Page 258 - Vinkler, Jonatan, in Jernej Weiss. ur. 2014. Musica et Artes: ob osemdesetletnici Primoža Kureta. Koper: Založba Univerze na Primorskem.
P. 258
musica et artes
From Text to Music
Finding himself in a Vienna then at the height of the Expressionist period,
the composer was obviously part of the spirit of the times in his affinity for
the theatre of Georg Büchner. The German Romantic writer, who died be-
fore reaching the age of twenty-four, was rediscovered with great enthusiasm
by Expressionist circles when the play Woyzeck (unfinished, dating from 1837)
premiered in Munich in 1913. Naturalist and Expressionist writers and art-
ists found many of their favourite themes in the play, a series of fragments in
which the development of a coherent plot is not the main aim, but rather the
psychological meanders of the characters and the emphasis on the gloomy,
obscure, irrational, pathological side of human nature. Moreover, when he at-
tended the Vienna premiere of Büchner’s dramatic scenes (1914), Alban Berg
probably felt stimulated by the text’s suitability as a potential opera libretto:
in the scenes that are preserved (fifteen of twenty-six) the composer only rare-
ly alters the structure of the lines. He was also undoubtedly challenged by one
of the play’s fundamental ideas–man is an abyss–which is implacably inter-
twined with the protagonist’s psychical development, his hallucinatory oscil-
lation between delirious vision and wretched reality, until the inevitable trag-
ic denouement.
Büchner died in 1837, leaving behind a manuscript entitled Woyzeck, in
the open form of dramatic scenes without any definite ending. A few decades
later, an editor attempted to shed light on that forgotten and by then almost
illegible manuscript, treating it with various chemicals before finally publish-
ing it. It was thus that Karl Emil Franzos came to publish an edited version
of Büchner’s fragments in 1879, arranging them in the order he saw fit; he ac-
cidentally altered the name of the play and its protagonist to Wozzeck. It was
this edition that Berg was to work with a few decades later, when he decided
to turn the play into an opera libretto.
The writer left behind a number of versions of the finale to his dramat-
ic scenes: Woyzeck is caught and tried for his crime (which matches the his-
torical truth of the real events on which Büchner based the story); Woyzeck
drowns while trying to find the knife he used to kill Maria. The second of
these situations further branches into two possible scenarios: either suicide or
a trance-like advance into the waters of the lake into which he cast the mur-
der weapon. The ambiguity also persists in Berg’s opera, in the interpretation
of the penultimate scene, that of the protagonist’s death by drowning. But the
composer adds a twofold final message. The purely musical commentary of
the final orchestral interlude (Invention in D) focuses the viewer/listener’s at-
tention solely on the music. Berg designs a veritable musical film sequence of
256
From Text to Music
Finding himself in a Vienna then at the height of the Expressionist period,
the composer was obviously part of the spirit of the times in his affinity for
the theatre of Georg Büchner. The German Romantic writer, who died be-
fore reaching the age of twenty-four, was rediscovered with great enthusiasm
by Expressionist circles when the play Woyzeck (unfinished, dating from 1837)
premiered in Munich in 1913. Naturalist and Expressionist writers and art-
ists found many of their favourite themes in the play, a series of fragments in
which the development of a coherent plot is not the main aim, but rather the
psychological meanders of the characters and the emphasis on the gloomy,
obscure, irrational, pathological side of human nature. Moreover, when he at-
tended the Vienna premiere of Büchner’s dramatic scenes (1914), Alban Berg
probably felt stimulated by the text’s suitability as a potential opera libretto:
in the scenes that are preserved (fifteen of twenty-six) the composer only rare-
ly alters the structure of the lines. He was also undoubtedly challenged by one
of the play’s fundamental ideas–man is an abyss–which is implacably inter-
twined with the protagonist’s psychical development, his hallucinatory oscil-
lation between delirious vision and wretched reality, until the inevitable trag-
ic denouement.
Büchner died in 1837, leaving behind a manuscript entitled Woyzeck, in
the open form of dramatic scenes without any definite ending. A few decades
later, an editor attempted to shed light on that forgotten and by then almost
illegible manuscript, treating it with various chemicals before finally publish-
ing it. It was thus that Karl Emil Franzos came to publish an edited version
of Büchner’s fragments in 1879, arranging them in the order he saw fit; he ac-
cidentally altered the name of the play and its protagonist to Wozzeck. It was
this edition that Berg was to work with a few decades later, when he decided
to turn the play into an opera libretto.
The writer left behind a number of versions of the finale to his dramat-
ic scenes: Woyzeck is caught and tried for his crime (which matches the his-
torical truth of the real events on which Büchner based the story); Woyzeck
drowns while trying to find the knife he used to kill Maria. The second of
these situations further branches into two possible scenarios: either suicide or
a trance-like advance into the waters of the lake into which he cast the mur-
der weapon. The ambiguity also persists in Berg’s opera, in the interpretation
of the penultimate scene, that of the protagonist’s death by drowning. But the
composer adds a twofold final message. The purely musical commentary of
the final orchestral interlude (Invention in D) focuses the viewer/listener’s at-
tention solely on the music. Berg designs a veritable musical film sequence of
256
