Boston Symphony Orchestra
Berg’s Wozzeck (concert performance)
Performers
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons, Music Director and Conductor
Bo Skovhus, Wozzeck
Christine Goerke, Marie
Renée Tatum, Margret
Christopher Ventris, Drum Major
Mauro Peter, Andres
Franz Hawlata, Doctor
Additional soloist to be announced
Program
BERG Wozzeck (concert performance)
Event Duration
The program will last approximately 90 minutes with no intermission. Please note that there will be no late seating.At a Glance
Austrian composer Alban Berg began his opera Wozzeck on the eve of World War I and finished it in its aftermath. The opera is based on the play by German playwright Georg Büchner, left incomplete at his early death in 1837. The opera’s poor, uneducated antihero is a soldier in the Hessian army. His strange ways have made him a figure of fun to his superiors, the Doctor and the Captain; he makes scarcely enough money to support his common-law wife, Marie, and their illegitimate son. Wozzeck’s nature and circumstances lead to his madness and to the work’s tragic and strange conclusion. The score is dedicated to Alma Mahler.
Berg was still a relatively untried composer with few real successes when he completed Wozzeck, though he was known for his association with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg. A successful performance of two of his Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6, and a copy of the opera’s vocal score convinced conductor Erich Kleiber to stage the work at the Berlin State Opera. A critical success, this intensely expressionistic and poetic work was slowly taken up by other companies in Europe; its American premiere was given by the Philadelphia Opera Company and Leopold Stokowski in 1931, and it has since become a standard work in the major opera houses of the world. Until the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concert performances of Wozzeck in Boston last week, the only previous BSO performances of the complete opera were under Seiji Ozawa’s direction in April 1987, with Benjamin Luxon singing the title role.