Wozzeck is a genuine downer. Since the time of the early Romantics (let’s say Lucia di Lammermoor, 1835) we have had plenty of operas that end with the death of one or both protagonists, and some in which one protagonist (usually the woman) dies at the hand of the other (the man, crazed by jealousy). We have even had a few in which all this takes place in a socially inverted, de-idealized world. Wozzeck relates this same tale, but is different from those many other works in three ways. First, its world is not merely that of struggling working folk (as in Il Tabarro) or marginalized itinerants (e.g., I Pagliacci), but of a true underclass. And from this world there is not even an illusion of escape. Whereas Giorgietta and Luigi, Nedda and Silvio, et al. can briefly dream of flying to another life on the wings of their love, Wozzeck and Marie share no such fantasy, and Marie’s capitulation to the Drum Major partakes not of love, transcendence, or even upward mobility. It’s just part of a sad, hopeless search for a fleeting scrap of primal satisfaction, for a moment of being wanted for something.

Second, this world of the Untermensch is of nightmarish quality. This is not necessarily true of the play, as eventually assembled by Karl-Emil Franzos and then Paul Landau from Georg Büchner’s unordered scenes. The play can be read and performed as straightforward lower-depths naturalism with an unbalanced protagonist. But that is not how Berg set it after first seeing it in what was, I gather, an Expressionistically influenced Vienna production, then enduring several miserable years in the Austrian military, only to emerge into the shambles of post-WW1 Europe. His choice is the same as that represented in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, which adorned the cover of the Odyssey LP re-release of the Mitropoulos recording.^(I) In the foreground of the picture is the now-iconic image of the terrorized figure’s face under the lurid, striated sky. (I’ve always taken the figure for female. For the “real-life” circumstances of the painting, see the Wikipedia reference.) In the background—as I’m sure art critics have expatiated on, if only I were well enough read in art criticism to cite them—an unconcerned pair out for a stroll overlook an inlet with sailboats riding on placid waters. They are in a world, not far distant, of urban/pastoral bourgeois unconcern. There are only two possible interpretations. Either the couple’s world is the objectively real one, and the figure experiencing a psychotic, or at least hallucinatory, episode, or the the figure perceives the true reality, to which the couple is oblivious. Either way, the foregrounding of the figure’s face and the dominance of “her” ghastly mental world give us a powerful shove into her reality.