618 .

I Composition, Comppsers, and Works

elist. He married Alma Mahler, the compos~r's widow, in 1929. They emigrated to
the United Stat'es in 1940, having earlier left Germany for France. The Opera Wozzeck
,.
The neologism entliichelnd appears in the poem Alte Dienstboten" [Old Ser
/1

vants], in the coffection Einander (!913-14): "Die alten Miigde haben giitige Hiite
auf, I Mild<von Vergangenheit qi;id ka1;1m entliichel~d mehr." The,richly image-
laden German is difficult to capture in English, b-qt roughly: "The old servant
women now wear kindly hats, I Softened'by tirrie and hardly any'mbre capable of
refusing a smile." Franz "Yerfel, Das lyrische Werk; ed.. AdolfD. Klarmahn (Frank-
furt !\Ill Majn:.,S. Fischer, 1967,), p. 183. Adorgo,repe~ts. this rem,a.rk in~' p. '132:
"The word ~ntliichelnd iq an early poexy. by Werfel giyes the same il}lpression of
a departing smil,e. Such a feeling inhabits the motive type of ihe first .violins in
the cons~quent phrase marked mit'Empfindurig (with' feeling)" of the Adagieho of
the Fifth." , . ,
German is rather free. in allowing the formation of new words that combine a
prefix and a verb or noun-in this case ent- (meaning: forth, from, out, awaY,
dis-) and liicheln (to smile). Some compounds formed in'thiswayfalreasily into
place in German-but not ~ntliic~eln, which retains the strangeness and awk-
wardness of a neologism. Adotno'S. comment that "the body of the ;word is The compositioh of an opera bas~d on the'ttagic drama Wozzeck,which
stretched too far and tcirnr refers precisely to this awkwardness and strangeness.
There is no evident way to translate the term entliicheln into a unique term in proves itself by the power c5f Soth the word and the [theatrical] 'setting,
English, since English does not have the same grammatical capacity, and hence cannot be justified tner~ly bycihsight into 'the play and belief in the pos-
analogous constructions, foil.example "dis-smiling," ~re nonsensical. ~ranslato(s sibility of ll n:tu~ic that is assflmed"to be implicit.fa the-passion of the'actio'h
note]
and the darkness -of its backdrop. Neither pathos "nor mood opens the frag-
7. See p. 510.n. 1. ,
8. Frank Wedekind (1864f1918), Genpan e~pressioni~t pla~right. His dramas ment to music. ':Rather, the times tnade"it ripen.into composition-its age.
Erdgeist and Die Buchse der Pandora served Al,ban Berg)ls tb.e ,textual sourc!!s for The hurrdred <y-ears thlit lie between~Wozzeck and today have hollowed out
,Lulu. <"- caV'ities within the tlrama, have made its fragmentary character more acute
. 9. Adorno'.s reference'Ts to the t\tle of a sogg froJTI Mahler's Des Knaben Wun-
derhorn (1892-1~01), v~Rew~lge: Th~ Dead Drummer,'' .the penultjmate song from by taking a\.vay the immediacy of the attack that 'it previously mounted
among tpe Wunderhorn teiqs tpat b.e set; it.wfis S:omposed'in 1899. Th~ refereqce,
however oblique, is critical to hi' epsay's import; see the discussion, p. 546.
,
and that tarried it alongfrom one fragment to the next. In today's society,
it 1.s no mbre 'approptiate to pa)'" primary attention to' the paralysis of the
petii: bdurgeois individua1 in the fad! ofhis dom1natio'n by the'bourgeoi-
sie-sifite the suffering ofthat inditidual has long'Since entered into the
class sttuggle and turned agllinst Jhi:! permanence of'that bourgeoisie.!..,_
thah a drama'S':surfrtce fotrrt is truthfully sustainable if its 'form is con-
structed" solely around that individual. However, the suffering of the op-
presSl:!d .human being hasno more been assuaged l>y the class struggle, up
to"now, than S:rt that takes this suffering-as its subject is lost. From such
a conttadiction:1iprings tlte'Ihusic of Wozzeck. That the tragic drama col-
lapsed as a totality makes it aC:cessible to musiC, which enffrs tl:rrough the
cracks artd catdteS'1i.re more -easily; Oll''the old material of the sentence
stntcture than it would be. 11.ble to with self-assertive living material. The
fact that its cells 'contain <truth' justifies the effort 'the music devotes tcf
Wozzeck,tits will to generate'from within itself new forms to replace'the
drama's old collapsed ones. Music and thE!' word meet ih the powet of
stlfferirtg, and the tnusic-salvages a suffering that may llave oeen intended
l
in Wozzeck's wor'ds but that the verbal drama no longer supports. In the
620 I Composition, Composers, and Works
same way, Mahler, to whom Berg is closer in a purely musical sen~e fhan
anyone else is, undertook to preserve the vanishing contents ot the Wun-
derhorn songs. Walter Benjamin correctly remarked on the analogy be-
tween Berg's method and Karl Kraus's treatment of the lyrics of Matthias
Claudius. 1 All this is intended to indicate that the alternative that Berg's
opera production is said to represent nowadays does not characterize Woz-
zeck. The person who is interested in salvaging the objective contents of
past works is unlikely to pursue the subjective psychological impulses that
may be found in the material. But if he becomes aware of the human
motivation for that salvaging in himself, he will not simply ban human
essence from the compass of his music. Berg's Wozzeck is nqt a musical
drama; neither is it an opera-musical in the sense of that Neue
Sachlichkeit 2 that makes the singing individuals into mere contrapuntal
figures in a fugal system that hovers above their heads without ever touch-
ing them directly. It is qulte necessary to distinguish the opera from both
of these things. On the one hand, Wozzeck, with its musical visions of
anxiety, its murky lands<;jpe and gurgling pond, has been seen psycholog-
ically and even impressionistically, and has remind!:d some people of Wag-
ner or Debussy. Others have alloweq themselves to be misled by the suite1
the passataglia, and tb.e triple fugue, and have discpvered in WQzzeck, as
everrwhere else, th~ .i&,vjyal of old forms with which people nowadays
at!empt to disguise and distract from the rupture of musical conscious-
ness.3 Against all this, Be.rg's Wozzeck ~dopts the.stance of areal humanity,
one that falls completely outside the abstra~t schema of an alternative. In
order to describe this stance, it is necessary to critique the .concept of "Aus-
drucksmusik," or music of expression, which nowadays is applied much
too ,Vft..guely, although with a certain polemical justification. Whether a
particular music ,is psy~hological.is not decided by whether it,expresses,
something .. The concet of the expressitmless,has its authentic application
in the most powerful pioments of th~ musical-;:--;where music attilins im-
ageless presence. All expressionless music. that .fail~ to attain irrlageless
presence is nothing but the empty shell of some;hing expressed that has
remained ~bsent 1 ,Ad1J1.ittedly, it can gain po,wer through.this very silenc-
ing; butit is never the power of the,expressjonles.s. There is, consequently,
scarcely any music that could be said to be expressionless, and precisely
Bach, the unattainable goal of all objectivei will in modernism, delv~d
deeply into the realm of expression. 4 The objective character of music,is
essentially determined by what is.expressed in it. Irt the nineteenth "Cen-
tury, which is the terraiq of music of expression in the fipecific sense, music
reproduces, witl}in continuously shifting bpund,aries, the course of human
The Opera Wozzeck I
experience-even it it is the image of a single experience, an isolated im-
pulse. The expression of -pre-Beethovenian music, .however, is aimed at
objective characters of being itself, in which the variety of human expe-
rience may participate, but with which it is by no means identical. The
eighteenth-century Affektenlehre [Theory of the Affects] is quite clear
about this: However, if whatever tnuh there is in objecti'O'e characters con-
tinues to exi~ in altered form even under tlre mantle of musical subjec-
tivism, then a procedure is legitimized tlfat cuts through that mantle and
grasps anew the contents beneath it. Thg occurs in Berg's Wozzeck. Oth-
ers, aware of the crisis of musical subjectivism, have denied the situation
of the latter .and made a fresh statt, as if the eighteenth century we're
commencing with them. Berg holds out in th!! sitttation in which he finds
himself, drives it 'to destruction and grasps, 11mong its decayed ruins, the
objective characters. More th<tn in tmy "cbtrespondence of musical style,
l}is relationship to Schoenberg is revealed in the dialectical movement that
'Berg performs in the realm of musical subjectivism, in order to destroy it.
He destroys the music drartl.a by realizing it to the fullest. He arrives at
construction by dri'O'ing the musical-psychological process to a deep level
where the unity of the surface. relations of conscioustl.ess, no longer pre-
vails, but where the objective characters, in their solitariness, clamber out
of the abyss of subjectivity. Here they are seized by the formal Work [Ge-
bilde], by virtue of its construction. Between Wozzeck and psychoanalysis
there exists not mere simll.arity, but a family relationship. Like analysis,
Berg's music begins With sleep and the dream-not the illusory dream of
romantit remoteness, but the dream as a ghdstly simulacrum that arises
frotn the lost depths of the human being and grasps the construction in-
terpretively. Berg's musicls not lacking in images. But its images are de-
rived from an archaic realm, childhood, the dense dreafh rather than bright,
contemporary life, and the music seizes the images not reproductively, but
with the attack of recollection. The radical disintegration of the coherent
musical surface corresponds, in Berg, to the dissolution of the surface
structure of consciousness under-analysis, the destruction of the coherent
course of consciousness that artalysis brings about as a consequence of
taking seriously the idea of coherence and of understanding every expe-
riehce from within the totality of psychic life, urttil it perceives totality
itself as a ttansparent illusion. 'It is a style that pulverizes substance into
the tiniest particles, in order to create its form from the construction of
their transition. Just l1s, finally,' the psy-choanalytic process uncovers resi-
dues of exittencethat can no longer be derived from the process itself and
thatmake theall-po'Werful nat\J.re of the process illusory, so Berg's music-

622 I Composition, Composers, and Works
a process, like analysis, and entirely fun,ctional-uncovers essential rem-
nants of exist~nce. It adheres to them, and they are the measure of the
opera's objectivity. Despite all its.subjective dynamics, Wozzeck, in reality,
is an objective act performed in the space of subjectivity. One can recognize
the Austrian and even a relationship to Schubert in the acceptance of fate's
inevitability in music that does not seek to influence fate, of its own vo-
lition, but offers consolation as it faithfully accepts it. Only in this way
does the choice of the text become fully understandable. For. it is only his
passivity that mi:J.kes the soldier Wozzeck into the bearer of the fateful
action that the music means and transcends. For this reason, the petit
bourgeois individual is needed here once again: his suffering discloses ob-
jective characters that are not yet evident today in the action of the col-
lective. Wozzeck's private pathology is the entry portal for the objective
characters, as little .suited to traditional psychology as. Berg's music is to
th~ psychology of romanticism. His dominant emotion, fear, is' at the same
time the foundational emotion o( the opera. The astonishment with "\"'hich
he imagines himself "Qi.I the track of many things" and hears the Free-
masons marching underground resembles the ,astonishment of a music
that, shuddering, finds archaic dream material under ,the earth.
The construction of Wozzeck, however, is only the means Qf grasping
this dreal)l material WQJ;e it dissolves into the atmosphere and drifts away
in moods. Not that the music of Wozj.eck generates contents froll} withirl
itself. Here craftsmansJ'.1ip is at work, .internally consistent and ready to
recover the contents it encounters. The Jeadiness for,re,i:eption as the tnea~
sure of technjque ~an be.defined no better than Alban Berg himself did in
a letter. "I know," he wrote, "when I look a,t the'score,b.ow obje'ctiv.ely
that was composed-admitte\ily alwayii with an,effort to make' sure.that
the other person doesn't nQtice anY,thing and feels as romantically com-.
fortable as in a good armchair with nails that'Cl.on't protrude fl,nd glue that
doesn't stink while it holds.it together." Craft-like autoruuny, in other
words, is men:ly the stri~t joining of a means to absorb the intentions, lest
they slip away from it. At the,same tirne, however, Berg's comments are
a critique of th~ practice of the Neue Sachlichkeit, as dictated by his hu-
mane stance. Here, too, a, pecliar dialecti~ i:; at work, one,that Berg dis-
covered, and quite prod.uctively. For qrdinary objectivity is,,characterized
by the fact that it isvifJible as objectivity; that, to remain within the meta-
phor, the nails do :;tick out, the glue does stink; that the technical apparatus
runs on idle like a blinking r:pachine. But objectivit~ that establishes itself
as. its own raison d'etre is objectively i~accurate; .for the true balance of
any construction lies in the fa,ct that no part of the whole is supposed to.
\,,
The Opera Wozzeck I
emancipate itself. Where the parts are balanced against each other, the
construction as such no' longer .announces itself. This does not mean that
the internal consistency of the material is negated, nor that music is once
again expected to be decorative. But if, everything perfect points beyond
its kind, then .sure1y this is true of compositional technique, whose per-
fection is not unquestioned until it becomes cogi.prehensible as aiigure for
what is meant. As Berg, by means of the perfection of the psychological
music drama, breaks through~o the objective truth.contents, the construc-
tion, whose perfection.no longer leaves a room for a single free note, is
tr~nsformed info its opposite and makes room for those very contents.
This explains the-facn:hat no unprejudiced listener notices, or is supposed
to notiCe, very much in the way. of variations and fugues. They are satu-
rated with expression;. their purpose is to carryi:he expression coherently.
The armchair-with which Berg compares the opera is no practical lounge
chair for the comfortable audience, but Jhe seat of demons. It resembles
van Gogh's chair.5 It Ji.ts together, it llas its proportions and perspectives,
but it is seen from too close up or froin below, so askew, so strangely does
it stand in space... Notin the room; in the storm. It stands up to a terrible,
procession of phendm~nll'.that emerge from their darkness to corporeal
horror. The path tu t~.m ..passeuhrough childhood. It can be:follo~ed in
Wozzeck's numerous songs..,.-the hunting song, in which the nomad's an-
cient right to booty falls. into bourgeoi~ order lik~ a meteor; in Marie's
lullaby and her ballad 'Of the .gypsy that comes for the child who won't go
to sleep, a spirit that kills -anyone who lays -eyes on ii; in the lyre' songs
about .the daughter who has attached hersel to the coachmen and the
w11goners, thtt maid who doesn't ~wear lortg dresses, because they aren't
suitable fo~ her but alsobecause she rebels against being brought up. 6
Grown-ups.don't sing the way these songs do; it is how children sing in
the .dark, in order.ito banish fea,r. In the songs themselves are quivering
fear and at the sametimeithe hope .of baniShing ft. This subterranean
folklore also reverberates in the distorted tonality of the songs, whic'h does
not conserve the recently departed >romanticism, but tJUOtes from a pre-
existing, long-vanished one-as Childr~n do in their songs. Above the
mythical realm into which Wozzeck';; music sinks 'a hundred shafts, the
emotion of sorrow rises powerfully. In it, the endless emotional world of
weakness is held 'Up tO" judgment. The way this sorrow rises above the
foundering demons, with mad m~itary ipusic, with drums and clarinets-
the nineteenth century never heard. wything like it. Wozzeck's expression
has nothing whatsoever to do with]ristan's. The depth of the sleep from
which all the music here wrests itself loose, groaning; this startle reflex
 I Composition, Composers, and Works
and jumpiness, the thumping, the "Too near" in the scene of Wozzeckand
Andres in the field, when Marie is murdered-all this could no more be
contained in psychological expression than the tone of Berg's orchestra
sounded at that time, in which all the colors return as if bewitched with
blackness, drained and dreamlike. Only Schoenberg's Erwartung explored
this realm. In Wozzeck, its entire geography is mapped out. For the music
is as wholly constructed as any by Stravinsky or Hindemith from this
period-only richer by all the layers of the depth dimension. Its constrJ.J.c-
tion originates in motif cells, as the contents of the work are.cell-like. The
way these cells develop out of each other binds them to the psychological
process that they ultimately destroy. The.means of their transition isthat
of the infinitely small. The motifs transform seamlessly irtto each other;
each new one retains elements of the old, as, its residue. The simple indi-
vidual tone often becomes the glue that holds the motif parts together.
The instrnmentation proceeds,.in the same manner. For all the continuous
change and even reversal, tonal substance .is carried over from each tone
to the next, and is only sradually dissolve~ in it. The functional essence
of a harmony that despite all the freedom of its chord construction does
not, in the,end, completely'renounce the tension between dominant and
tonic can be explained in the same way. No nails protrude-the power of
Wozzeck resid~s entirely,Jn the power of transition. The .dialectic of this
musical style, which everywhere tran'slates the constancy of what' has been
into the alien perspecti1'e of what is becoming, ,cah be distinguished in
relation to Schoenberg. Berg statts from the most advanced Schoenberg,
who was his teacher, and from thatstarting point he sinks wide-ranging
roots, as it were, into the past, in order to retrieve the mythical images
that he finds in himself as his authentic possession. Despite all the energy
of this forward thrust, Wozzeck also, at the satne time, draws the line '
backward to Mahler. Not only do the shapes of the themes often resemble
him; not only does Berg follow Mahler when he, carries along tlie lower,
cast-off music, or rather reawakens it as subterranean folklore. What re-
calls Mahler, above all, is the architectonically incommensurable, wholly
organic type of symphonic expansion. But where in Mahler, often enough,
the btittle program had to fill the gaps, here in Berg it is accomplisqed
compellingly by the dramatic structure. When the musical construction
founders under the power of the expressive moment,. then the dramatic
construction embraces the moment perceptibly, in its stead. The latter be-
comes extremely dense in the first scene in the tavern, probably the core
element in the [opera's] conception. Here suffering individual and demonic
The Opera Wo~zeck I
folklore run smack up against each other, only to penetrate each other in
the counterpoint of the scherzo, which Mahler might have struggled his
whole life long to achieve. After the second act is the opera's caesura, which
can be felt in the splendid moments of silence during the curtain's fall, and
then at the beginning of the third act during its rise.'If music,,,always and
forever, has utilized, the pause p.s an element of its form-Berg was the
first to make silence into a musical actor, the empty beating of time. In
seconds, the expressionless; just ~s in the murder scene, once again, he
composed .out the filled silence with the rising voices of the muted trom-
bones, with terror. The entire third att skirts the abyss; the music contracts
and counts' the minutes until death. Then it throws itself into the orchestral
epilogue and is reflected as distantly, in the children's s.cene of the conclu-
sion, as the blue of the sky appears at the bottom of.a.well. This reflex
alone indicates hope in Wozzeck-weak, undetermined,-made murky by
the light of the tragic irony that make~ the child on the hobbyhorse ride
to the corpse of its mother, but evident after all. It illuminates the character
of the opera softly, and late. Its character is Passion. 7 The music does not
'suffer within the'human being, does hot, itself, participate in his actions
and emotions. It suffers ov~r him; only for this .reason is it able, like the
music of the old passion plays, to repres,ent every .emotion without ever
having to assume the mask of one of the characters of the tragic drama.
The music lays the suffering that is dictated by the stars above bodily onto
the shoulders of the human being, the individual, Wozzeck. In wrapping
him in suffering so that it touches him wholly, it may hope that he will
be absolved of that which threatens ineluctably in the rigid eternity of the
stars.
(1929; GS, vol. 18, pp. 472-79)
Translated by Susan H. Gillespie
NOTES BY RICHARD LEPPERT
1. Adorno, "Reminiscence," in AB, pp. 25-26: "Benjamin, who was rather in-
different to music and who in his youth had nursed a certain animosity towards
musicians, said to me with real insight after a performance of Wozzeck that as a
composer Berg had treated Biichner's drama in a manner similar to Kraus's treat-
ment of Claudius and Gocking. Berg's literary sensibility told him'that one could
not just compose these works the way Verdi did his librettos." Matthias Claudius
(1740-1815), German writer and poet and friend of Lessing, Herder, and Goethe,
.
t
is also regarded as the father of German popular journalism. His poetry addresses
the small details of ordinary life, precisely the matters that, along with his gift for
satire, caught Kraus's eye. Kraus himself wrote poetry of a similar sort on topics
.j
l
l
'I I Composition, Composers, and Works

I ljke "The Day," an,d "Rapid Transit"; his lyrics are marked w\th a distinctly dark
edge, where the mundane shows its hideous underside. L~opold Friedrich. von
Gocking (or Goeckingk) (1748-1828) was a German rococo poet and epigramll}a-
Toward ah Understanding
of Schoenberg
II tist.
2. Adorno amplifies- this point in his 1932 ~say, "On the Social Situation of
Music"; see p. 401. Adorno has in IT).i.nd music. of the, 1920s, by Hindemith in
particular, but likely as well works by Kurt Weill.
3. Adorno is"alluding to the neo-dassic revivalism amorig-what he termed the
J, "moderate modems" in general, amt5.travinsky in particular. See PNM, pp. 203T
09. . '
4. See Adorno, "Bach Defen<led against His Devotees," PR, especially pp. 142-
46. ' ' . ' ..
5. Vincent van Gogh (1855-1890), '~The Chi:'lir and the Pipe" (1889-9'0), Lon-
don, National Gallery, jp.v. no. 0 862.; S.ee the piscussion iI;i:Richard Lepp~rt, 4rt
and the Committed Eye: "{he.Cultural Functions qf Imagery (Boulder: Westview/
HarperCollins, 1996), pp'. 6c;-70.
6. Adamo's references are the various cenes in Biichher's unfinished 'play
which exists in fout fragmentary.drafts,.Regardirtgthe spectfic "songs" to which Arnold Schoenberg .firmly counted on living to be eighty, and on that day
Adorno refers, see Georg B1i.chner, Complete Works and Letters, ed. W~lter Hin; he plarlnecbo announce.publicly.4is long-accomplished.reconciliation with
derer and Henry' J. Schmidt, trans. Henry J. Schmidt (New Yorl<: Continuum,
1986): the liunting song, 1' 233 (from araft 2, scene 1); Marie's lulfaby, p. 202
'Jhomas Mann. 1 A serious illness, ,together .with a crisis during which he
(draft 4, scene 2); ballad ofcthe gypsy, p~205 (draft 4, scene 4); lyre songs, p'. "230
;.
believ,ed his heart had,.already stopped beating and he had,. as it 'were,
(draft 1, scene :i:o); th~ maid who do~sn't wear long ~resses,1 p. 220,(draft 1,, scep.e already died, did not dent his confidence. He lived as if there were still an
'l
'j 17).
7. Adorno uses the Latinate tetm "Passion," which refers, specifically to'th~
endfess wealth of time available to him. Again and again, he postponed
the conclusion of his two monumentally conceived works, the oratorio Die
r passion of Christ. [trahslator's note]
]akobsleiter and the,biblical opera Moses und Aron, which accompanied
r
1'
him o.r decades. At most, he occasionally joked ab6uthaving made himself
a Fiv~- or Ten-Year, Plan for their completion, o~ly to devote himself to
I other pressing conceptio,ns. One may reflect on why the two great choral
wbrks remai'hed fragments-patchwork like everything else, he said-and
j1
on 'Whether the task itself,. of .once more musically shaping a comprehen-
"
Ii. sive totality of meaning, poses difficulties that mocked even the inex-
haustible str~ngth qf the Master. This.inexhaustibility is manifested in his
big::hearted time-wasting, his readiness to yield to every productive im-

l
l

l
pulse, .no ,matter how. distant from his musical center. At the end of the
bourgeois era, ,the capacity to btingJorth. the entire world aesthetically
from within oneself, from the subject, ~as .embodied, ohce again, in a few
individuals; as it had beenwouchsafed to thegreatest artists of the.begin-
l
ning of the epoch, .to Michelangelo, or Shakespeare perhaps. Like Schoen-
.; berg, Picasso also prpduces with unquenchable youthfulness, as if the ge-
Qius of History were making up Jn the sph,ere of aesthetics, in the substance
ofj the individual, for what it withholds fwm society in its reality. That
l,
Schoenberg nevertheless had to ,depardrom us, only a few days after one
I; of his twelve-tone works, the "Dance around, the Golden C.alf," gave the
lie, at its premiere in Darmstadt, to the received wisdom that this music