Wozzeck

with Italian and English surtitles
La Fenice staging

In his composition of Wozzeck Alban Berg, who also wrote the libretto, remained essential faithful to the unfinished fragments of Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, creating three acts, each divided into five scenes, and seeking perfect harmony between the dramaturgy and music. The composer exalts the Stimmungsgehalt (ambience), which runs through Büchner’s text, making the expressive potential, the visionary and hallucinatory force of the German playwright’s language erupt, where every word, every gesture has an explosive charge. And he does so through an expressionistic use of voices and instruments, focusing on a highly suggestive timbre and on a non-dogmatic recourse to atonality, so that some pages of the score still seem to lend themselves to a tonal interpretation, while others take the path of dissolution without return, taking Mahler’s lacerating legacy to the extreme. It was November 3, 1942, when Alban Berg’s Wozzeck premièred at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. In the middle of the war, with the risk of irritating the German allies, the first Italian performance of the opera took place (in the rhythmic version in Italian by Alberto Mantelli). It was a reckless undertaking, which saw the great Tullio Serafin on the podium and Tito Gobbi (Wozzeck) and Gabriella Gatti (Maria) in the two main roles. After so many decades, the pioneering experience of that time is returning to Teatro La Fenice.