Berg: Wozzeck / Alan Gilbert

Actually, one can only feel sorry for the tragic title character Wozzeck. The penniless soldier puts up with all kinds of harassment in order to provide for his girlfriend Marie and their illegitimate son – until he can no longer withstand the psychological pressure and his jealousy brings the barrel to overflowing. Berg narrates the drama with music that is pushed to the limits of expressiveness. You first have to listen to its intensity and modernity, but then it becomes all the more gripping. Especially as he also incorporates grotesquely comic elements, such as a snoring fugue of sleeping soldiers. As a soldier in the First World War, he himself lay in the barracks – and developed a similarly deep aversion to militarism and its strictly hierarchical world order as the author Georg Büchner, who wrote the original.

It is no coincidence that the Nazi regime banned opera as »degenerate art«. But this could not stop its worldwide success. Its unmistakable message, an appeal for more humanity, still resonates today.