Alban Berg's Wozzeck is one of the few operas from the 20th century to enter the standard operatic repertory.
A remarkable achievement, considering the overwhelming majority of the opera is atonal.
It isn't unusual for atonal music to be labeled as arbitrary noise with composers who randomly throw notes on a page, with the intent of sounding as offensive and dissonant as possible.
But Berg's Wozzeck is organized to the highest degree. In fact, it's a musical matryoshka doll. Each scene has a structure of its own that folds into an overall structure for each act; in turn, the three acts create a cohesive, overarching form for the whole of the opera.
Keeping in mind that the First and Third Acts have such refined structure, the Second Act is the easiest to conceptualize. Act Two forms a five-movement symphony, like so: Scene 1 is in sonata-form (very much like the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart); Scene 2 is a fantasia and fugue; Scene 3 is the slow movement, and so on.
All this rigidity to the musical construction of Wozzeck becomes more fascinating as the dark and haunting story unfolds into chaos.
Listen to Classical MPR at noon Saturday to hear Wozzeck live from The Metropolitan Opera.
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