Woyzeck

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Photo courtesy of Liceu Opera.

On May 5, 1914, Alban Berg attended the first performance of the theatrical Woyzeck by playwright Georg Büchner. Impacted by history, he decided to turn it into an opera, and in 1922 he closed the score, integrating into the plot his own experience as a worker in the Ministry of War during World War I. The brutality and despair of a society drowned in the horrors of war have been evoked since its premiere.

A masterpiece of the Vienna School, it was an immediate success for its powerful fusion of music and drama. It is a story with a tragic dimension that goes beyond the literal to become a universal theme and talks about elements as inherent in the human condition as life, love, desire and death.

Wozzeck is a soldier with a daily existence of misery and alignment who will succumb to humiliation in the face of the wickedness of the harsh laws of exploitation and abuse. A victim of the cruelty of the military doctor's experiments and forced by his captain to perform the most humble and servile work, he is nothing but an individual reduced to an object owned by the ruling class. The home with Marie, his lover, and the common child are his real paradise, but when the woman betrays him with the Drum Major, a spiral of self-destructive anger and jealousy is activated: a war against the world, but also internal and mental.

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