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Class 11: Two Towering Masterpieces Class 11: Two Towering Masterpieces A. Music Without a Key 1. Title Slide 1 (Wozzeck in Geneva) 2. Berg and Schoenberg I make no secret that the music in this class is the most difficult of any in the course, but I hope that the two operas I am going to show will engage you because of their stories and moral relevance. They are Wozzeck by Alban Berg (1885–1935), which premiered in 1925, and Moses und Aron by Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), which the composer stopped working on in 1932. I shall show them in this order, although Schoenberg was the older composer by nine years, and Berg was in fact his student. Both operas are atonal, which simply means that they avoid conventional harmonies based on key. Previously, when presenting works by these composers, I have done little demos to try to explain what that means. But this is supposed to be a class on Opera Production, and as the staging I am going show for the most part is probably the most straightforward of any in the entire course, I want to leave time to at least sample some of the more extreme productions out there. 3. Wozzeck poster and Lotfi Mansouri production So I am just going to ask you to take the music for granted, treating it as a highly dramatic emotional sound-track. Berg was writing in the aftermath of the First World War (in which he served), and at the height of German Expressionism. Despite quiet moments like Marie’s Bible reading, this is an opera in which everything is pushed to extremes, and emotions, where they are not dangerously bottled up, are allowed to flow in full spate. There are few productions that do not have their lurid moments, and many which abandon realism almost entirely. B. Wozzeck, the Inarticulate Soldier Nevertheless, I am going to do something that is unusual for me in this course. Rather than showing the most innovative production I can find, I am going to stick with one of the most conventional ones, hailing from Vienna in 1987. The director, Adolf Dresen, works mainly with small units of more or less realistic scenery within a bare stage. For, despite its Expressionist extremes, Wozzeck is essentially a story about common people and the way they are ground down by those above them in society. [On the website, I shall post a link to a film version made in 1970. I won’t show it here, since this course is about stage production, but it gains immensely from being set in a real German village. Watch it if you can.] 4. Georg Büchner and Woyzeck. — 1 — Berg’s source was the unfinished play Woyzeck by the German Romantic—and indeed revolutionary— poet Georg Büchner (1813–37). Looking at his few portraits, you could scarcely imagine that such a meek young man could write such searing drama, but he did. His play was left unfinished at his death at the age of 24, existing only as a large number of short scenes. It was first performed only in 1913 in Munich and in Vienna the following year, a performance that Berg attended. Its themes of militarism and social injustice reverberated intensely in the years surrounding the First World War, and Berg’s own experience gave him the blood with which to follow Büchner’s vitriol. He made his own selection of the scenes and wrote the libretto himself. 5. The Characters in Wozzeck. I shall show seven excerpts from the opera. First four scenes from the Act I exposition, giving glimpses of the other major figures in Wozzeck’s life: the Captain and Doctor who patronize and exploit him, Marie whom he loves, but who will betray him with the fifth character, the Drum Major. I am going to play these more or less continuously, with just part of each scene except for the last, which will be complete. By starting in the middle of the Captain scene, however, I am distorting the overall effect. For the first four minutes of the opera, Wozzeck says nothing at all except the subservient “Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann.” But when the Captain says that he should have some morality, and not father a child out of wedlock, Wozzeck is compelled to speak up, beginning with the words Wir arme Leut’…. “We poor people do not have the money or the time for luxuries like morality.” I am starting here, however, because whatever else it is, Wozzeck is very much a moral document—a fact that links it strongly to Moses und Aron. 6. Some Questions about Wozzeck You might want to think about these questions as we go. 7. Berg: Wozzeck (Vienna, 1987). Act I, scene 1, Wozzeck and the Captain (part) 8. Berg: Wozzeck (Vienna, 1987). Act I, scene 3, Marie and her child (part) 9. Berg: Wozzeck (Vienna, 1987). Act I, scene 4, Wozzeck and the Doctor (part) 10. Berg: Wozzeck (Vienna, 1987). Act I, scene 5, Marie and the Drum Major (all) 11. — still from the above From there, we will look at how all this coalesces into his jealousy of Marie. First, the scene in Act II where he confronts her in the street, and she says she would rather have a knife in her belly than submit to violence, an idea which lodges in Wozzeck’s tormented mind. Note the onstage chamber ensemble, whose elegance is in stark contrast to the tension in the scene. 12. Berg: Wozzeck (Vienna, 1987). Act II, scene 3, Wozzeck and Marie (all) 13. — still from the above Then the murder scene in Act III, followed by the final sequence in which Wozzeck, now completely out of his mind, returns to find the blood-stained knife and drowns himself, the overwhelming orchestral interlude that follows—as though a drama this powerful can only be resolved through pure music—and — 2 — finally the epilogue in which a group of children (including Wozzeck’s own son) hear about a body being washed up, and go off to see: 14. Berg: Wozzeck (Vienna, 1987). Act III, scene 2, Wozzeck and Marie (all) 15. Berg: Wozzeck (Vienna, 1987). Act III, scene 4 to the end 16. Some questions about Wozzeck, repeat Does anyone want to suggest some answers to my questions? 17. Extras: all If we have any time, I would like to look at some very short scenes from the last act in one or more of the productions shown here. They run the gamut from brutal and grotesque to eerie and internal. 18. Extras: Homoki 19. Homoki: murder scene 20. Extras: Mussbach 21. Mussbach: Captain and Doctor 22. Extras: Warlikowski 23. Warlikowski: orchestra and final scene 24. Extras: Loy 25. Loy: final scene 26. Title Slide 2 (Marie’s child) There is also a magnificent staging of the final interlude in the Calixto Bieto Barcelona production, in which human beings slowly emerge from some kind of industrial underworld, totally naked, clean, and innocent. I shall post it on the website. C. Moses: the Inarticulate Prophet 27. Title Slide 3 (Moses und Aron) Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) wrote two of the planned three acts of his Moses und Aron [the unusual spelling is because the composer was triskaidekaphobic] between 1930 and 1932, but wrote only sketches for the third. Because he always intended to finish the opera, though, it was never performed in his lifetime. Its first staging was in Zurich in 1957, six years after the composer’s death. This was in the two-act version. Although another composer, Zoltán Kocsis, eventually set the missing third act, this “complete” version has never been staged. The two acts that Schoenberg wrote have a logical unity of their own, and there is some evidence that he thought so too. They are often considered the composer’s masterpiece. Schoenberg wrote his own libretto, based on the Book of Exodus. It covers the calling of Moses at the burning bush, the deliverance from captivity in Egypt, and the wandering of the Israelites in the desert. Not all of this is told in normal dramatic form, and indeed the composer originally planned the work as — 3 — an oratorio. As an opera, it has only two leading characters, only one of whom (Aron) actually sings; Moses, who claimed he was tongue-tied, speaks only in Sprechstimme; he needs his half-brother Aron as his mouthpiece. The chorus, however, plays a major part in the drama. 28. Dale Duesing as Moses There had been operas about Moses before, of course, most notably Rossini’s Italian and French versions of the story. But these treated the character as a hero in the Charlton Heston mold. Schoenberg, on the other hand, makes him tormented, obsessive, consumed by an idea that nobody else understands. More than any other I can think of, Moses und Aron is an opera of ideas, whether an overt part of its plot, or hidden within the psyche of its composer: • The main idea is that God is unknowable, indescribable, and irreducible. By taking Moses’ thoughts and turning them into language and symbols the people can understand, Aron is both fulfilling his mission and betraying it. • The opera marks an important stage in Schoenberg’s struggle with his Jewish identity. He had converted to Christianity in 1898, but nonetheless suffered from the growing anti-Semitism of the interwar years. The ideas in Moses und Aron derived in part from a political play he wrote in 1928, called The Biblical Way. He returned to Judaism in 1933. • One might also see a reflection of Schoenberg’s struggles as a pioneer of atonality in those of Moses to express divine truth in a language that no one around him understands.
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