I make the score 15-0. I was going to put it in the books at 9-0, which in major league baseball is the score designated in the rare event that a team does not show up, or field a full complement of players, or, if it’s the home team, it or its fans commit some egregious infraction that does not allow the game to be completed. In those cases, a forfeit is declared, and one run per inning is assigned to the forfeitee—hence, 9-0. However, the Berg team, after long, hard practice, did suit up, take the field, and make every effort to compete. They just couldn’t score against the overwhelming Kentridge lineup. And since Wozzeck has not nine innings, but fifteen scenes, and since in Little League or certain other games fifteen runs is often the margin at which a “Mercy Rule” is invoked and the game terminated, 15-0 seems just and proper. Although the game was over almost before it began, I’ll file a report on it down below. First, though, I’m going to back up and look at some aspects of the opera itself and its performance history, particularly here in New York and in my lifetime—as it happens, two coeval chronicles.

New York and Wozzeck grew familiar, if not intimate, over a span of twelve months in the years 1951-52. True, there had been the American premiere under Stokowski with his Philadelphia Orchestra, in a production designed by Robert Edmond Jones, in 1931, and it had traveled to the old Metropolitan Opera House for a single performance. After that, nothing but concert fragments for twenty years, during which the opera, widely produced in Europe after its 1925 world premiere (Berlin Staatsoper, under Erich Kleiber) was choked off there by Nazi censorship—save for a brief run (remarkable, given the nature of the regime) at the Rome opera in 1942. That production had Tito Gobbi and the American soprano Dorothy Dow as Wozzeck and Marie, with Tullio Serafin conducting.^(I)

Then, in 1951, Wozzeck, presented in the New York Philharmonic’s subscription series, became the most audacious of the concert-opera projects Dmitri Mitropoulos undertook before leaving the orchestra for opera proper at the Met and elsewhere. Those performances also provided the materials for the first complete recording of the work, on the Columbia label. Exactly a year later Joseph Rosenstock, in his first season after taking over the musical directorship of the New York City Opera from Laszlo Halasz, led New York’s first run of theatrical performances, in English, directed by Theodore Komisarjevsky and sung by a cast that included Marko Rothmüller (also Covent Garden’s Wozzeck that same year) in the title role, Patricia Neway as Marie, and two of Mitropoulos’ principals, David Lloyd (Andres) and Ralph Herbert (The Doctor). These three performances sold well, and the opera was brought back for two more in the Fall ’52 season.^(II)