{"id":1583,"date":"2018-02-15T14:42:51","date_gmt":"2018-02-15T14:42:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ripm.org\/cnc\/?p=1583"},"modified":"2018-04-19T19:44:39","modified_gmt":"2018-04-19T19:44:39","slug":"alban-bergs-reflections-onwozzeck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cnc.ripm.org\/?p=1583","title":{"rendered":"Alban Berg’s Reflections on Wozzeck<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Emil Stumpp, Portr\u00e4t des Musikers Alban Berg,\u00a0<\/em>Deutsches Historisches Museum <\/i>(1927), above left
\n<\/em>B. F. Dolbin,\u00a0Alban Berg <\/em>(1935),<\/em>\u00a0Modern Music<\/em>, Vol. 8 No. 3 (March-April 1936): [31], above right<\/span><\/p>\n

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This week, we celebrate the influential Austrian composer, Alban Berg, born 9 February 1885. A longtime student of Arnold Schoenberg, Berg\u2019s compositional style blended modernist twelve-tone and serial techniques\u2014hallmark characteristics of the so-called Second Viennese School\u2014with late 19th-century Romanticism. His first major success was the 1925 opera, Wozzeck<\/em>, derived from an unfinished play by German dramatist Georg B\u00fcchner, which told the story of an impoverished soldier\u2019s descent into madness and murder. To commemorate Berg’s birth, we present several reflections on Wozzeck<\/em> written by the composer himself\u2014translated and published in an issue [Vol. 5 No. 1 (Nov. – Dec. 1927): 22-24.] of the journal Modern Music<\/em>\u2014accompanied by video excerpts of several memorable scenes from Act III of a 1987 production by the Vienna State Opera, the late Claudio Abbado conducting.<\/p>\n

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I wanted to compose good music; to develop musically the contents of Buechner’s immortal drama; to translate his poetic language into music; but other than that, when I decided to write an opera, my only intention, as related to the technique of composition, was to give the theatre what belongs to the theatre.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Berg’s commitment to writing music in service of the opera’s action is reflected in the so-called “drowning music” of Act III Scene IV.\u00a0 Having returned to the pond where he killed his wife Marie, Wozzeck fears that his murder weapon will be discovered, and soon after, drowns.\u00a0 Though Wozzeck is no longer visible to the audience, Berg’s use of overlapping ascending chromatic patterns of increasing duration signifies Wozzeck’s continued subjective experience of rising water and gradual loss of consciousness.<\/p>\n