Wozzeck lives in exploitative, precarious conditions and is dependent on the goodwill of others. Wozzeck gives everything he has to support Marie and their child. Society is numb, violent (not only physically) and oppressive. Wozzeck, who believes it is impossible to escape the fate of the "poor people", is plagued by delusions that make him look at life with different eyes and force him to act.
"Man is an abyss, it makes you dizzy when you look down," says Wozzeck in Alban Berg's opera, expressing what must have spoken from the soul of many people at the premiere of the work in 1925, seven years after the end of the First World War. "Wozzeck", based on a drama fragment by Georg Büchner from 1837, still affects us today: loneliness, capitalism and pressure to perform break individuals and conjure up fatal events. Berg's expressive and extremely multifaceted composition is considered the first full-length stage work of atonality and, in addition to early forms of twelve-tone technique, also features musical constructions from the Baroque to the late Romantic period. The voice resounds in various forms between speech, rhythmic declamation and ariose singing. The award-winning director Martin G. Berger (who won the DER FAUST theater prize in the “Best Direction of Musical Theater” category in 2020, among others) is dedicated to the social and psychological drama set in music. He will bring this key work of modernism to the stage in all its radicalness together with Sarah-Katharina Karl, who has been celebrated as “Set Designer of the Year” by “Opernwelt” magazine, among others.
