Page 257 - Vinkler, Jonatan, in Jernej Weiss. ur. 2014. Musica et Artes: ob osemdesetletnici Primoža Kureta. Koper: Založba Univerze na Primorskem.
P. 257
Woyzeck and Wozzeck
– Büchner and Berg
Valentina Sandu-Dediu, Bukarešta/București
»Anyway, must we always progress? Could we not content ourselves
with placing beautiful music in the service of good dramatic works
or, even more so, with composing music so beautiful that it would
become–despite all the odds–good theatre?« asked Alban Berg1. What did he
mean by beautiful music? Would the opera-going public of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries accept the adjective »beautiful« as a description of
the opera Wozzeck, which Berg completed in 1925? Or would the more tol-
erant-minded among them prefer to describe it as »interesting« or »fasci-
nating«, as convenient ways of avoiding potentially embarrassing sincerity
and concealing the fact that Berg’s music is anything but »beautiful«? Even
if I personally count Wozzeck as one of my favourite operas, one I would rec-
ommend for inclusion in any time capsule, I am unable to ignore (from the
supposed heights of musicological academe) the fact that a century after the
musical tsunami unleashed by Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg’s professor of
composition, atonalism has not come to be a mass phenomenon. Opera lov-
ers–lovers of Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner even–might accept Berg’s op-
era, they might appreciate it, but do they think it »beautiful«, given it lacks
the stable musical consonance lent by a classical or romantic tonal system?
The answer is, in principle, yes, because the tonal system is just one of the
components that blend together to form the dramatic whole, and the atten-
tion of the listener/viewer will be captured by the convincingness of all the
musical and stage components, by the power of the plot and the psychologi-
cal depth of the characters.
1 Alban Berg, Écrits (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1985), 108. 255
woyzeck and wozzeck – büchner and berg
– Büchner and Berg
Valentina Sandu-Dediu, Bukarešta/București
»Anyway, must we always progress? Could we not content ourselves
with placing beautiful music in the service of good dramatic works
or, even more so, with composing music so beautiful that it would
become–despite all the odds–good theatre?« asked Alban Berg1. What did he
mean by beautiful music? Would the opera-going public of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries accept the adjective »beautiful« as a description of
the opera Wozzeck, which Berg completed in 1925? Or would the more tol-
erant-minded among them prefer to describe it as »interesting« or »fasci-
nating«, as convenient ways of avoiding potentially embarrassing sincerity
and concealing the fact that Berg’s music is anything but »beautiful«? Even
if I personally count Wozzeck as one of my favourite operas, one I would rec-
ommend for inclusion in any time capsule, I am unable to ignore (from the
supposed heights of musicological academe) the fact that a century after the
musical tsunami unleashed by Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg’s professor of
composition, atonalism has not come to be a mass phenomenon. Opera lov-
ers–lovers of Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner even–might accept Berg’s op-
era, they might appreciate it, but do they think it »beautiful«, given it lacks
the stable musical consonance lent by a classical or romantic tonal system?
The answer is, in principle, yes, because the tonal system is just one of the
components that blend together to form the dramatic whole, and the atten-
tion of the listener/viewer will be captured by the convincingness of all the
musical and stage components, by the power of the plot and the psychologi-
cal depth of the characters.
1 Alban Berg, Écrits (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1985), 108. 255
woyzeck and wozzeck – büchner and berg
