Though I missed the City Opera’s Wozzeck, 1952 was also my first encounter with the opera, via a radio broadcast of the recently released Mitropoulos/NYP recording. My only previous exposure to atonality (apart from subliminally absorbed noir movie scores) had been a single listening, in a record store listening booth, to Berg’s Lyric Suite. My teenage self had wondered what the music could possibly be about, and why it would called “Lyric.” But over the next few years, I heard further examples of Second Viennese School music, read Joseph Kerman’s groundbreaking Opera as Drama, with its chapter on Wozzeck, as well as other articles, encyclopedia entries, and reviews of the productions of Wozzeck that were now proliferating around the world. The Brecht/Weill revival, spearheaded in New York by the Theatre de Lys production of The Threepenny Opera, Lotte Lenya’s recordings, and the Brecht advocacy of Eric Bentley, had given me some of the flavor of the culture of interwar Berlin. By the time Berg’s masterpiece at last reached the Metropolitan Opera in 1959, I was reasonably well prepared to receive it.

And it made an overwhelming impression on me. The production was conducted by Karl Böhm, staged by Herbert Graf, and designed by Caspar Neher, three men whose professional lives extended back to the Weimar years, and who had the métier in their bones. Böhm had demanded, and received, twenty-four orchestral rehearsals. Graf’s staging kept the narrative taut. Neher, Brecht’s frequent collaborator, produced stark, haunting designs in the Modernist style I’d seen reproduced in Bentley’s In Search of Theatre and elsewhere. This first Met Wozzeck was sung in English. I was even then not a fan of opera in translation, and certainly want this one in German now. But for getting acquainted with this of all operas, hearing the text in one’s own language was without doubt an immersive factor. The Met has certainly not matched the cast of those early seasons in overall strength: Eleanor Steber and Hermann Uhde in the leads,  Paul Franke (The Captain), Karl Dönch (The Doctor), Kurt Baum (The Drum Major), Charles Anthony (Andres), and, as The Fool, Alessio de Paolis, who was something we don’t have anymore, a comprimario divo. In several performances over three seasons, Wozzeck burned in.

In the Twenty-First Century, we can safely say that Wozzeck, along with Lulu, has escaped the confines of the Invisible Modernist Canon to join The Repertory. And that is true in the sense that from year to year we can expect to note down a production or two or three somewhere in the world, and that several major recordings of it exist. Still, it is not a work that one expects to find regularly recalled by acclamation to the schedule of any one opera company. Beyond the fact that its rehearsal and performance requirements always forbid adding it to the list of repeatable pieces that can be easily renewed (a couple of cast changes, some brush-up rehearsals) is the additional one that not many people want to see it often.