The section in the opera that follows a strict twelve tone technique development is that of the doctor, which Berg did on purpose. He had a love-hate relationship with the strictness of this technique, so he gives it to the character in the opera who puts "science" and his experiment's techniques above the human life of Wozzeck. Genius and zingy. Thank you for a great video!
Wow again! This would be a great topic for a subsequent video. I had a feeling that those big block chords in the "harmonic smear" section sounded too beautiful to be true 12-tone music. If you could manage to make us hear hooks in a passage by the 12-tone doctor that would be quite an accomplishment!
And another fact about the doctor: his twelve-tone row, his "idée fixe" is only broken once - when he sings the words "Fixe Idee" as if to show a caricature of himself...
Ich Liebe Das. Alas Das Für Alban Berg 🙌 Lieblings ❤❤❤ Ja! Bitte Bitte thank you 🙏 Vielen Danke 🥲 🎻 Ausgezeichnit!!! “Mickey mouse is in the orchestra.” Ja Ich bin! Also, the block chords YesS! Thank you for speaking to the beauty of that section. It’s so glorious. ❤ block chords deserve many many conversations. I would love to hear more from you about the history of his leitmotif and the matrix Berg chose and yes 🙌 compared to the jaunty schismatic atonal lines ~cycle of fifths and fourths for all eternity. Soli Deo Gloria 🎵 I love Berg and I love you 🤟 all for your comments here. Thank you 🙏 Guinness of Opera cheers 🍻 ❤Excellent job! Bravo 👏 bravo 👏 bravo presentation! I’m into Wozzeck! Let’s see if I can be persuaded to stomach an entire proper pint 🍺 of Guinness 🥖 “it’s like drinking a loaf my bread 😂,” my Dad would say. Beautiful Analogy! I’ll have a pint 🍺 or two ✌️ thank you 🙏
I first saw Wozzeck in 2015. It ruined my week (couldn't stop thinking about it), and has haunted me ever since. PLEASE SEE IT! It's incredibly powerful.
By the way: The play this is based on is considered one of the big milestones of German literature and is a staple in German high school up to this day. I've never heard of this opera but it sure looks like a worthy adaptation.
Whenever I am traveling and see that "Wozzeck" is playing at the local opera house, I will usually go. Sad though it is that is not appreciated as much as it deserves, it does have one advantage: you can be almost certain of getting a (good) ticket when you show up at the box office on the same evening. A deeply moving work.
I fell in love with Wozzeck on the first hearing, so you're preaching to the distorted choir here. That didn't make the analysis any less fascinating, though. "Hopp, hopp!" That odd, simple ending sends chills up my spine every time.
I can't say that I fell in love with it, but I certainly didn't get much unpleasant feelings from it. Years of listening to noise rock showing, I guess.
I think Berg is often dismissed unfairly by virtue of his 'guilt by association' with the 2nd Viennese School and the often sterile, cerebral and anodyne work of Webern and Schoenberg et al. A listen to Lyric Suite or Wozzeck is all the evidence required that serialism wasn't necessarily a pyrrhic victory for the democracy of pitches
I was introduced to Wozzeck via a music history course taught by a gifted musician and scholar. With the libretto in hand, I found the music to be compelling from the beginning. Going forward many years, I invited a couple grad school buddies who knew very little about classical music to a performance of Wozzeck at the Dorothy Chandlers Pavilion in Los Angeles. They loved it! I think that their ignorance of classical music let them take in the music with no preconceptions. They didn't know enough not to like it.
Being a fan of and studying the original play, Woyzeck, it is incredible to hear how much has been translated so vividly right from the text into the score. I'll definitely be looking into the opera further now, it looks incredible
Watched "Wozzeck" the other day and had a really good discussion about it with my friend afterwards, who recommended it to me. I don't know much when it comes to music theory, but as a writer, there was a lot for me to unpack when it came to characters, symbolism, motivation, etc. One thing we were discussing, and I think what I remember the most, was the character of Andres and how he unwittingly plays a role in Wozzeck's downward spiral. By singing his hunting songs and acting like everything is fine while Wozzeck is having hallucinations, Andres is almost unintentionally gaslighting him and making him question reality- as in, "why do I feel like this when the people around me are saying everything is fine?" We also examined the Doctor and the Captain (who I keep wanting to call "the General" for some reason) and how they parallel each other; the Doctor attacks Wozzeck's psychology, while the Captain attacks his philosophy. The Doctor's experiments clearly take a toll on his mental well-being and health, but the Captain frequently makes him second-guess his morality by insisting he's a "good person," then suggesting the opposite. Also, as for Wozzeck and Marie's child, we came to the conclusion that having him as a mostly voiceless role emphasizes that he's essentially a blank slate which the adult world in all its madness and grotesquery has been constantly projected onto. And this is extended to the society the characters live in as a whole- when Marie's body is found at the end, the children do not react with horror, but rather as if finding the bodies of their playmates' parents is a part of everyday life. We also drew a number of comparisons between the themes and characters of "Wozzeck" and "Sweeney Todd," which was equally fascinating, but this comment is already long enough, haha.
@@prototypeinheritance515 Yeah; there was also another opera based on the same source material by a different composer that came out around the same time, although Berg and the other composer weren't aware of each other's projects.
It's quite fitting that the opera was so groundbreaking and avantgarde because Büchner's play also was far ahead of its time. Sometimes it feels like you're reading some type of expressionist play and you have to remind yourself that it was written almost a century before Expressionism became a thing. It has a nightmarish quality that you don't find in other literary works of the time. Büchner was a genius and his early death was a tragedy for the history of German literature.
@@sophiatalksmusic3588 Manfred Gurlitt also wrote an opera based on J.M.R. Lenz' drama Die Soldaten, which was much more famously adapted by B.A. Zimmermann, probably the most important German opera after Wozzeck, and Büchner wrote a novella about Lenz. I wonder who's behind all those connections, must be the freemasons!
I have no idea about you as a musician. And I am ashamed of my self for that. As I am an Indian Musician I do admire the knowledge of other styles too. This was very informative and innovative. Nicely explained! Keep inspiring us! ❤️🍾 Regards from Sri Lanka! 🇱🇰✨
I am so happy you made this video! Also love how you're incorporating midi blocks into score analysis! I feel like it invites in a whole generation of composers who speak that language more fluently!!! Keep up the good work and Maybe we can get a sequel where you talk about LULU???:)
As someone who loves music and cinema but always found the latter easier to understand on a deeper level, that analogy with artifices such as dutch angles was a revelation. There's an entire corner of my CD collection waiting for a reappraisal from me and your video was exactly what I needed to realize it.
Spare a thought for the composer Manfred Gurlitt, who had the accidental misfortune of writing his own "Wozzeck" at the same time as Alban Berg's opera, and to basically the same libretto. It's rarely performed, but there's a recording of it on the Capriccio label, and it's fascinating to compare the two. Gurlitt's is a worthy effort, but Berg's is significantly more inventive and accomplished, both musically and dramatically.
I instantly loved Wozzeck, and I’m so glad to have been introduced to it. This channel has brought lots of wonderful music to my attention and I’m always grateful for it. Thank you David, keep up the great work!
Thanks for being so conclusive! I'm attending to the next performance of this opera in Barcelona's Liceu, next month, because of your enthusiastic explanations. I happen to be a Guiness lover too, after a bitter first encounter many years ago.
Kudos to this fascinating video, which I'm sure I'll have to watch 20 more times to process the multi-layeredness of its content. I always found even "normal" opera singing terribly inhuman until this video. But in this context and form, wow! I've been leaving the realms of "normal harmonies" myself for the last 3 years. That's why all this suddenly falls on much more open ears. Kudos how you explain, package and present all this! Great! Also the little jokes inserted. And 20:20 special kudos for still being able to speak so cleanly after 15-20 cans of Guiness. I stumbled into your channel via the Escher video and immediately signed up. All comes at just the right time. Thank you!
I adore Wozzeck and have done since I first saw it in my teens, a great many decades ago. I had taken the time to familiarize myself with it through the Karl Bohm recording before going to see it and was utterly fascinated by the music's magnificently distressing expressiveness. I cried at the final scene when I saw it on stage. I had no clue that the shower scene was inspired by the mouse squeaks! Pyscho is my favourite film score of all time. Thanks so much for bringing Wozzeck to our attention with your usual and always helpful eludication.
I like your video edits. You’re clearly educated but make your videos interesting to look at and learn more about music theory. Edit: Im a song-writer so this is great inspiration
not really a fan of Opera, and hadn't even heard of this one. but after seeing this video i simply have to see it, it sounds so beautiful and heartbreaking
When I saw the title of this episode of your program I immediately thought of Wozzeck. I am so glad that you actually made this program and that I was right. I remember hearing this opera for the first time. I was in college taking a class on Opera and each opera that we studied we had to listen and be able to musically identify parts of the opera. Wozzeck was not what I was expecting at all and like you I hated it the first time. But I knew that I needed to be able to identify selections so I kept listening and the more I listened the more I came to understand how perfectly the music underlined the libretto. It is an amazing composition. And I'm so glad that you took the time to make an episode about it. By the way, thank you for all of your programs. I don't understand everything you say. Though I played the double bass for 13 years and tuba 4-5 years I never really was able to make a connection between my ears and the notes on the page. I was merely mechanically reproducing what the page said to play. Eventually this caused me to give up playing because I just wasn't getting it. I am grateful however because it gives me the ability to appreciate music to a much greater degree than I might otherwise. And your program gives me lots of insights that I greatly appreciate. So thank you so very much, David Bruce. Oh, I greatly enjoy your one theme for composers type episodes. They're absolutely wonderful though I realize they take a lot of time and effort to produce.
I just wanna say that this is a particularly excellent video, and I'm glad that you have made it. This is beautifully well done. You are really successfully opening doors into something that is a hard sell, but a worthy one. Thank you for this.
David, brilliant piece here. Loved your goofy green screen antics. Just make sure Dorian's doesn't get too deep in the drink! Wozzeck is just one of those things I haven't quite gotten around to, but because of this, I'll certainly place it on a higher priority. Danke!
I first heard Wozzeck on a DGG recording when I was 15, and my amazement with it has only increased in the decades since. If the Rite is the early 20th-century's most influential score, Wozzeck to my mind is the most original. It struck me years ago when I wrote a set of program notes for a production of "Cavellaria Rusticana" that Wozzeck's libretto shares some basic elements of verismo: Wozzeck and Marie, as human characters, are very believable.The libretto and tenor of Lulu are very different. Lulu's score is amazing, the work of a more mature composer, but its story doesn't strike the human chord that Wozzeck does. I am a Guinness fan as well. Thanks, David, for this excellent video - I especially loved your observation about the double-bass note in the sleeping soldiers' chorus. What struck me as a bird call in the field scene in Act 1, Scene 2 becomes a sleeping soldier's nasal hair!
Several years ago, when asked what I wanted for my birthday, I said that I wanted to see Wozzeck at the Metropolitan Opera NYC. I have grown to love this opera ever since I was in college.
I've been studying composition at university for the past 3years and I have to say, partly thanks to channels such as yours, I'm blown away by how much my musical tastes are shifting. Berg was a composer I wouldn't have let play for longer than a minute in my first year, but more and more I'm starting to listen to this type of music on my own accord. You do a fantastic job of making challenging pieces more accessible! Consider me persuaded! 🙌
Thanks for this expose, David. I've always liked the music of the Expressionists, particularly Berg and Webern and Wozzeck has been a favorite of mine for many years. But still, I learn a few things, particularly about the humor. Thanks again.
It's been a while since I studied Wozzeck - but listening to David's choice of clips, and listening to Settling the Score podcast (Jon and Andy), it is clear how influential Wozzeck has been on film composers. Someone made the comment this was "a screenplay with background music". It is interesting to see how the music works in its own terms, but also as the soundtrack to the video production.
I saw the San Francisco Opera do this in the 80's. I also listened once before going, because that helps. I found it both intriguing and hard to comprehend, though there was clearly interesting stuff going on. This helps, thanks.
Many years ago I had not yet listened to Scriabin's piano sonatas properly, but when Marc André Hamelin released a box with all the sonatas i bought it and then spent many evenings on the sofa, trying to "get it". Eventually I did, and I listen to little else for a year or so. When I lay there on the sofa, my partner asked me if I liked it, and I answered truthfully that I did not know. She thought it rather hilarious, but to my knowledge almost all music that i really, really like, has gone through a similar process... apart from Mozart's piano concerto no. 20, which i loved at first... sight-ish. Some patterns have to be outsourced to the subconscious, so that they sound more familiar.
Not a convert, because it's been on my list for many years and I love Alban Berg, but thanks for the very good intro that not only convinced me, but enthusiastic to finally tackle it.
Superb! Wozzeck is one of my favourite operas (though I can never decide whether I prefer it or Lulu when it comes to Berg). I particularly liked your comments on leitmotifs and Mickey-Mousing - I've often thought how well much of the music in Wozzeck would work as film music.
Very interesting video, makes me wanna watch the entire opera. Which is quite the achievement: since watching a full length opera feels like a big commitment, I tend to stick to the classics that I know will be good. A very dark and dissonant opera is definitely one of those, but after this video I might just give it a try
This was especially interesting me. For most of my life, I've written heavy metal and noise rock. I'm about to start writing both electronic and orchestral music. So this was very interesting, coming at it from the other end, so to speak.
Same with me, mostly noise rock/post hardcore/noisy alternative and this feels just logical in context of those genres, doesn't it? Especially the way speech-sing is used here, my mind went straight to early Nick Cave and bands like Pere Ubu, among others (some parts of Wozzeck orchestration immediately made me think of that last Daughters album as well). The dissonances just fit and make sense and I'm happy David made this video, have to watch the whole opera now!
Wow! Thanks to this really brilliant way of presenting it, this is the most accessible any music from the 12-tone school has ever sounded to me. Now do Lulu! Or Webern! Of the big 3, Berg definitely seems like the easiest for a normal pop music fan to learn to love and Webern the hardest. Another thing that struck me watching this is how much influence these guys had on filmscore music. Anyway, keep 'em coming. You've really got a knack for revealing the musical hooks in abstract music.
You make such high quality videos, the classical music community on RU-vid owes you a great debt for opening us up to new pieces of music (and breaking them down, making the less-digestible ones at least palatable). Thank you!
Cheers and thanks for this beautiful video man. Berg saved expressionism for me. It was a turning point the time I could hear feelings and not just clustered stressful music. And this video explains it very well: it is an amazing human heartfelt piece of music that will change your life.
I worked as an extra in a Wozzeck production done by Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldoft (Germany) in 2017. The director was Stefan Herheim and his staging was based on the executions done in jails in the US by chemical death (not sure if you say it like that.) So we the extras were the public formed by family members of the victims killed by the sentenced one, which was Wozzeck. Most of those 90 minutes we had to sit behind a window looking in front with a poker face as the entire opera unfolded. So during rehearsals I went through a process of trying this "guinness" beer for the first time, just like you describe it here. At first it was shocking, then I started to find the patterns in the music and by the end I was curious and fascinated by this grim tale with such powerful musical language. It was certainly quite an experience for me, and I remember clearly that on most nights, at least one person left the theater in the middle of the show, perhaps because it was too much for them, either the music, the choreography or the director's vision that shocked them to the point of removing themselves from the theater. I for one found it to be one of kind. I've worked in many other productions as extra in that same opera company, but Wozzeck has a special place in my heart. (If anyone's interested, this is a little interview with the director and a few bits from the production - it's in German but still: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-yfOp-oWwlYQ.htmlsi=UMRVX488rDlxvql8 )
I've always been fascinated by this piece, it took me awhile to get into it but it is tremendously rewarding. I now have a real taste for 20th century and experimental music. Years ago I was in the U.S. premiere of an opera and my mentor was one of the world's sought-after Lulus, another wild atonal/pantonal opera. The road starts at Chopin and leads to Britten, then through 20th century music history until you wind up at the "death" of tonality. But if you back up a step or 2, you get to composers like Walton, Arvo Part, Gorecki, Glass, Reich, Cage, Crumb, Cowell, Barber, etc. If you develop your ear, a truly massive treasure chest awaits the persistent. Some of this crew were attempting to punch up post-romanticism with skillful forays into pandiatonicism, I think this is a very live edge of composition with plenty of pieces left to be written. Espeically if you mix in a little electronics, some prepared instruments, etc..Enjoy!
I have a ticket for Wozzeck at the Kungliga Operan in Stockholm in a few weeks. I will put these notes in thought. Thanks. This could be really interesting.
What a great intro guide to modern classical opera. When we studied Wozzek in theory class but it was only really shown for its 12-tone portion. Im afraid we missed a lot of what was important about this piece by just trying to understand it in relation to a compositional style. Really glad to have watched this, thanks for all your hard work. 😊 On the design side, I’m intrigued by your experimentation with a tab chapter system on the right hand side to help with attention! I am curious to see if it works better than the chapter system in the timeline baked into the RU-vid platform. Personally, I found the yellow colour a bit distracting. Maybe highlighting only the current chapter you are discussing and greying out the ones you are not might help if you continue to use it in the future?
opera is one of those things that i always found quite daunting, but this video really revealed to me how much i would appreciate it if i gave it a proper shot. in the future, i hope there will be more videos like this that help make opera more accessible. just like general classical music, it shouldn't be viewed as some aristocratic 'high art'.
I've heard Woozek before... I didn't like it (mainly for the lack of memorable arias) but it opened the doors to other operas that i love, for example: Król Roger by Karol Szymanowski or Arlecchino by Ferruccio Busoni. I find a lot of the techniques that Berg uses are really interesting and if used right they can expand the emotional spectrum of a piece. Thank you for making a video analyzing an opera, it is a genre that is often dismissed in favour of instrumental music.
What a wild staing on that opera! I saw it live once by the Chicago Lyric Opera back about 1964 and also have the old recording starring Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. The Chicago performance was much closer to normal. I've always been moved by the ending of this opera, with the little boy playing with his toy and singing "Hip hop!" and oblivious to the new reality that is his life. I can't confess to being a great fan of the opera, though I've certainly given it a fair chance (which I've also done with Guiness, which I'm also not crazy about). But I learned a great deal of insightful stuff from this video. Berg's other opera, "Lulu" - now there's a work I *really* hate. I'm afraid it goes way over the edge for me. Thanks David for your always intelligent observations.
So I initially found this video very confusing because I liked everything I heard almost from the start. Then I remembered three things: I like horror movies (and their soundtracks), I like both metal and prog rock, and I have heard this before. It took me a while to place it, but the downward run distortion and every musical bit of humor you pointed out has definitely been riffed on by WB cartoons and, I believe, the Animaniacs and Batman the Animated Series. The images I seem to see with the music are the big red hairy monster that appears in both Looney Toons and Animaniacs. If that's the case, that was one of my favorite episodes, and explains why my reaction to first hearing Wozzeck in your video was to expect something funny to happen. I also liked Guiness on first sip, but at the time, I drank solely black coffee and green tea, which may have had something to do with it.
