Wozzeck

Off on Sunday afternoon to see Alban Berg's opera "Wozzeck" by The Welsh National Opera Company. What am I going to make of it? Will it be too avante garde for me? To refer to something as avante garde is I suppose to refer to art that is ahead of its time now. Now, not back then in the 1920's when Berg wrote the opera. Yet his music, together with that of Schoenberg and Webern, is still difficult, is still unassimilated into the musical nerves of your average modern music lover. There are people who like this twelve tone scale music but they, I guess, are few and far between. Just as modern poetry is enjoyed by an ever diminishing group of people - mainly other poets - it seems to be that music by these three German composers is written to be heard by an elite, and that elite are other composers who work in the same genre. So the ordinary music lover like me, trying as best he can to enter this seemingly sealed world, finds it difficult to get to grips with it. It's rather like, I think, trying to engage in Calculus without the basic knowledge of mathematics to help: like trying to read a foreign language without a dictionary to hand.
One thing struck me about the story of Wozzeck: none of the characters are what you would expect to find in romantic opera. While the subject is tragic the plot does not follow the course of most tragedies where the central character is a man of high regard brought down by flaws in his character or illness or social conditions. It is not a Don Carlos or a Madame Butterfly or a Boheme; it's more in line with the drama of German Expressionism. The central character is someone who is low to start with; he can't get much lower except by doing something horrid.
In The Spectator last week Lloyd Evans, the theatre critic, wrote complimentarilly of Horvath's play from the 20's or 30's, "Judgement Day", but he said: "I admired it a lot. I just didn't like it much. Simple reason. The characters are all ghastly people". I have the feeling that that's how I will respond to Alban Berg's "Wozzeck".
We shall see.