Alban Berg’s masterwork had its début in Berlin a hundred years ago today. What I wrote in The Rest Is Noise:
At the end of the next-to-last scene, the orchestra delivers a kind of wordless oration, which, in Berg’s own words, is “a confession of the author who now steps outside the dramatic action on the stage . . . an appeal to humanity through its representatives, the audience.” There is a palpable break in the musical language, as Berg makes use of a piece that he wrote back in 1908 or 1909—a sketch for a Mahlerian Sonata in D Minor. (The composer associated this music with the singer Helene Nahowski, whom he married in 1911, and he apparently inserted it in the opera at her request.) Dissonance stages a counterstrike: trombones deliver a stentorian “We poor people,” twelve woodwinds mass together in a twelve- note chord, and sheets of sound in the percussion replicate the terror of Marie’s murder. Finally, the bass instruments pound out a rising fourth, and D minor crashes back in. All this sounds like something more than a lament for two human beings; it may be a tribute to what Thomas Mann called the “worldwide festival of death”—the Great War itself.
The ending is breathtakingly bleak. We see Wozzeck and Marie’s child riding his hobby horse, oblivious to the fact that his mother is lying dead nearby. Berg, in a lecture on the opera, pointed out that the coda links up with the beginning; likewise, it is all too plausible that this child will grow up to be a replica of his father. A slow fade-out on an oscillating pair of chords points toward a despairing conclusion. As the chords rock back and forth, though, there are passing glimpses of G major, like transitory glimmerings of light.