After Schoenberg, the most powerful exponent of expressionism in music was his student Alban Berg. Berg’s opera Wozzeck, first conceived during World War I, was completed in 1923. In general plan, this opera can be described as Wagnerian, in that it depends on musical continuity carried by the orchestra. It uses leitmotivs and contains no arias. In more specific matters, its musical style owes much to Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire.

Berg set a remarkable fragmentary play by the German dramatist Georg Büchner, a half-legible draft that was discovered after his death in 1837. In a series of brief, savage scenes spoken in the plainest vernacular, Büchner presents an almost paranoid vision of the helpless poor oppressed by society. Berg’s music for the play’s dialogue is all highly intense, and he kept the tension up by writing continuous orchestral interludes during the blackouts between one scene and the next.

Franz Wozzeck is an inarticulate and impoverished soldier, the lowest cog in the military machine. He is troubled by visions and tormented for no apparent reason by his captain and by the regimental doctor. Wozzeck’s lover, Marie, sleeps with a drum major, who beats Wozzeck up when he objects. Finally Wozzeck murders Marie, goes mad, and drowns himself. Büchner’s play provided the perfect material for an expressionist opera.

Act III; Interlude after scene ii Scene ii is the murder scene. When Wozzeck stabs Marie, she screams, and all the leitmotivs associated with her blare away in the orchestra, as if all the events of her lifetime were flashing before her eyes.

A blackout follows, and the stark interlude between the scenes consists of a single pitch played by the orchestra in two gut-bursting crescendos — another example of avant-garde stretching of musical effects to the limit.

Scene iii The lights snap on again. In a sordid tavern, Wozzeck gulps a drink and seeks consolation with Marie’s friend Margret. Berg’s idea of a ragtime piano opens the scene — one of many signs that European music of the 1920s had woken up to American influences. But it is a distorted, dissonant ragtime, heard through the ears of someone on the verge of a breakdown.

The music is disjointed, confused, shocking. When Margret gets up on the piano and sings a song, her song is distorted, too:

Suddenly she notices blood on Wozzeck’s hand. It smells like human blood, she says. In a dreadful climax to the scene, the apprentices and street girls in the inn come out of the shadows and close in on Wozzeck. He manages to escape during another blackout, as a new orchestral interlude surges frantically and furiously.

The whole of scene iii is built on a single short rhythm, repeated over and over again with only slight modifications — but presented in many different tempos. This twitching “master rhythm” is marked above the two previous examples, first at a fast tempo, then at a slow one; we first heard it in the timpani in the interlude between scenes ii and iii. Another obvious instance comes when Margret first notices the blood:

Here is yet another kind of ostinato — very different from Stravinsky’s (see page 317) or Schoenberg’s in the song “Night” (see page 322). Even though this master rhythm may elude the listener in a good many of its appearances, its hypnotic effect contributes powerfully to the sense of nightmare and fixation.

Scene iv Fatefully, Wozzeck returns to the pond where he murdered Marie. The orchestra engages in some nature illustration; we can even hear frogs croaking around the pond. Wozzeck’s mind has quite cracked. He shrieks for the knife (in powerful Sprechstimme reminiscent of Pierrot lunaire: see page 321), discovers the corpse, and sees the blood-red moon and the pond, too, seemingly filled with blood. He falls into the water to wash himself.

At this point, his principal tormenters walk by. The captain and the doctor hear the macabre orchestral gurgles and understand that someone is drowning, but like people watching a mugging on a crowded city street, they make no move to help. “Let’s get away! Come quickly!” says the terrified captain — in plain, naturalistic speech, rather than the Sprechstimme used by Wozzeck.

In the blackout after this scene, emotional music wells up in the orchestra, mourning for Wozzeck, Marie, and humanity at large. Here Berg adopts and even surpasses the late Romantic style of Gustav Mahler. Anguished leitmotivs from earlier in the opera, mainly in the brass, surge into a great climax, then subside.

Scene v Berg (following Büchner) has yet another turn of the knife waiting for us in the opera’s final scene. Some children who are playing with Wozzeck’s little son run off to view his mother’s newly discovered corpse. Uncomprehending, he follows them. The icy sweetness of the music here is as stunning as the violent music of the tavern scene and the weird pond music. In turning Büchner’s visionary play fragment into an expressionist opera, Berg created one of the great modernist theater pieces of the twentieth century.