The Collins Guide To Opera And Operetta. Michael White
of the Drum-Major.
ACT II The Doctor and the Captain taunt Wozzeck with Marie’s infidelity and he rushes home to confront her, threatening her with a knife, which he does not use. Wozzeck follows Marie to a crowded inn garden where he sees her dancing with the Drum-Major. Again, he is about to attack them, but the dancing stops before he can act. Alone and tormented, Wozzeck is joined by an Idiot, who tells Wozzeck that the scene before them, although apparently a happy one, is in fact reeking with blood. In his disturbed state of mind Wozzeck begins to be obsessed by the image of blood. Later, in the barracks, he and the Drum-Major fight and Wozzeck is knocked to the ground.
ACT III Marie, overwhelmed by guilt, walks with Wozzeck in the country. A blood-red moon rises over the scene as Wozzeck draws his knife and stabs her to death. He returns to the inn, where his bloodstained hands are noticed and, as a crowd gathers, he stumbles back to the murder scene to search for the knife. In his tormented mental state he imagines himself to be covered in blood and walks into the pond to clean himself, going deeper and deeper until he drowns. At their home, Wozzeck and Marie’s child unconcernedly plays with his hobby-horse before, finding himself alone, he goes in search of his friends.
Music and Background
Easier on the ear than the later Lulu, Wozzeck is a dissonant score that manages to be lyrically seductive and betray little of the complex formal structures by which everything is governed. Act II is designated, rather clinically, a ‘Symphony in Five Moments’ and Act III a set of ‘Six Inventions’, but the writing is vivid, passionate, sympathetic in its treatment of the anti-hero, and disturbing in its sardonic incorporation of popular street music (a device Berg borrowed from Mahler’s symphonies and song cycles).
Highlights
The entire score aches with a sense of gathering catastrophe, but Act III, Scene 2, in which Wozzeck kills Marie as the moon rises, is an especially chilling moment; the Act III, Scene 4 interlude after Wozzeck’s own death is the climax of the piece; and the vignette of Wozzeck’s child murmuring ‘hopp hopp, hopp hopp’ as he goes on playing is as unsettling an end as that of any opera.
Did You Know?
Recommended Recording
Eberhard Waechter, Anja Silja, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Christoph von Dohnanyi. Decca 417 348-2. A striking performance from the then husband-and-wife team Dohnanyi and Silja, with Schoenberg’s Erwartung as a bonus filler.
(1803–69)
Les Francs-Juges (1826)
Benvenuto Cellini (1828)
Les Troyens (1858)
Béatrice et Bénédict (1862)
Berlioz was a dreamer of dreams in the grand Romantic tradition. The son of a French country doctor, he originally studied medicine but abandoned it for music – largely under the spell of Beethoven, who ranked alongside Shakespeare, Virgil and Goethe as the composer’s creative idol. Other idols included Harriet Smithson, a Shakespearian actress who became the governing inspiration for Berlioz’s vividly (some might say unhealthily) imagined Symphonie Fantastique in 1830, his first enduringly great work. Symphonic and choral scores followed – Harold in Italy, the Requiem, Roméo et Juliette, the Te Deum – and they became the basis of his fame, which originated abroad rather than in France. But his chief interest was always the stage, and the tragedy of his creative life was that his operas failed to find support. Les Francs-Juges was never performed, Benvenuto Cellini was taken off after four nights and only the last two Acts of Les Troyens reached the stage. Béatrice et Bénédict, which was welcomed in Germany, had no Paris production until well after Berlioz’s death. La Damnation de Faust (1846) is sometimes staged as an opera, but was written as a concert work and is probably best left as such.
(Béatrice and Benedick)
FORM: Opera in two acts; in French
COMPOSER: Hector Berlioz (1803–69)
LIBRETTO: Hector Berlioz; after Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing
FIRST PERFORMANCE: Baden-Baden, 9 August 1862
Principal Characters
Don Pedro, a general Bass
Béatrice, Don Pedro’s niece
Héro, Don Pedro’s daughter
Bénédict, an officer
Claudio, an officer
Somarone, an orchestral conductor
Synopsis of the Plot
Setting: Messina, Italy; around 1700
ACT I The townspeople gather to celebrate Don Pedro’s defeat of the Moors. Héro is joyfully anticipating the return of her beloved, Claudio, but her cousin, Béatrice, is not so happy to contemplate the return of Bénédict, with whom she has a much more volatile relationship, one in which neither is willing to admit their true feelings for each other. The victorious forces soon arrive and Héro and Claudio happily arrange their wedding for that very evening. They encourage Bénédict to do the same, but he scoffs at the idea of marriage and declares that, if he is ever foolish enough to do such a thing, they can hang a banner on his roof announcing ‘Here is Bénédict, the married man’. This prompts Don Pedro and Claudio to hatch a plot to achieve just that. Later, Bénédict, hiding behind a hedge, hears an arranged conversation in which Béatrice confesses that she is very much in love with him – and Béatrice subsequently hears Bénédict say the same about his feelings for her. Their ideas on marriage now begin to change.
ACT II The wedding feast is well underway and, offstage, Somarone is encouraged to perform a noisy drinking song. In a quiet moment Béatrice again admits her true feelings for Bénédict and even welcomes the emotions she had for so long denied. But old habits die hard and when Bénédict appears she cannot resist baiting him in the usual way, although it is clear that a new tenderness underlies their ripostes. Claudio and Héro sign the marriage