There are other resemblances between Pelléas and Wozzeck. The most obvious one is dramaturgical: the score is a direct setting of its source play, not an opera-ized adaptation of it. And for all the allusiveness and mysticism of Pelléas and the centrifugal scatterings of Wozzeck, each tells a simple and familiar story in a straightforward, linear narrative form. Each presents this narrative in a series of scenes that are connected by orchestral interludes within the acts, then tied off in closed form at the end of each act. But whereas Pelléas is laid out in five acts, in best French grand opera form, and luxuriates in a gradual and understated development, Wozzeck pushes urgently through three acts of five scenes each that adhere strictly to the traditional  “beginning, middle, and end” (“exposition, development, dénouement”, or, in Willi Reich’s scheme, “exposition, dénouement, catastrophe”) model of storytelling, and its musical structures, for all their detailing and form-within-form elaborations, emphatically reinforce this model.

Pelléas and Wozzeck also both use large orchestras that go far beyond accompanimental usages, and indeed often set the terms for the vocal utterances.^(I) They do this in contrasting ways, however—Pelléas by providing a bedding and frequent melodic cues for voices that are used in discreet extensions of “natural” spoken inflection, and Wozzeck by what I think of as a system of triangulation: the voices are, simultaneously or alternately, caught up in harmonic and rhythmic patterns that are essentially abstract or instrumental, and in apparent violation of traditionally “operatic” modes of expression; yet are frequently bound up with highly theatricalized spoken or quasi-spoken usages that are word-oriented; yet again, are taken to extremes of range and accent that seem designed to push them beyond the established bounds of technical control.

Whenever we’re speaking about Wozzeck in performance, it’s necessary to engage with this question of vocal settings, and of what sorts of voices are most useful in these demanding and unusual assignments. Perhaps it’s easiest to approach the matter role-by-role. First, though, a word or two about the general layout of the vocal score may help to clarify what we’re dealing with. The voice/piano reduction, by Fritz Heinrich Klein, is almost uniquely dense with instruction. It not only preserves Berg’s hundreds of nuanced articulations with respect to meter and tempo, constantly shifting dynamics, accent and the connection or detachment of individual notes, desired shadings, mandated registrational choices, optional pitches, the incorporation of the Sprechstimme, etc., but more than any other vocal score I can call to mind is rich in information (often on added staves) for the accompanist or reader as to the instrumental colors being evoked. Perhaps the fact that Berg self-published the score in lithograph before turning it over to Universal Edition accounts for some of this detail, which also reflects the general tendency in Modernist scores to exert tight authorial control over moment-to-moment expressive choices, the precise execution of which is seen by the composer as requisite for making sense of the writing. It’s the through-composed, music-drama analogue to the step finally taken by Rossini and other Romantic composers to notate passages of floridity and ornamentation formerly left to the singers’ devices. And though we assume that singers will be searching for ways to make all these interpretive gestures their own, it also tends to reinforce the feeling of individuals caught in a tightly controlled system, wherein their behavior is often externally determined and against which they scream in protest.