The scheme contradicts Schoenberg’s utopian notion that the new language could replace the old. Instead, Berg returns to the method of Mahler and Strauss, for whom the conflict of consonance and dissonance was the forge of the most intense expression. Consonance is all the sweeter in the moment before its annihilation. Dissonance is all the more frightening in contrast to what it destroys. Beauty and terror skirmish, fighting for Wozzeck’s hollow soul.
Berg took pride in the fact that each scene in Wozzeck is based on a historical form: Suite, Passacaglia, Rondo, and so on. Act II is a five-movement symphony, and in the opening Sonata Allegro, Wozzeck’s paranoia is developed like a classical theme. Once a level of maximum dissonance has been reached, there comes a sudden respite in the form of a C-major chord: this marks the moment that Wozzeck hands over to Marie the money he has earned for suffering through the sadistic games of the Captain and the Doctor. It is the last display of uncomplicated tenderness between the two.
In the second movement (Invention and Fugue on Three Themes), the Captain and the Doctor amuse themselves again by tormenting their charge, implanting in him the fatal idea that Marie has slept with the Drum Major. Wozzeck confronts his wife in the slow Largo movement, accompanied by the same fifteen instruments that Schoenberg used in his First Chamber Symphony (Schoenberg’s marital crisis of 1908 might be a subtext). The Scherzo of the “symphony” is set in an inn full of drunken revelers; a stage band plays a Mahlerian Ländler waltz, dissonantly distorted. Wozzeck’s humiliation reaches its height in the Rondo marziale, the last movement, when he tries unsuccessfully to find rest in a barracks full of atonally snoring soldiers. The Drum Major barges in, bragging of his conquest of Marie. Wozzeck whistles at him derisively and is beaten to a pulp.
At the beginning of Act III, Marie reads aloud from the Bible to her child, her mind swaying back and forth between the calm glow of Christian verities and the virus-like action of fear and guilt. A heart-stoppingly beautiful horn theme—an extract from a piano piece that Berg had written during his studies with Schoenberg—is almost immediately scrubbed out by twelve-note patterns and other “difficult” features. When Wozzeck enters, the note B begins droning in various sections of the orchestra, sometimes high and sometimes low. The couple walks by a pond. The moon rises, and each of them comments on the apparition. “How the moon rises red,” Marie says. “Like a bloody iron,” Wozzeck adds. Büchner’s writing here looks ahead to the Symbolist poetry of Wilde’s Salomé, and, as if on cue, trumpets, horns, and violas play a transposition of Strauss’s Salome chord, with its hint of outlaw sexuality on the brink of destruction.
Wozzeck takes out his knife as the timpani pound away at the fatal note. He kills Marie suddenly and unceremoniously, without much commentary from the orchestra. Once he rushes from the scene, though, the orchestra reenacts the death with an incredible succession of sounds. The B returns, humming almost inaudibly on a muted horn. Then instrument after instrument joins in on the same pitch, creating a super-bright beam of tone. As the composer and theorist Robert Cogan has demonstrated, by way of spectrographic imaging of sounds, the scoring of this single note produces an exceptionally rich mass of overtones, with a chord of B major at its root. After a climactic dissonant chord and a shuddering death-rhythm on the bass drum, the crescendo begins again, now with a battery of percussion added, so that clean overtones give way to a toneless wash of noise. “Like the murder scene,” Cogan writes, “this climactic passage reaches the ultimate in human limits, extending from the threshold of audibility to the threshold of pain.”
As if with a rapid cinematic cut, the scene changes to a tavern, where an out-of-tune upright piano is playing a rickety polka, employing the same rhythm that has just been heard on the bass drum. Wozzeck is seated at one of the tables, blood dripping from his hand. The locals stop their wild dancing to accuse him of murder, and he rushes back to the pond to wash away the evidence. As the orchestra plays rippling transpositions of a six-note chord, he sinks beneath the waves. The Captain and the Doctor walk by a moment later, marveling at the uncanny stillness of the scene. It is as if they were studying a canvas at a Secession exhibition.
Now comes the masterstroke. At the end of the next-to-last scene, the orchestra delivers a kind of wordless oration, which, in Berg’s own words, is “a confession of the author who now steps outside the dramatic action on the stage … an appeal to humanity through its representatives, the audience.” There is a palpable break in the musical language, as Berg makes use of a piece that he wrote back in 1908 or 1909—a sketch for a Mahlerian Sonata in D Minor. (The composer associated this music with the singer Helene Nahowski, whom he married in 1911, and he apparently inserted it in the opera at her request.) Dissonance stages a counterstrike: trombones deliver a stentorian “We poor people,” twelve woodwinds mass together in a twelve-note chord, and sheets of sound in the percussion replicate the terror of Marie’s murder. Finally, the bass instruments pound out a rising fourth, and D minor crashes back in. All this sounds like something more than a lament for two human beings; it may be a tribute to what Thomas Mann called the “worldwide festival of death”—the Great War itself.
The ending is breathtakingly bleak. We see Wozzeck and Marie’s child riding his hobby horse, oblivious to the fact that his mother is lying dead nearby. Berg, in a lecture on the opera, pointed out that the coda links up with the beginning; likewise, it is all too plausible that this child will grow up to be a replica of his father. A slow fadeout on an oscillating pair of chords points toward a despairing conclusion. As the chords rock back and forth, though, there are passing glimpses of G major, like transitory glimmerings of light.
Compare the ending of Debussy’s Pelléas, where Mélisande dies within sight of her newborn baby while the serving women fill the room. “It’s the poor little thing’s turn now,” says King Arkel. The onlooker is left to imagine the fate of these orphans of the fin de siècle: perhaps they will perpetuate the cycle of misery, breeding violence from violence, or perhaps they will escape to some great open city, where the children of unhappy families start anew.
The Rite, the Folk, le Jazz
May 29, 1913, was an unusually hot day for Paris in the spring: the temperature reached eighty-five degrees. By late afternoon a crowd had gathered in front of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, on the avenue Montaigne, where Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was holding its spring gala. “There, for the expert eye, were all the makings of a scandal,” recalled Jean Cocteau, then twenty-three. “A fashionable audience in décolletage, outfitted in pearls, egret headdresses, plumes of ostrich; and, side by side with the tails and feathers, the jackets, head-bands, and showy rags of that race of aesthetes who randomly acclaim the new in order to express their hatred of the loges … a thousand nuances of snobbery, super-snobbery, counter-snobbery …” The better-heeled part of the crowd had grown wary of Diaghilev’s methods. Disquieting rumors were circulating about the new musical work on the program—The Rite of Spring, by the young Russian composer Igor Stravinsky—and also about the matching choreography by Nijinsky. The theater, then brand-new, caused a scandal of its own. With its steel-concrete exterior and amphitheater-like seating plan, it was deemed too severe, too Germanic. One commentator compared it to a zeppelin moored in the middle of the street.
Diaghilev, in a press release, promised “a new thrill that will doubtless inspire heated discussion.” He did not lie. The program began innocuously, with a revival of the Ballets Russes’ Chopin fantasy Les Sylphides. After a pause, the theater darkened again, and high, falsetto-like bassoon notes floated out of the orchestra. Strands of melody intertwined like vegetation bursting out of the earth—“a sacred terror in the noonday sun,” Stravinsky called it, in a description that had been published that morning. The audience listened to the opening section of the Rite in relative silence, although the increasing density and dissonance of the music caused mutterings, titters, whistles, and shouts. Then, at the beginning of the second section, a dance for adolescents titled “The Augurs of Spring,” a quadruple shock arrived, in the form of harmony, rhythm, image,
