Berg makes the second choice: he puts us inside Wozzeck’s experience, which is thus the reality for us. The score’s “language of horror”^(I), with its break from previous expectations of both harmonic idiom and word setting, creates a disorientation, a fracture, that throws it into an alternate reality that is at once fragmented and yet, owing to its extreme formalism, inexorable. Pierre Boulez writes of its ” . . . strictness of form [which] controls the centrifugal forces,” and of the effect of a “scattered but rigorously unified whole which is the hallmark of his [Berg’s] theatrical conception.” There is no point in my attempting to track this in technical terms—I haven’t the theoretical knowledge, and in any event Berg himself was insistent that the forms not intrude as such on the listening experience, while Theodor Adorno notes that the forms are not meant to have lives of their own, but to function as a “subconscious unifying factor for words and music.” But many hearings down the road, that is exactly how the music’s progression feels to me.

And third: unlike the operas in the great mainstream of E-19 tragedies, Wozzeck provides no fulfillment, no sense that its narrative is actually over, and certainly no redemption. (These are among the reasons some of us find it truthful and powerful.) In even the meanest of verismo tales, or the early Strauss shockers, to say nothing of the apotheosis of protagonist-couple murder/suicide operas (Otello), the end of the personal story is also the end of that whole story. We know full well that there will be other tellings, but this one is over—we have “closure.” The characters we most invested in are gone and/or (as in Pagliacci and Carmen), facing certain justice, and the music writes finis in no uncertain terms. But miraculously, we are still here and at liberty, released to go about our lives, and that is enormously satisfying and reassuring. In Wozzeck, however, this is not the case. We could say that Wozzeck, like Canio or José or Michele, is crazed by jealousy, but this craziness is only one aspect of a general state of extreme disturbance, and hard to disentangle from other aspects of his social and psychological circumstances. He kills Marie numbly, wades into the pond in search of the knife numbly, drowns numbly—we can’t even call it suicide. Suicide would be an act of moral recognition, as with Edgardo or Otello, and thus part of our fervently desired closure; whereas Wozzeck’s death is as inadvertent as his life has been.

Further, the deaths are not the end. The end concerns the next generation: the children taunt Marie and Wozzeck’s child about the death of his mother, and the child, after a moment, follows them off on his hobby horse to view the scene, and the music simply peters out. Given the unobtrusive, almost casual, gestures with which it began, this huge, highly elaborated musical apparatus leaves us with this pattern:  dot-dot-dot [story] dot-dot-dot. The cycle of poverty, misery, and brutality begins another turn, as a matter of course. Among all the protagonist-couple tragedies of E-19, only one shares this sense of hopeless continuance, and it’s another contemporaneous outlier, Pelléas et Mélisande. Arkel’s “C’est la tour de la pauvre petit” (“It’s the poor little one’s turn”), sung as Mélisande drifts off into a death not really caused by the incidental wound she has sustained at the hands of her jealous husband, also tells us of the renewal of an inescapable pattern of infidelity and violence. From Pelléas, though, we can, if we choose, derive comfort from the implication of a better life beyond this one, and of a predestiny that governs human actions, thus relieving us of ultimate responsibility. Besides, its music is pretty—dreamlike and often dark, but not nightmarish. (See my post on last season’s Met production of Pelléas, Feb. 15, 2019.)