No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Lyrical Tension, Collective Voices: Masculinity in Alban Berg's Wozzeck
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Abstract
The voice of Berg's Wozzeck has been characterized by his Sprechgesang, heard as manifestation of his abnormality or even ‘hysteria’. However, Wozzeck often sounds more lyrical and emotive in relation to his oppressors, whose sense of authority is undermined by their caricatured vocal lines and vocal types. Rather than representing a ‘broken’ voice, Wozzeck's Sprechgesang is reserved for moments shared with his fellow low-ranking comrades, suggesting that it served as a voice of solidarity and empathy. In this article, I historicize the première of the opera at the Berlin State Opera; indeed, a glance at the singers who played the central roles suggests how the characters were perceived. It reveals an intertextual web of suffering shared between Berg's traumatized soldiers, and the perverse exercise of authority. Wozzeck therefore opens up questions about the expression of ideals in post-First World War Germany: the ideal of a stoic man demanded by the army, and the ideal of a voice.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2019 The Royal Musical Association
References
1 Hofer, Hans-Georg, Nervenschwäche und Krieg: Modernitätskritik und Krisenbewältigung in der österreichischen Psychiatrie, 1880–1920 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2004), 267.Google Scholar
2 See for instance Beckmann's 1919 Hell: The Way Home, Grosz's 1918 Fit for Active Service and Kokoschka's 1919 The Principle. Steven Beller, ‘The Tragic Carnival: Austrian Culture in the First World War’, European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment and Propaganda, 1914–1918, ed. Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 127–61 (pp. 141–3); Peter Jelavich, ‘German Culture in the Great War’, ibid., 32–57 (p. 53); Carol Poore, Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 18–28 (p. 23).Google Scholar
3 Lerner, Paul, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 126–7.Google Scholar
4 The first serious critical edition of Büchner's Woyzeck (following Karl E. Franzo's unsatisfactory attempt in the 1870s) was Woyzeck: Nach den Handschriften des Dichters, ed. Georg Witkowski (Leipzig: Insel, 1920). David G. Richards, Georg Büchner's Woyzeck: A History of its Criticism (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001), 2.Google Scholar
5 For music critics' commentaries on Berg's setting of Büchner's play to music, see Hall, Patricia, Berg's Wozzeck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 64.Google Scholar
6 Ibid., 67.Google Scholar
7 Berg, Alban, Letters to his Wife, trans. Bernard Grun (New York: St Martin's Press, 1971), 229.Google Scholar
8 Jarman, Douglas, Alban Berg: Wozzeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 66.Google Scholar
9 Doctors, including Julius Wagner von Jauregg, on whose work I touch in this article, were acquitted of any wartime wrongdoing, even though Sigmund Freud concluded in a 1920 report that Viennese psychiatry had been excessively cruel to soldiers. Hans-Georg Hofer, ‘Mobilisierte Medizin: Der erste Weltkrieg und die Wiener Ärzteschaft’, Im Epizentrum des Zusammenbruchs: Wien im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Alfred Pfoser and Andreas Weigl (Vienna: Metroverlag, 2013), 302–9 (p. 306).Google Scholar
10 Schwarz, Peter, ‘“Die Opfer sagen, es war die Hölle”: Vom Tremolieren, Faradisieren, Hungern und Sterben: Krieg und Psychiatrie in Wien’, Im Epizentrum des Zusammenbruchs, ed. Pfoser and Weigl, 326–35 (p. 327). Lerner's Hysterical Men provides the most comprehensive English-language account of ‘war hysterics' in the German context.Google Scholar
11 ‘Vorteile zu erreichen oder Übel zu vermeiden’. Julius Wagner von Jauregg, ‘Erfahrung über Kriegsneurosen’, Wiener medizinische Wochenschrift, 67/4 (20 January 1917), 189–90, cited in Schwarz, ‘“Die Opfer sagen, es war die Hölle”’, 328.Google Scholar
12 Hofer, Hans-Georg, ‘“Nervöse Zitterer”: Psychiatrie und Krieg’, Krieg, Medizin und Politik: Der erste Weltkrieg und die österreichische Moderne, ed. Helmut Konrad (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2000), 15–134 (p. 45).Google Scholar
13 Leese, Peter, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 56; Tracey Loughran, Shell-Shock and Medical Culture in First World War Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 87–93.Google Scholar
14 ‘Äußerlich intakt’. Hofer, ‘Mobilisierte Medizin’, 306.Google Scholar
15 Link-Heer, Ursula, ‘“Male Hysteria”: A Discourse Analysis’, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, Cultural Critique, 15 (spring 1990), 206–15. The term ‘Protestant ethic’ was, of course, coined by Max Weber only in 1905, in his Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus, trans. Talcott Parsons as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York and London: Routledge Classics, 2001), in which lower-class masculinity was tied to a man's productivity in the factory.Google Scholar
16 Hofer, , ‘Mobilisierte Medizin’, 305. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (London and New York: Harper, 1911).Google Scholar
17 Hofer, , ‘Mobilisierte Medizin’, 305.Google Scholar
18 Ibid., 306. Lerner discusses Germany's shift to hypnosis in Hysterical Men, 88–98.Google Scholar
19 ‘Nervöse Männer’; ‘harte Faust’. These are the words of, respectively, the Austrian psychiatrist Erwin Stransky and the German physician and later politician Willy Hellpach. Stransky, Krieg und Geistesstörung (Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1918), 44; Hellpach, ‘Therapeutische Differenzierung der Kriegsnervenkranken’, Medizinische Klinik, 13 (1917), 1259–63 (p. 1261).Google Scholar
20 Hofer, , ‘Mobilisierte Medizin’, 303.Google Scholar
21 ‘Schlagkraft’; ‘stillen, selbstlosen Helden’. Ibid.Google Scholar
22 Poore, Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture, 7. Holger H. Herwig documents the equally devastating Austro-Hungarian side of numbers; see his The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914–1918, 2nd edn (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).Google Scholar
23 Lerner, Hysterical Men, 197, 226–9.Google Scholar
24 Ibid., 126–9, 150–5. See also Heather R. Perry, Recycling the Disabled: Army, Medicine, and Modernity in WWI Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 45–77, esp. pp. 62–3.Google Scholar
25 Jancke, Oskar, ‘A Conversation with Alban Berg’, Pro mundo–pro domo, ed. and trans. Bryan R. Simms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 326–8 (p. 327); originally published as Jancke, ‘Gespräch mit Alban Berg’, Aachener Anzeiger: Politisches Tageblatt, 20 February 1930.Google Scholar
26 Kutsch, K. J. and Riemens, Leo, Großes Sängerlexikon, 3rd, expanded edn, 7 vols. (Bern and Munich: K. G. Saur, 1997–2002), ii: Davislim–Hiolski (1997), 1559–60.Google Scholar
27 Richards, David G. briefly explores the influence of commedia dell'arte on Büchner's Woyzeck; see his Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, 5–6. Notably, Richards cites a doctoral dissertation contemporaneous with Berg's writing of the opera: Walter Kupsch, ‘“Wozzeck”: Ein Beitrag zum Schaffen Georg Büchners (1813–1837)’, Germanische Studien, 4 (1920).Google Scholar
28 All English translations of Wozzeck's libretto, stage directions, tempos, etc. are from Alban Berg, Georg Büchners Wozzeck: Opera in 3 Acts (15 Scenes), op. 7, trans. Vida Harford and Eric Blackall (Vienna, London and New York: Universal Edition, 1955). Other translations from German are my own unless otherwise stated.Google Scholar
29 Puffett, Derrick, Richard Strauss: Salome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 143.Google Scholar
30 Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1961), 3, 7.Google Scholar
31 Kutsch and Riemens, Großes Sängerlexikon, 3rd edn, i: Aarden–Davis (1977), 3.Google Scholar
32 ‘Gesanglich die schwerste des Ganzen’. Walter Schrenk, ‘Wozzeck: Uraufführung in der Staatsoper’, Deutsche allgemeine Zeitung, 15 December 1925, 2.Google Scholar
33 ‘Mit bewundernswerter Musikalität’; ‘Spleen’. Schrenk, ‘Wozzeck’.Google Scholar
34 Kutsch and Riemens, Großes Sängerlexikon, 3rd edn, v: Seideman–Zysset (1997), 3293.Google Scholar
35 Ibid.Google Scholar
36 Ibid.Google Scholar
37 Arnold Schoenberg: Letters, ed. Erwin Stein, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1964; repr. 1987), 41.Google Scholar
38 ‘Von seiner Männlichkeit durchdrungene’; ‘prachtvoll in Haltung, Gesang und Spiel’. Schrenk, ‘Wozzeck’.Google Scholar
39 Brown, Jonathan, Tristan und Isolde on Record: A Comprehensive Discography of Wagner's Music Drama with a Critical Introduction to the Recordings (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 51. The 1924 recording is available on YouTube, along with a number of Soot's recordings in Wagnerian tenor roles: ‘Dead Tenors' Society’, ‘Fritz Soot – Wohin nun Tristan scheidet’, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDk9ag-HX9U> (accessed 23 January 2018). (accessed 23 January 2018).' href=https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Brown,+Jonathan,+Tristan+und+Isolde+on+Record:+A+Comprehensive+Discography+of+Wagner's+Music+Drama+with+a+Critical+Introduction+to+the+Recordings+(Westport,+CT:+Greenwood+Press,+2000),+51.+The+1924+recording+is+available+on+YouTube,+along+with+a+number+of+Soot's+recordings+in+Wagnerian+tenor+roles:+‘Dead+Tenors'+Society’,+‘Fritz+Soot+–+Wohin+nun+Tristan+scheidet’,+
40 Johnson, Julian, Mahler's Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 134.Google Scholar
41 Concurrently with his appearance in Wozzeck as the Drum Major, who, resembling the Captain, cannot be stolid, Soot – unsurprisingly – also sang Aegistheus and Herodes. Vicki Kondelik, ‘Barbara Kemp’, Record Collector, 49/1 (2004), 27–58 (p. 46); J. P. Wearing, The London Stage 1920–1929: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel, 2nd edn (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 367.Google Scholar
42 ‘Seine dunkle, dabei ungewöhnlich bewegliche Stimme mit der Feinheit ihrer Charakterisierung und seine glanzvolle Schauspielkunst bewährten sich auf der Bühne im seriösen, namentlich aber im Buffo-Repertoire.’ Kutsch and Riemens, Großes Sängerlexikon, 3rd edn, iv: Muffo–Seidel (1997), 3164.Google Scholar
43 Clements, Andrew, ‘Wozzeck’, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Grove Music Online, <https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.O005360> (accessed 3 December 2017).+(accessed+3+December+2017).>Google Scholar
44 Puffett, Richard Strauss: Salome, 94.Google Scholar
45 Miller, Richard, Securing Baritone, Bass-Baritone, and Bass Voices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9–10.Google Scholar
46 Berg, Alban, ‘The Voice in Opera’, Pro mundo–pro domo, ed. and trans. Simms, 218–19 (p. 218); originally published as ‘Die Stimme in der Oper’, special issue ‘Gesang: Jahrbuch 1929’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, 10/9–10 (November–December 1928), 349–50.Google Scholar
47 After all, Sprechgesang as a technique was not completely new. See discussions in, for instance, Edward Kravitt, The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, Stimme und Sprechkünste im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 213–50 (for a history of Sprechgesang from at least the early 1800s); Matthias Nöther, Als Bürger leben, als Halbgott sprechen: Melodrama, Deklamation und Sprechgesang im wilhelminischen Reich (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2008), 114–18 (for Cosima Wagner's promotion of Sprechgesang in Bayreuth); and Martin Knust, ‘Music, Drama, and Sprechgesang: About Richard Wagner's Creative Process’, Nineteenth-Century Music, 38 (2014–15), 219–42.Google Scholar
48 Smith, Stephen Decatur, ‘“Even Money Decays”: Transience and Hope in Adorno, Benjamin, and Wozzeck’, Opera Quarterly, 29/3–4 (2013), 212–43 (p. 232).Google Scholar
49 As the First Apprentice opens the scene, he mocks – using the ‘deep bass' voice that Berg has assigned to him – the buffo bass Doctor by alluding to his preposterous scientific ambition to be immortal. He strains his voice in climbing to the top of each of the ascending phrases as he sings ‘For my soul, for my immortal soul stinketh of brandy wine … ’ (bars 455ff.), until he pushes his bass voice to a falsetto f ′and e′ (bar 462), on the edge of a bass's normal comfort zone. The First Apprentice makes clear here that this omnipotent figure of the Doctor is intoxicated with his own fantasy and can barely maintain his composure. Moreover, just before Marie and the Drum Major make their entrance onto the dance floor (bar 479), the First Apprentice's drawn-out ‘That is dreary, dreary, dreary … ’ at the end of this scene's opening segment can be heard as his comforting of a distressed Wozzeck witnessing Marie's infidelity (bars 474–80).Google Scholar
50 Jelavich, Peter, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1.Google Scholar
51 Ibid., 85–117.Google Scholar
52 Ibid., 2.Google Scholar
53 Kutsch and Riemens, Großes Sängerlexikon, iv, 3164.Google Scholar
54 Hall, Berg's Wozzeck, 63–4.Google Scholar
55 Franz Köppen's review of Wozzeck's Berlin première captured the sentiment against technicality well when he wrote: ‘There is too much technique, endlessly too much […] But technique is no heart-substitute. And no blood-substitute’ (‘Technik ist viel, unendlich viel […] Aber Technik kann kein Herz-Ersatz sein. Und kein Blut-Ersatz’). Köppen, ‘Wozzeck von Alban Berg: Uraufführung in der Staatsoper’, Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, 15 December 1925, 3. Translations of newspaper reviews are mine, but I am grateful to Mirjam Frank for her advice.Google Scholar
56 Hall, Berg's Wozzeck, 63–4.Google Scholar
57 Except for Walter Schrenk, the critics whom I cite in this article, for instance, all commented negatively on the question of form.Google Scholar
58 Perle, George, The Operas of Alban Berg, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1980–5), i: Wozzeck; Janet Schmalfeldt, Berg's Wozzeck: Harmonic Language and Dramatic Design (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); Hall, Berg's Wozzeck.Google Scholar
59 Hall, Berg's Wozzeck, 64.Google Scholar
60 Jarman, Alban Berg: Wozzeck; Hall, Berg's Wozzeck.Google Scholar
61 Petschnig, Emil, ‘Atonales Opernschaffen’, Die Musik, 16/5 (February 1924), 340–5, trans. as ‘Creating Atonal Opera’ in Jarman, Alban Berg: Wozzeck, 143–9 (p. 147).Google Scholar
62 Ibid.Google Scholar
63 Ibid.Google Scholar
64 Ibid.Google Scholar
65 Petschnig, ‘Atonales Opernschaffen’.Google Scholar
66 Schmidt, Leopold, ‘Wozzeck: Uraufführung in der Staatsoper’, Berliner Tageblatt und Handels-Zeitung, 15 December 1925, 2.Google Scholar
67 ‘Man kann ihr das Schöne nicht nehmen, ohne ihr zugleich den Ausdruck zu rauben. Deshalb sind alle, die heute mit Bewusstsein und Absicht das Hässliche (Mißklängige, Dürftige, Überladene, Verzerrte) schaffen, zur Ausdrucklosigkeit verdammt.’ Ibid. Google Scholar
68 ‘Es ist kein Zufall, dass ihre Musik tödlich langweilig wird, sobald sie nicht etwa Groteskes, Abwegiges, Krankhaftes, Fratzenhaftes, schildert. Jede Würde ist ihr verloren gegangen, sie erniedrigt sich zu widernatürlichen Diensten und frönt oft nur den Bedürfnissen rohester Instinkte und elementarster Empfindungen.’ Ibid.Google Scholar
69 ‘[Berg] vermeidet krampfhaft jede natürliche Ausdruckweise […] Nichts darf stimmen oder im Sinne eines natürlich empfindenden Menschen “gut” klingen.’ Schmidt, ‘Uraufführung in der Staatsoper’.Google Scholar
70 ‘Dergleichen kommt in der Aufführung natürlich nur so ungefähr heraus, wie es überhaupt mit der ganzen “Melodik”, die sich bald dem Sprechton nähert, bald durch ihn ersetzt wird, nicht eben genau genommen werden soll noch kann. Das aber ist das tief Bedauerliche, dass es der Sänger da kaum noch bedarf. Naturalisten täten es auch. Ob einer falsch singt oder spielt, ist bei einem musikalisch so unsauberen Darstellungsstil schlechterdings gleichgültig.’ Ibid.Google Scholar
71 Band, Lothar, ‘“Wozzeck”: Uraufführung in der Staatsoper’, Berliner Volks-Zeitung, 15 December 1925, 2.Google Scholar
72 ‘Solche “Atavismen”, zumal aus lyrischem Gebiet, zeigen aber die schwache Erfindungskraft des Komponisten […] Auch Gesang kennt diese Musik kaum noch. Der Text wird meist – ähnlich Schönbergs Pierrot lunaire – rhythmisch gesprochen, auf bestimmte Tonhöhen festgelegt und geht im Affekt wohl auch in melodische Linien über. Streng sind dabei der natürliche Tonfall der Sprache und ihre Akzente gewahrt. Aber all diese Überlegungen und Ausdrucksformen lösen das Problem der Oper nicht.’ Ibid. (emphasis added).Google Scholar
73 ‘Geht doch auch die Singstimme mit meist weniger vokal als instrumental chromatischen, verkrausten, verzackten, weitsprüngigen (und daher auch instrumental notierten) Intervallen auf Tonfälle und Akzente aus, die wie in einem verzerrenden Jargon die Alltagsrede nachahmen.’ Julius Korngold, ‘Feuilleton: Operntheater: “Wozzeck”, Oper nach Georg Büchers Drama von Alban Berg’, Die neue freie Presse, 1 April 1930, 1–4 (p. 3).Google Scholar
74 ‘Der Komponist unterscheidet in einem Vorwort zu seinem Werke zwischen Gesungenem und Gesprochenem […] Aber auch das Gesungene ist eigentlich nur ein Singgesprochenes oder im Affekt erregt Singgeschrienes, oft geistvoll in der Akzentuierung, aber selten natürlich, meist allen gesanglichen Notwendigkeiten der Menschenstimme entgegen. […] Durch seine Methode auch horizontal verpflichtet, gelangt eben der atonale Komponist von selbst dazu, die Singstimme ins Singsprechen geraten zu lassen, nicht weil er will, sondern weil er muss. So dass die “Oper” sich ins Melodram verwandelt.’ Ibid. Google Scholar
75 Kreuzer, Gundula, Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 176; Adrian Daub, Tristan's Shadow: Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 1–3.Google Scholar
76 Berg, Alban, ‘Berg's Wozzeck in Leningrad: Remarks by the Composer’, Pro mundo–pro domo, ed. and trans. Simms, 324–6 (p. 325); originally published as ‘Bergs “Wozzeck” in Leningrad: Äußerungen des Komponisten’, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 26 (1927).Google Scholar
77 Berg, ‘The Voice in Opera’, 218.Google Scholar
78 Ibid.Google Scholar
79 Ibid., 218–19.Google Scholar
80 Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed. Knud Martner (Alma Mahler), trans. Eithne Wilkins, Ernst Kaiser and Bill Hopkins (London and Boston, MA: Faber & Faber, 1979), 147–9.Google Scholar
81 Wagner, Richard, ‘The Performing of “Tannhäuser”’, Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1892–9), iii (1894), 169–205 (p. 202).Google Scholar
82 Shaw, George Bernard, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring (1898), Project Gutenberg, <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1487/1487-h/1487-h.htm#link2H_4_0006> (accessed 21 February 2018). (accessed 21 February 2018).' href=https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Shaw,+George+Bernard,+The+Perfect+Wagnerite:+A+Commentary+on+the+Niblung's+Ring+(1898),+Project+Gutenberg,+
83 Kreuzer, Verdi and the Germans, 155.Google Scholar
84 Ibid., 145.Google Scholar
85 Ibid., 141.Google Scholar
86 Ibid., 143.Google Scholar
87 Ibid., 151.Google Scholar
88 Ibid., 178–80.Google Scholar
89 Aster, Misha, Die bewegte Geschichte der Berliner Lindenoper im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Siedler, 2017), 18.Google Scholar
90 Ibid.Google Scholar
91 Ibid.Google Scholar
92 Ibid.Google Scholar
93 Aster, Die bewegte Geschichte, 19.Google Scholar
94 Ibid.Google Scholar
95 Ibid.Google Scholar
96 Bauman, Thomas, Heinz Becker, Richard D. Green, Hugh Canning and Imre Fábián, ‘Berlin (opera)’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Grove Music Online, <https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.O900816> (accessed 25 January 2018).+(accessed+25+January+2018).>Google Scholar
97 Hall, Berg's Wozzeck, 52.Google Scholar
98 Ibid., 62; Jarman, Alban Berg: Wozzeck, 24.Google Scholar
99 Russel, John, Erich Kleiber: A Memoir (Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 1981), 94.Google Scholar
100 Kreuzer, Verdi and the Germans, 186.Google Scholar
101 Ibid., 187.Google Scholar
102 Ibid.Google Scholar
103 Berg, Alban, ‘Lecture on Wozzeck: The “Atonal Opera”’ (1929), Pro mundo–pro domo, ed. and trans. Simms, 228–60 (p. 238). Berg's original, untitled typescript is preserved in Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung, F21.Berg.104/ii.Google Scholar
104 Ibid.Google Scholar
105 Ibid.Google Scholar
106 Berg, ‘The Voice in Opera’, 218–19; ‘Lecture on Wozzeck’, 238.Google Scholar
107 Berg, Alban, ‘What is Atonal? A Dialogue’ (1930), in Pro mundo–pro domo, ed. and trans. Simms, 219–27 (p. 223). Berg's original typescript, entitled ‘Was ist atonal? Ein Dialog’, is preserved in Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung, F21.Berg.105, 1–10.Google Scholar
108 Kutsch and Riemens, Großes Sängerlexikon, iv, 3164.Google Scholar
109 Ibid.Google Scholar
110 The matter of Sprechgesang has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years. Pertinent to my discussion of Schützendorf as a cabaret performer, Jessica Payette writes, for instance, that Sprechgesang has its origins in melodrama and cabaret, that is, in both ‘high-’ and ‘low-brow’ practices in both France and Germany. Its promiscuous roots also allowed Berg later to emphasize the German lineage of his music. Payette, ‘Dismembering “Expectations”: The Modernization of Monodrama in Fin-de-siècle Theatrical Arts’, Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama, ed. Sarah Hibberd (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 137–58.Google Scholar
111 Köppen, ‘Wozzeck von Alban Berg’.Google Scholar
112 Kreuzer, Verdi and the Germans, 187.Google Scholar
113 Kutsch and Riemens, Großes Sängerlexikon, v, 3293.Google Scholar
114 Schützendorf, Eugen, Künstlerblut: Leo Schützendorf und seine Brüder (Berlin: Deutsche Buchvertriebs- und Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1943), 323–4. Richard Sheppard, ‘Proletarische Feierstunden and the Early History of the Sprechchor 1919–1923’, Literatur, Politik und soziale Prozesse: Studien zur deutschen Literatur von der Aufklärung bis zur Weimarer Republik, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, Sonderheft 8 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997), 147–83. Among those involved in the musical activities of the USPD, Sheppard discusses Alexander Moissi, Max Reinhardt (who offered his Großes Schauspielhaus to the party), Herman Scherchen and – briefly – Waldemar Henke. Many of them would, in the late 1920s and 1930s, downplay their association with the USPD.Google Scholar
115 Indeed, if one appeared ‘whole’, then one should work. The discourse of (bodily as well as psychological) ‘wholeness' was firmly rooted in the idea of work as rehabilitation. Dr. H. Fr. Ziegler, for instance, wrote about this in 1919, just after the war. Deborah Cohen, ‘Will to Work: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany after the First World War’, Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 295–321 (p. 301).Google Scholar
116 Cohen, ‘Will to Work’.Google Scholar
117 Ibid., 295, 300.Google Scholar
118 Ibid., 295–6.Google Scholar
119 Ibid., 296, 302, 308.Google Scholar
120 Ibid., 311.Google Scholar
121 Sherry, Lee, ‘Modernist Opera's Stigmatized Subjects’, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, ed. Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner and Joseph Straus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 661–83 (p. 663). With regard to the ‘Expressionist impulses’, Lee references here disability scholars such as Tobin Siebers.Google Scholar
122 Ibid.Google Scholar
123 I borrow these criteria from Lee (ibid., 665) and, in turn, Lennard Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 57.Google Scholar
124 Wozzeck, directed by Georg Klaren. Kurt Meisel (Wozzeck), Helga Zülch (Marie), Paul Häussler (the Doctor). DEFA Film Library, 2013 (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft, 1947), DVD. Georg Büchner, Dantons Tod and Woyzeck, ed. Margaret Jacobs, 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954), xxix–xxx.Google Scholar
125 Crighton, James, Büchner and Madness: Schizophrenia in Georg Büchner's Lenz and Woyzeck (Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 221.Google Scholar
126 Monson, Karen, Alban Berg (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1979), 129, 135–6.Google Scholar
127 Ibid., 136.Google Scholar
128 Ibid., 138.Google Scholar
129 Ibid.Google Scholar