After attending a 1914 Viennese performance of Woyzeck, German playwright Georg Büchner's unfinished play, Alban Berg decided to transform the fragmented drama into an opera. Drawing on Büchner's text and his personal experiences as a soldier during the First World War, Berg produced Wozzeck, a three-act opera that employs atonality and Sprechgesang to tell the story of a society in which everyone is lost, and where brutality, frustration, and desperation reign. Despite the Nazis' efforts to stifle it during the war years, the work was championed by conductor Erich Kleiber and achieved enduring international success. An ominous and fascinating musical study of the darker realms of the human psyche...
Photo: © Salzburger Festspiele / Ruth Walz