Wozzeck

Opera in three acts by Alban Berg

Wozzeck loves Marie, they have a child; she turns away from him. In the end, he kills her. It is a predictable killing, the result of a gradual loss of support and stability: insult turns into jealousy, jealousy into rage, and this has fatal consequences.

Wozzeck's environment seems blind to these changes. The Captain gives him endless lectures on morality and mocks his ignorance. The Doctor uses him as a guinea pig for grotesque medical experiments. His friend Andres remains a passive observer, unable to intervene, to help or stabilize Wozzeck in his distress.

In his opera Wozzeck, which premiered in Berlin in December 1925, Alban Berg paints a harrowing portrait of people on the fringes of society. Here in particular, poverty, social dependence, psychological distress, narrow-minded moral concepts, and structural injustices form the breeding ground for violence. Balancing between bitter comedy and deepest tragedy, Berg transforms Georg Büchner's fragmentary drama Woyzeck into a cohesive opera libretto. His atonal music reveals psychological processes and unfolds an expressiveness that, despite all its modernity, is immediately accessible.