Then there is the Sprechgesang itself. Boulez touches on this as a performance problem which he wonders “can ever find a satisfactory solution,” and notes (correctly—see below) that it is especially knotty for female voices. Berg, citing as ur-precedent its use in Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (a brief chamber piece for female voice) and the even shorter one-act opera Die Glückliche Hand, calls it “rhythmic declamation,” which is perhaps Boulez’s cue for asserting that observance of the time values of notes is more important than enforcement of the spokesung pitches. (His recording of Wozzeck, so precisely executed orchestrally, illustrates this approach, sometimes to a fault.) The extension of this usage into roles of the length and vocal stress of those in Wozzeck, set against the sonorous format established by the opera’s vast orchestra, is daunting for both performers and listeners. For Wozzeck himself, his extensive use of it is certainly intended as his “scream of protest” and of terror, of hallucination. It also foretells Schönberg’s later employment of the device in Moses und Aron, as representing the struggle of a character with powerful feelings and notions, but not the gift of articulating them. Wozzeck‘s opening two scenes set the pattern. The first, with The Captain in his quarters, is entirely sung, even when Wozzeck comes close to going too far with his superior in his quasi-arioso about wealth as the pre-requisite of morality.^(I) The second, set in a field where Wozzeck and his companion Andres are cutting sticks, drags us into the world Sprechgesang inevitably invokes, a Zwischenrealismus that belongs to neither our everyday spoken world nor the operatically natural sung one. Except for three bars that are marked as “becoming singing” and three more marked “wholly sung,” Wozzeck dwells in this “world of between” throughout the scene, speaksinging, over the role’s whole compass, his perceptions of a head rolling in the grass, of rumblings in the ground, a sky in flames, and his conspiracy theory about the Freemasons, while Andres tries to stay sane with his (sung) hunting song and his more quotidian uses of Sprechstimme.

Not until his final scene (the drowning) will Wozzeck stay at such length and at such extremes of pitch in Sprechstimme. But throughout its duration, his writing will alternate between that usage and singing that is often of only slightly different effect, since the carrying of word-oriented, one-syllable-per-note declamation above the passaggio inclines so much in that direction. Need it, though? We should remind ourselves that Berg (and Schönberg) came of age in a time when theatrical (and for that matter, all public) speech was far more vigorous than it is now—stronger and wider in inflectional range, and put to more overtly rhetorical, histrionic use. Declamation over live musical accompaniment (mélodrame) was common, and in the recitation of leading male actors the ascent of the voice to pitches well above the normal speaking range took on a quasi-operatic quality that no one deemed artificial. It is that model, at once of greater impact yet less tiring to hear, that Berg would have had in his ear when setting what is clearly a Heldenbariton part of the higher sort. (For an extended discussion of these kinds of theatre rhetoric, with numerous references to recordings, see Opera as Opera, Part IV, Chap. 5, and the associated endnotes, which include citations of German and Austrian actors that are especially relevant here.)