Have you heard that horrible piece that the Met is performing?’” Later Met productions, especially when Jimmy Levine was directing, were much better attended; the most recent ones, with William Kentridge’s décor and Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s able direction, have been visually puzzling but musically satisfying. The centenary of the premiere is generating new productions all over Europe, though we are hardly like to hear it at the Kennedy Center (where, in 1974, I attended a three-hour concert of Schoenberg and Ives) in the current climate. For stay-at-home Americans, the YouTube may suffice. In this version one can follow the score. Bruno Maderna’s filmed version is HERE.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert on the music of Alban Berg, Debussy, and other early 20th-century composers. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (Ph.D., 1967), he has published on many music subjects, and edited the revised fourth (1978) and fifth (1987) editions of Harmony by his teacher Walter Piston.