¹ Büchner, Georg, Werke und Briefe, ed. Pörnbacher, Karl, Schaub, Gerhard, Simm, Hans-Joachim and Ziegler, Edda (Munich, 1988)Google Scholar. This ‘Münchner Ausgabe’ contains the four fragments H1–4 (Entwurfsstufen, 197–232), a reading version (Lesefassung, 233–69), and an extensive appendix, including Doctor Clarus's expert report (586–682). In this article I use the standard notation, in which, for example, H4:7 refers to scene 7 of fragment 4. Throughout, page numbers refer to this edition of Woyzeck.

² This is one of those apparently simple phrases that is impossible to render accurately in English. Literally it is ‘Slowly, Woyzeck, slowly!’ – and one has to translate it this way to make sense of what follows. But ‘Langsam!’ is used in situations when an English speaker would warn ‘Be careful!’ Translations are my own unless indicated otherwise. Many performing versions imitate the working-class vernacular of the original German with idiomatic English expressions and phrases. Here I have mostly aimed for a more literal translation to best elucidate what Büchner and Berg were doing.

³ ‘Sehn Sie, wir gemeine Leut’ – das hat keine Tugend; es kommt einem nur so die Natur’ (‘You see, we common people – we have no virtue; we can only do what comes naturally’). Büchner, Woyzeck, 224. This line is not included in Berg's Wozzeck.

⁴ The likely opening scene sees Woyzeck and Andres collecting sticks in ‘open countryside’ (Freies Feld) and likely the third scene has the Showman maintaining that his animals are every bit as civilised as a human. For a detailed treatment of geological or ‘deep time’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Rudwick, Martin J.S., Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ O'Rourke, Stephanie, ‘Staring into the Abyss of Time’, Representations 148 (2019), 30–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 50, 49. O'Rourke discusses how Friedrich, with his interest in geology, incorporates James Hutton's discovery that the age of the world is not commensurate with human history, but rather has ‘no vestige of a beginning, – no prospect of an end’, and that the geological features that furnish a static backdrop to human history flow like a liquid in deep time giving rise to other worlds radically separate from human activity and experience: Theory of the Earth (1785).

⁶ ‘I simply wanted to compose good music … to translate [Georg Büchner's] poetic language into music’: Alban Berg, ‘A Word about Wozzeck’ (1927), in Jarman, Douglas, Alban Berg: ‘Wozzeck’ (Cambridge, 1989), 152Google Scholar.

⁷ Wozzeck: ‘Sehn Sie Herr Hauptmann, Geld, Geld! … Ja, wenn ich ein Herr wär, und hätt’ einen Hut und eine Uhr und ein Augenglas und könnt’ vornehm reden, ich wollte schon tugendhaft sein!’ (‘Look Captain, it's a question of money. If I were a gentleman and had a hat and a watch and an eyeglass and could talk elegantly, I would be virtuous!’). Büchner, Woyzeck, 224.

⁸ Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts (Toronto, 2002), 89. Walter Benjamin thought that the ‘essential quality’ of art was not ‘the imparting of information. Yet any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information – hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations’. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923), in Illuminations (London, 1999), 70–82.

⁹ Operatic music performs what Roman Jakobson called ‘intersemiotic translation’, defined as the ‘interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of non-verbal sign systems’. Roman Jakobson, ‘On the Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, The Translation Studies Reader (London, 2004), 138–43, at 139. The non-verbal sign system in this case is one of musical meaning – with the understanding that musical meaning cannot be read as it can with language.

¹⁰ Berg, ‘A Word about Wozzeck’, 152.

¹¹ Theodor Adorno, ‘Alban Berg. Zur Uraufführung des Wozzeck’, Musikblätter des Anbruch VII/10 (December 1925), 531–7; reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften [GS] 18 (Berlin, 1984), 456–64. Theodor Adorno, ‘Die Oper Wozzeck’, Der Scheinwerfer: Blätter der städtischen Bühnen (Essen) 3/4 (1929), 5–11. Reprinted in GS 18 (1984), 472–9. Theodor Adorno, ‘Wozzeck in Partitur’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (18 April 1956), 10. Reprinted in GS 18 (1984), 480–2. Theodor Adorno, ‘Alban Berg: Oper und Moderne’ [Radio broadcast, 1969]. Printed GS 18 (1984), 650–72.

¹² Adorno's big-S (Hegelian) Subject is the most advanced individual subject possible at a particular historical juncture (formed in relation to the objective material and social conditions); it is the Subject and not the biographical subject, that is, the composer, who speaks in ‘great’ music.

¹³ Carl Dalhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge, 1987), 81ff. That Schoenberg's is the most authentic modernist musical style is the main argument of Adorno's The Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, 2006 [1949]).

¹⁴ Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans [Il tempo che resta: una commento alla lettera ai Romani, 2000], trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, 2005), 37, 38. I retain Dailey's translation ‘impotential’, rather than the more obvious ‘impotence’, because ‘impotential’ is the linguistic term for the ‘as if’ modality that Agamben finds in Adorno's aesthetics.

¹⁵ Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London, 1974), 247.

¹⁶ The ‘messianic’ here is a form of time in which one anticipates the ‘coming community’, rather than the coming of the messiah as in traditional Jewish thought.

¹⁷ Theodor Adorno, Alban Berg, Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge, 1991 [1968]), 17.

¹⁸ George Perle, The Operas of Alban Berg. I: Wozzeck (Berkeley, 1980), 35.

¹⁹ Leo Treitler, ‘Wozzeck and the Apocalypse: An Essay in Historical Criticism’, Critical Inquiry 3/2 (Winter, 1976), 251–270, at 258.

²⁰ Treitler, ‘Wozzeck and the Apocalypse’, 256.

²¹ Treitler, ‘Wozzeck and the Apocalypse’, 254.

²² Treitler, ‘Wozzeck and the Apocalypse’, 255.

²³ Büchner's dissertation, ‘Mémoire sur le système nerveux du barbeaux (Cyprinus barbus L.)’ (1836), written in political exile in Strasbourg, examined the nervous system of the barbel (a kind of carp) in an attempt to confirm the theory that the fish skull had evolved from its topmost vertebra.

²⁴ Büchner's political pamphlet ‘Der Hessische Landbote’ (1834) is considered an important precursor of Marx and Engels's Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848); his treatment of time under capital in Woyzeck (1836/7) also prefigures Marx's discussion of the working day in chapter 10 of Volume 1 of Das Kapital (1867).

²⁵ See Maurice Benn, The Drama of Revolt: A Critical Study of Georg Büchner (Cambridge, 1976), 53–62.

²⁶ Pierre-Simon Laplace's view can be taken as typical of most (what we would now call) physicists of the time: ‘We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and of the cause of the one to follow’: A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, trans. Frederick Wilson Truscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory (New York, 1951 [1814]), 4. This famous passage gave rise to the well-known idea of ‘Laplace's Demon’ who can predict and retrodict every event from the beginning until the end of time.

²⁷ Georg Büchner, ‘On Cranial Nerves’, in Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings (London, 1993), 183–6. The German text can be found in the Münchner Ausgabe. The ‘Trial Lecture’ was given on commencing his career as a Privatdozent at Zurich. The premise of Reddick's The Shattered Whole is that the underlying unity of nature that Büchner advocates in this lecture is the key to understanding his literary work, an important insight that I am indebted to in this article.

²⁸ Büchner, ‘Cranial Nerves’, 183.

²⁹ Büchner, ‘Cranial Nerves’, 184. It is important to understand that by this time most biologists already understood and accepted that some form of evolution had occurred.

³⁰ Büchner, ‘Cranial Nerves’, 185.

³¹ ‘Many of the processes and structures found in living cells are being maintained at or near phase transitions’, that is, on a virtual knife-edge between two very different states, meaning that the behaviour of organisms can never be explained by simple mechanical causality: Christopher G. Langton, ‘Life at the Edge of Chaos’, in Artificial Life II, ed. Christopher G. Langton, Charles Taylor, Doyne Farmer and Steen Rasmussen (Redwood City, CA, 1992), 85–6. It is important to realise (given the old objection to Lucretius's ‘swerve’ as the basis for free will) that ‘indeterminism’ does not simply mean ‘random’: the processes governing life are extremely finely balanced; it is just that the mode of causality at work is emergent rather than efficient.

³² Büchner's work can be seen to follow a similar path to Schopenhauer's On Morality, where, in direct opposition to Kant, he attempted to derive a psychological explanation of morality from the way people act in the world rather from some predetermined set of (Christian) dictates. This prefigures Nietzsche, who held onto Schopenhauer's psychologism and empiricism long after he outgrew his metaphysics.

³³ The Idealists have not produced ‘Menschen von Fleisch und Blut’, ‘deren Leid und Freude mich mitempfinden macht, und deren Tun und Handeln mir Abscheu oder Bewunderung einflößt’: letter to his family, 28 July 1835, in Büchner, Werke, 305–7.

³⁴ ‘Ich verlange in allem Leben, Möglichkeit des Daseins, und dann ist's gut; wir haben dann nicht zu frage, ob es schön, ob es hässlich ist, das Gefühl, dass Was geschaffen sei, Leben habe, stehe über diesen Beiden, und sei das einzige Kriterium in Kunstsachen’. ‘Diese Idealismus ist die schmählichste Verachtung der menschlichen Natur. Man versuche es einmal und senke sich in das Leben des Geringsten und gebe es wieder, in den Zuckungen, den Andeutungen, dem ganzen feinen, kaum bemerkten Mienenspiel.’ ‘Man muss die Menschheit lieben, um in das eigentümliche Wesen jedes einzudringen, es darf einem keiner zu gering, keiner zu hässlich sein, erst dann kann man sie verstehen; das unbedeutendste Gesicht macht einen tieferen Eindruck als die bloße Empfindung des Schönen, und man kann die Gestalten aus sich heraustreten lassen, ohne etwas vom Äußern hinein zu kopieren, wo einem kein Leben, keine Muskeln, kein Puls entgegen schwillt und pocht’: Büchner, Lenz, in Werke, 144–5. English translation: Büchner, Lenz, in Complete Plays, 148–50.

³⁵ For the similarities between Woyzeck and Lenz, see Benn, Drama of Revolt, 194–216, passim.

³⁶ Slightly earlier in Lenz, Büchner explains: ‘the simplest, purest kind of human nature was most closely connected to elemental nature; the more refined the mental life and emotions of a person became, the more this elemental sense was blunted’: Lenz, in Complete Plays, 147.

³⁷ Details of the case, letters from J.C. Woyzeck, and all Büchner's sources including Dr Clarus's original reports can be found in Büchner, Werke, 586–682. See also Reddick, Shattered Whole, 324–8, and Benn, Drama of Revolt, 218–26.

³⁸ Büchner also drew on other cases, so the fictional Woyzeck is a composite. Benn, Drama of Revolt, 219.

³⁹ Clarus's report appeared in Zeitschrift für die Staatsarzneikunde in 1825, a journal to which Büchner's father subscribed; Benn, Drama of Revolt, 218–19. Translation in Complete Plays, 325–7.

⁴⁰ Rather in the manner that Heidegger talks about Galileo, Taylor is using Bacon as a convenient name for the general intellectual shift towards empiricism that rippled through Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But there is a direct link to the German thinkers here. Apart from the fact that German and French Enlightenment thinkers were most strongly influenced by Bacon through their reading of subsequent British empiricists Locke, Hume and Hobbes, Kant certainly knew Bacon's work intimately and mentioned him in his lectures, and Herder (a student of Kant) quoted Bacon copiously, even whole pages from Novum Organum and other works: H.B. Nisbet, ‘Herder and Francis Bacon’, The Modern Language Review 62/2 (1967), 267–83. Büchner, as one would expect, ‘devoured’ Herder in his youth, but later rejected his romantic view of history: Benn, Drama of Revolt, 75, 13.

⁴¹ Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, 1975), 8–9.

⁴² ‘Er hat keine Moral!’, ‘Er hat keine Tugend’*, ‘Er hat ein Kind ohne den Segen der Kirche!’, ‘wenn's geregnet hat, und den weissen Strümpfen so nachseh’, wie sie über die Gasse springen – verdammt! Ich hab’ auch Fleisch und Blut!’*: Nicholas John, ed., Wozzeck: Berg (London, 1990), 62–3. Quotations with an asterisk are not used in Berg's Wozzeck.

⁴³ ‘Er hat wieder gepisst, auf der Straße gepisst’: John, Wozzeck, 69. Berg changed ‘pissen’ to ‘husten’ throughout the scene to get the opera past the censors. It makes no sense with this substitution and the original ‘pissen’ and its cognates are almost always used in performance today.

⁴⁴ ‘Aber Doktor, wenn Einem die Natur kommt!’, ‘Die Natur kommt! Aberglaube, abscheulicher Aberglaube! … Hab’ ich nicht nachgewiesen, dass der musculus sphincter vesicae dem Willen unterworfen ist?’: John, Wozzeck, 72. Berg was forced to substitute ‘das Zwerchfell’ (the diaphragm) for ‘der musculus sphincter vesicae’ (the muscles of the bladder sphincter), to agree with his use of ‘husten’ (to cough).

⁴⁵ ‘ärgern ist ungesund, ist unwissenschaftlich!’: John, Wozzeck, 73.

⁴⁶ ‘Wenn es noch ein Molch wäre, der einem unpässlich wird’: John, Wozzeck, 73. In the scene in the Professor's courtyard (the Professor is almost certainly the same character as the Doctor), he explicitly calls Woyzeck an ‘animal’ (‘Thier’).

⁴⁷ In modern critical editions, such as the reading version in the Münchner Ausgabe, the scenes outside and inside the fair are grouped together as scene 3, which occur before the scene with the Doctor, scene 8. In Berg's Franzos-Landau edition they were placed as scenes 5 and 6, after the scene with the Doctor, which is scene 4, as in the opera.

⁴⁸ There are two occasions when it seems the donkey ought to nod its head, although this was not indicated by Büchner.

⁴⁹ Trans. in Complete Plays, 117. Not in Berg's edition. The donkey is a horse in some editions.

⁵⁰ ‘Was ist der Unterschied zwischen einem Menschen und einem Esel? Staub, Sand, Dreck sind beide. Nur das Ausdrücken ist verschieden’: John, Wozzeck, 77. In Berg's edition, but not set.

⁵¹ John 8:3 and 8:11. Peter Schwartz has discovered that in the decades preceding Büchner's work on the play, the ‘Let he who is without sin’ crops up in numerous Enlightenment texts that argue that social conditions are complicit in many crimes and that true justice cannot be done unless there is better education and better laws. Peter J. Schwartz, ‘“Guckt euch selbst an!” Büchner's Woyzeck and the Pericope Adulterae’, in Georg Büchner: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Robert Gillett, Ernest Schonfield and Daniel Steuer (Leiden, 2017), 79–91.

⁵² ‘und sündige hinfort nicht mehr’: John, Wozzeck, 100.

⁵³ For example, in The Genealogy of Morality, as discussed in later footnotes.

⁵⁴ ‘Wer das lesen könnte’: John, Wozzeck, 74. ‘Ich hab's heraus! Es war ein Gebild am Himmel, und Alles in Glut! Ich bin Vielem auf der Spur!’, ‘Steht nicht geschrieben: “Und sieh, es ging der Rauch auf vom Land, wie ein Rauch vom Ofen”’: John, Wozzeck, 68. This is taken almost ad verbatim from Genesis 19:28, where the aftermath of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is described. Büchner makes two earlier references to the same story.

⁵⁵ It is not completely clear what Büchner meant by ‘Zickwolfin’ here, but undoubtedly a derogatory term for a woman. See footnote 67 in Georg Büchner, Dantons Tod and Woyzeck, ed. Margaret Jacobs (Manchester, 1996), 165.

⁵⁶ A considerable amount of effort has been made over the years to determine Berg's sources for the libretto and how he altered them. This includes Gerd Ploebsch, Alban Bergs Wozzeck: Dramaturgie und musikalischer Aufbau (Strasbourg, 1968) and George Perle, ‘Woyzeck and Wozzeck’, Musical Quarterly 53 (1967), 206–18; Ernst Hilmar, ‘Die vershiedenen Entwicklungsstadien in den Kompositionsskizzen’, in 50 Jahre Wozzeck von Alban Berg, ed. Harald Goertz et al. (Graz, 1978), 22–6; and, more recently, Patricia Hall, who details which editions were used at what time (Berg acquired ten versions of the play in all) in ‘Chapter 5: Berg's Büchner Text and the Genesis of Form’ in Berg's Wozzeck (Oxford, 2011), 69–88. Berg made the first draft of his libretto in a copy of Paul Landau's 1909 edition, which contains the same reading of the manuscript supplied by Franzos in the first publication, but in a slightly different order (Georg Büchner, Wozzeck-Lenz: Zwei Fragmente, ed. Paul Landau (Leipzig, 1909)). Berg's fifteen scenes occur in the same order as they do in Landau's twenty-five – it is not true that Berg re-ordered the scenes of the Franzos edition to create his dramatic structure, as some scholars once claimed (Jack M. Stein, ‘From Woyzeck to Wozzeck: Alban Berg's Adaptation of Büchner’, Germanic Review 47 (1972), 169). It has been shown that during the composition process, probably in 1921, Berg also used Georg Witkowski's 1920 edition to make sure his text was as close to Büchner as possible. Witkowski, unlike Landau, had gone back to the original editions and improved on some of Franzos's free or erroneous readings. (Peter Petersen, ‘Büchner aus zweiter Hand: Neue Thesen über Bergs Wozzeck-Libretto’, in Alban Berg Symposion (Wien 1980), 80–90.)

⁵⁷ Reddick, The Shattered Whole, 306–7. Scholars assume that in Büchner's plan, the vision of the head rolling in this opening scene is meant as a premonition of Woyzeck's own beheading, which would have ended the play.

⁵⁸ Perle, Wozzeck, 35. Jack M. Stein was perhaps justified in his assertion that the writing of musicologists (chiefly Ploebsch and Perle) who have considered Berg's libretto is ‘pervaded by an aura of sycophancy’. Stein, ‘From Woyzeck to Wozzeck’, 169. However, where Berg has made major alterations, such as conflating scenes to suit his tripartite division, Stein agrees with his supposedly sycophantic musicological predecessors and ends up praising these for their economy and dramatic effectiveness.

⁵⁹ His letters often just list relevant heroes in place of any substantive discussion of the issues. ‘But our great innovators have instead brought us a mass of glorious new ideals, purer and finer than the old ones now deformed. Nietzsche stares at us from afar with his piercing eyes. Ibsen with wry mouth speaks his harsh truths. And in the shadow of these two, so many names: Strindberg, Oscar Wilde, Gerhart Hauptmann, Wedekind, Karl Hauer, Weininger, Wittels, Karl Kraus, Hermann Bahr’: Berg to Helene, 17 August 1907, Letters to His Wife, ed. Bernard Grun (London, 1971), 27.

⁶⁰ Berg to Helene, 30 July 1908, Letters to His Wife, 37–8. Elsewhere he quotes Ibsen (from memory) to Helene: ‘“Oh, life contains its own renewal, let's hold on to that – we leave life soon enough”.’ And in the same letter he acclaims the ability of artists (those listed in the previous footnote) to ‘transpose’ their ‘ideals’ ‘into real and tangible life’: Berg to Helene, 17 August 1907, Letters to His Wife, 27.

⁶¹ In response to his fiancée's question ‘what is our goal?’ he answers that it is ‘the perfection of each human soul’, ‘to become a good, honourable, noble character’, going on ‘Nietzsche uses the image of “new seas” towards which his ship is irresistibly heading’: 23 August 1909, Letters to His Wife, 90–1. Berg was slightly misremembering Aphorism 343 of Book V: ‘das Meer, unser Meer liegt wieder offen da, vielleicht gab es noch niemals ein so “offnes Meer”’: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Naukhoff (Cambridge, 2001), 199.

⁶² William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, 1974), 1. McGrath means ‘liberal’ as in ‘neo-liberal’ not as in ‘socially liberal’, as in the US vernacular.

⁶³ McGrath, Dionysian Art, 54.

⁶⁴ McGrath, Dionysian Art, 2.

⁶⁵ God was taken from his celestial realm and transferred into earthly nature (arguably first by Rousseau) and became accessible via art as the sublime. The organic unity of a spiritualised Nature was a model that human life – particularly in its social organisation – should aspire to emulate. Romantic art absorbed this in toto, and the sublime, felt by E.T.A. Hoffmann to reside in the tonal and motivic structure of music (especially the Beethoven symphony), that is, in its autonomy rather than its surface emotional or referential content, became the defining quality of great art. This autonomy meant that the artwork became an allegory of the universe; its motivic and harmonic rules (what Adorno called its formal law) were homologous to the laws of nature. But, importantly, whereas scientific understanding of the absolute was connected with mercantilism through its exploitation in new technologies, artistic visions of the absolute associated nature with an imaginative space outside the grubby reality of city life in which modes of non-rational human understanding not amenable to scientific enquiry could flourish.

⁶⁶ See Richard Wagner, ‘Zukunftsmusik’ (1860), Wagner's Prose Works, Vol. III, trans. W.A. Ellis (1907), 317–18 for Wagner's physicalist rewriting of Hoffmann's Beethoven Review.

⁶⁷ In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche explains the mechanism through which this impression of transcendence is achieved through the immanent perceptual system. It is through the arrangement of rationally apprehensible ‘images and concepts’ that music ‘appears as Will’ and, although he is quick to point out that it ‘cannot possibly be Will’, it thereby betokens ‘the original contradiction and original pain at the heart of the primordial unity, and thus symbolizes a sphere which lies above and beyond all appearance’. Thus the Dionysian, or emotional, content of the music is no less symbolic – and consequently no less rational – than the Apollonian, or linguistic, content; it is simply that when the plenitude of possible meanings of a passage of music is juxtaposed with the specificity of the libretto, it allows the auditor to imagine infinity. The Birth of Tragedy, ed. and trans. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge, 1999), 33–6.

⁶⁸ Berg felt that a performance of Parsifal (1882) he attended at Bayreuth was a ‘magnificent, overwhelming’, ‘stirring, uplifting experience’ and that ‘[words] cannot give you anywhere near the tremendous impression, shattering yet life-enhancing, which the work made on me’. Berg to Helene, 8 August 1909, Letters to His Wife, 83.

⁶⁹ Susanne Rode[-Breymann], ‘Wagner und die Folgen: Zur Nietzsche-Wagner-Rezeption bei Alban Berg und Anton Webern’, in ‘Der Fall Wagner’: Ursprünge und Folgen von Nietzsches Wagner-Kritik, ed. Thomas Steiert (Laaber, 1991), 265–91.

⁷⁰ See McGrath, ‘Chapter 5: The Metamusical Cosmos of Gustav Mahler’, in Dionysian Art, 120–62 for a discussion of how Mahler incorporated the ideas of the triumvirate Schopenhauer–Wagner–Nietzsche into his Symphony No. 3, a work whose influence can be heard in Wozzeck.

⁷¹ Büchner, Woyzeck, ed. Franzos/Landau in John, Wozzeck, 73.

⁷² This is also an important aspect of later Nietzsche: choosing ‘life’ means affirming sickness, decay and suffering as part of life.

⁷³ These four fragments were condensed into two scenes in Berg's Landau edition.

⁷⁴ ‘Mensch sei natürlich’: Büchner, Werke, 238.

⁷⁵ In The Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche argues that one of the defining characteristics of the ‘pessimistic religions’ (by which he means the big three) is their emphasis on redemption which, being defined as ‘the hypnotic sense of nothingness, the repose of deepest sleep, in short absence of suffering’, says a resounding ‘no’ to life. Although Nietzsche was nominally attacking the priests in these passages (e.g., Essay III, Section 20), it is apparent that he was also thinking of Wagner.

⁷⁶ This, of course, is one of Nietzsche's central criticisms of the Judeo-Christian religions: priests deaden suffering by creating an ‘orgy of feeling’, but one of the most effective ways of doing so is to make the individual believe that their suffering is their own fault – so the comfort they seek for their sickness only makes them sicker: On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge, 2006), 95–103.

⁷⁷ Wagner believed, following Feuerbach, that the Christian story has a universal mythical validity and serves as an analogy for a more fundamental truth.

⁷⁸ Susan Greene, ‘Wozzeck and Marie: Outcasts in Search of an Honest Morality’, Opera Quarterly 3/3 (1985), 75–86, at 77.

⁷⁹ Franzos is, again, partly responsible here, but the most important change was made by Berg.

⁸⁰ Georg Büchner, Wozzeck-Lenz: Zwei Fragmente, ed. Paul Landau (Leipzig, 1909), 100. Franzos's text differs only slightly from the modern critical editions, such as the reading version in the Münchner Ausgabe.

⁸¹ Berg, ‘Lecture on Wozzeck: The “Atonal Opera”’, in Pro-Mundo – Pro Domo: The Writings of Alban Berg, ed. Bryan Simms (Oxford, 2014), 251.

⁸² Allen Forte divides the music in this scene into tonal (the fifth variation) and atonal (the rest) in ‘Tonality, Symbol, and Structural Levels in Berg's Wozzeck’, The Musical Quarterly 71 (1985), 474–99. However, this simple categorisation does not capture the important harmonic and melodic differences in character between the antecedent and the consequent.

⁸³ Alain Fourchotte discusses how the duality in the music corresponds to Marie's conflicted emotional state, but that the two halves are tied together by Perle's ‘The Child Rebuffed’ motif. Alain Fourchotte, ‘Les voix de la conscience et du sang dans la scène I de l'act III du Wozzeck d'Alban Berg’, in Nouvelles approches de la voix narrative, ed. Marc Marti, Narratologie, vol. 5 (Paris, 2003), 53–78. The motif is Perle's Leitmotiv No. 16, heard initially in Act II scene 1 and occurring in Act III scene 1 in bars 19ff: Perle, Wozzeck, 112.

⁸⁴ Erika Reiman, ‘Tonality and Unreality in Berg's Wozzeck’, in Encrypted Messages in Alban Berg's Music, ed. Siglind Bruhn (New York, 1998), 229–42.

⁸⁵ Reiman reads this differently, arguing that Marie breaks off the story just when she believes it is coming true, when she realises that the child will indeed be left alone: ‘Tonality and Unreality’, 232.

⁸⁶ Opinion on the D minor interlude is split between those, such as Constantin Floros, who see it as evidence of the social commitment of the work and those, such as Joseph Kerman, who view it as a fake catharsis imposed by the composer. Constantin Floros, ‘Alban Bergs Wozzeck als Botschaft an die Menschheit’, in Der kulturpädagogische Auftrag der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert: Bericht über das Symposion vom 14.–15. Juli 1989 in der Hochschule für Musik München, ed. Ute Jung-Kaiser, Musik im Diskurs, vol. 9 (Regensburg, 1991), 25–42. Joseph Kerman, ‘Wozzeck and The Rake's Progress’, in Opera as Drama (New York, 1952), 232.

⁸⁷ Berg said that ternary form was his guiding structural principle in the composition of Wozzeck. ‘Lecture on Wozzeck’, 234.

⁸⁸ Josef-Horst Lederer, ‘Zu Alban Bergs Invention über den Ton H’, in 50 Jahre Wozzeck von Alban Berg, ed. Goertz et al., 57–67.

⁸⁹ Allen Forte, ‘The Mask of Tonality: Alban Berg's Symphonic Epilogue to Wozzeck’, in Alban Berg: Historical and Analytical Perspectives, ed. David Gable and Robert P. Morgan (Oxford, 1991), 199–200. Forte attempts to undermine the reader's faith in the theoretical veracity of Berg's discussions about tonality and atonality.

⁹⁰ For Berg's own problematisation of the concept of ‘atonality’, see Alban Berg, ‘What is Atonal? A Dialogue’, in The Writings of Alban Berg, ed. and trans. Simms, 219–27.

⁹¹ This hidden tonal structure that is nevertheless felt raises the question of the hidden German canonical forms that structure each scene, which Berg said the audience should not notice, even though he went to a lot of effort to draw attention to them. This is a question I deal with in some detail in the companion piece to this article: ‘Wozzeck and the Mathematical’, Opera Quarterly 35 (2019), 179–206.

⁹² Taylor, Hegel, 14. See also Charles Taylor, ‘Chapter 21: The Expressivist Turn’, in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1992), 368–90.

⁹³ ‘Der Einzelne nur Schaum auf der Welle, die Große ein bloßer Zufall, die Herrschaft des Genies ein Puppenspiel’. Büchner to Minna Jaeglé, March 1834, Büchner, Werke, 288.

⁹⁴ Kerman, ‘Wozzeck and The Rake's Progress’, 230.

⁹⁵ Julian Johnson, ‘Berg's Operas and the Politics of Subjectivity’, in Music, Theatre and Politics in Germany: 1848 to the Third Reich, ed. Nikolaus Bacht (London, 2006), 218, 212.

⁹⁶ Taylor used the word ‘expressivism’ because ‘expressionism’ was already taken; however, expressionism is a particularly intense manifestation of expressivism.

⁹⁷ The situation is slightly more complicated for Adorno, since for him it is the Hegelian Subject, that is, the most advanced human subject, that speaks through music, but the curve of the argument is comparable.

⁹⁸ In Hegel's perfect state, which in music middle-period Beethoven comes closest to expressing as a credible future according to Adorno, subjective freedom is in perfect harmony with the objective law – what one freely wills is what is automatically best for the self and the whole state.

⁹⁹ Schoenberg to Kandinsky, 24 January 1911, ‘The Schoenberg-Kandinsky Correspondence’, Arnold Schoenberg, Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures, and Documents, ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch (London, 1984), 23. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 37.

¹⁰⁰ Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 30–1.

¹⁰¹ Probably a premonition of his own guillotining at the end of the play as Büchner intended it. I give bar numbers for reference to the score, but here I am concerned with the sonic qualities of the music, which are better accessed through a recording.

¹⁰² Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, Das Buch der Kinderlieder (Mainz, 2017), 113. The melody is so different from the original that – even accounting for Wozzeck's warped perception – it must be considered Andres's own invention.

¹⁰³ The words Andres sings before bar 257 seem to be unique to the play and do not come from a pre-existing song.

¹⁰⁴ For the relationship between Schoenberg's music and Kandinsky's art, see Konrad Boehmer, ed., Schönberg and Kandinsky: An Historic Encounter (Amsterdam, 1997).

¹⁰⁵ Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis, 2011), 226.

¹⁰⁶ Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 232.

¹⁰⁷ Klee's method involves a double articulation (a double reversal) in order to inject/force the ordinarily ungraspable Zwischenwelt into the painting. First he would paint the scene accurately, then turn the painting upside down and retrace the lines as he felt them. Finally, he would try to blend the two together: Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 226.

¹⁰⁸ The derivation of schizophonia will become clear shortly. It has nothing to do with R. Murray Schafer's use of the same word to mean sound electronically split from its original context: Our Sonic Environment and the Soundscape and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, 1994 [1977]), 88.

¹⁰⁹ Alternatively, when society is cured, and utopia is reached, everyone will be able to understand Schoenberg's music.

¹¹⁰ This explains why Büchner's political goals were rather limited but specific – freedom of association, freedom of press, etc.; he was more concerned about fostering the conditions under which such creative forces could flourish, rather than imposing some bourgeois-led version of what a revolution should look like. See, for example, the list of demands in ‘The Hessian Messenger’, in Complete Plays, 167–79.

¹¹¹ Deleuze talks about Wozzeck in similar terms elsewhere: the musical intensities make audible the inaudible intensities (i.e., the vital forces) that produce Marie's scream: Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London, 2003 [1981]), 60.

¹¹² Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis, 2000 [1972]), 2.

¹¹³ In physics ‘intensive’ properties are those that can be in thermodynamic disequilibrium and hence produce forces which then cause matter to move and energy to be transformed and dissipated. Its metaphorical use in Deleuze is far more general and more difficult to define: words, music and paintings contain intensive forces in that they can produce bodily reactions (the urge to dance, for example), and yet there is no property (such as temperature, voltage, or potential energy) that can be measured.

¹¹⁴ Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh, 2012), 209.

¹¹⁵ Landau took the first two lines from fragment H4 and the next three from H2, with some emendation/misreading: Büchner, Werke, 226, 214.

¹¹⁶ Taylor, Hegel, 13ff.

¹¹⁷ Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay I, Section 13, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 2000), 481.

¹¹⁸ As Nietzsche puts it: attributing agency to human action is like holding a lightning strike personally responsible for setting fire to the barn. In the Aristotelian view of the universe, which held sway for much of the Middle Ages, inanimate objects, such as a stone rolling down a hill, did require a ‘quasi-sentient’ mover in order to get from ‘potency’ to ‘act’. Arthur Koestler suggests that the tendency to infer agency in any moving object, let alone animals, other human beings or our own self, is one of the ‘deeper, primordial responses of the mind’: The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (London, 1968 [1959]), 112–13.

¹¹⁹ Agamben, The Time that Remains, 68.

¹²⁰ Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 482.

¹²¹ Translation slightly emended.

¹²² Exactly like Rotpeter the ape in Kafka's ‘Report to the Academy’, who develops a human subjectivity only after being imprisoned. Berg first read Kafka just after completing Wozzeck and recognised immediately a kindred spirit.

¹²³ Johnson, ‘Politics of Subjectivity’, 230.

¹²⁴ Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 482.

¹²⁵ His own anatomical work is premised on the idea of an Urfisch, and hence indebted to Goethe's theories about the Urpflanz. It was perfectly consistent for Büchner to argue against idealism in art and yet draw scientific inspiration from philosophers we now also class as idealist. The distinction is that, whereas Kant and his followers had tried to derive the real from the ideal (and in which bracket Büchner also placed Schiller), Goethe tried to discern the ideal in the real. As Büchner states in the Zurich lecture, the Urgesetz (the ideal) is something that can be intuited, but is and will remain unknown to science – hence his insistence on accurate reproduction of observed reality. See Fredrich Beiser, ‘The Enlightenment and Idealism’, The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge, 2000), 18–36.

¹²⁶ Organicism was actually a much more subtle analytic than the totalising, teleological caricature that often goes by the name.

¹²⁷ In a survey of the English and German literature, Douglas Jarman has weighed up the various hypotheses on the origin of the palindrome in Berg's oeuvre. Douglas Jarman, ‘“Remembrance of things that are to come”: Some Reflections on Berg's Palindromes’, Alban Berg and his World, ed. Christopher Hailey (Princeton, 2010), 195–221.

¹²⁸ For Jarman, for example, there is no hope of the characters in Wozzeck ever reaching ‘a level of consciousness that [makes] possible the recognition of potential for change’, and so they are doomed to remain trapped in their ‘tragic cycle’. Jarman, ‘Berg's Palindromes’, 218. See also page 216 for his identification of palindromes with fatalism in Berg's oeuvre as a whole.

¹²⁹ Jarman makes a useful distinction between the palindrome proper and Berg's frequent cyclic organisation of musical material: both mean different things in context. Robert P. Morgan also does this in ‘The Eternal Return: Retrograde and Circular Form in Berg’, Alban Berg: Historical and Analytical Perspectives, ed. David Gable and Robert P. Morgan (Oxford, 1991).

¹³⁰ John Covach, ‘Balzacian Mysticism, Palindromic Design and Heavenly Time in Berg's Music’, Encrypted Messages in Alban Berg's Music, ed. Siglind Bruhn (New York, 1998), 5–29. Wolfgang Gratzer, Zur ‘wunderlichen Mystik’ Alban Bergs (Vienna, 1993). Morgan, ‘The Eternal Return’. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA, 2003).

¹³¹ Both examples in Kern. Cinema was an explicit influence on Berg's Lulu.

¹³² Albert Einstein, Relativity, trans. Robert W. Lawson (London, 2001 [1915]). This is suggested by Jarman in ‘“Remembrance of things that are to come”’, however he dismisses the idea because it appeared to late and had not achieved sufficiently deep cultural penetration.

¹³³ S is the entropy, k is a constant and W is the number of arrangements of molecules that can give rise to the state one is observing. Put simply, the more arrangements that can give the state observed, the more probable it is and so the more stable it is. The equation was the culmination of the work James Clerk-Maxwell began on a statistical (kinetic) theory of gases in 1859.

¹³⁴ ‘Energy’ was named from the Greek ἐνέργεια, meaning ‘activity’ or ‘operation’, by Thomas Young in 1807. (Andrew Robinson, The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured the Sick and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone (New York, 2006)). Before that, Leibiniz's term vis viva had been in circulation and it could be argued that romantic notions of oneness with nature, and organicism, arose from the understanding that this ‘living force’ inhabited all animate things.

¹³⁵ The prodigious amount of effort expended on understanding the physical properties of energy cannot be divorced from the power and importance of the steam engine, a machine whose purpose was to convert the chemical energy of coal into the kinetic energy of the piston. Energy was not a substance that could be isolated, nor understood like force, which operated between matter, but was a property of matter itself. The law of conservation of energy (given its modern formulation by Rudolf Clausius and others in the 1840s, but known since at least Leibniz) puts time and energy in a complementary relationship with one another: time only happens because energy is transformed from one form into another. (In classical mechanics, time and energy are said to form a ‘canonically conjugate pair’.) Poetic though it might sound, the industrial revolution, and indeed what many in the nineteenth century would have understood by the term ‘progress’, relied on the almost literal theft of time from nature. This is what made the absence of time as an independent variable in Boltzmann's equation so surprising.

¹³⁶ Where does structure, order and complexity in the universe come from? It is not sufficient that there is energy, since there must be energy gradients – for example, differences in temperature – to do work. The answer is gravity: see Lizhi, Fang and Xian, Li Shu, ‘How Order was Born of Chaos’, in Creation of the Universe (Singapore, 1989), 73–86Google Scholar.

¹³⁷ Even the active and reactive forces that Nietzsche and Deleuze posit in order to escape such restrictive binomial structures are due to our embodied and therefore restricted point of view.

¹³⁸ Recall that debt and guilt are the same word in German: Schuld.

¹³⁹ Berg, Alban, ‘Die Musikalischen Formen in meiner Oper Wozzeck’, Die Musik 16/8 (May 1924), 587–9Google Scholar.

¹⁴⁰ Lederer gives numerous examples of how the note B or the key of B minor is often found in association with fatalism, irony, the demonic, the uncanny, etc. In Wagner, for Hagen, Alberich and Klingsor it corresponds to murder, curses and revenge respectively. In Wozzeck it is a ‘symbol of death’: ‘Zu Alban Bergs Invention über den Ton H’, 57–9. Apart from Lederer's contribution, there are surprisingly few articles or book chapters that concentrate on this scene.

¹⁴¹ ‘[Musical] landscapes arise less from direct tone-painting than from “definite negation” of the character of musical form as a process’: Dalhaus, Carl, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. Bradford, J. Robinson (Berkeley, 1989), 306Google Scholar.

¹⁴² For a discussion of Berg's minor alterations see Perle, Wozzeck, 81–2.

¹⁴³ Note: the piano score has ‘Bs Klar’ for bass clarinet.

¹⁴⁴ The most fundamental version of this is the virtual matter–antimatter particle pairs that continually pop in and out of existence, meaning that ‘empty space’ is actually seething with activity.

¹⁴⁵ There are strong constraints (singularities) on the way an event might unfold: a human embryo could develop in multiple ways – according to conditions in the womb, the nutrition and historical and cultural environment the resulting child then grows up in – and yet all the potential (or virtual) adults will share certain underlying resemblances.

¹⁴⁶ Nietzsche, Friedrich, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Hollingdale, R.J. (Cambridge, 1986), 8Google Scholar.